XviD and h.264: a popularity contest
h.264 is generally touted as technically superior to xvid (among other alternative codecs). Some fansub groups have embraced this as the next big thing. But most fansub-watchers don’t give a damn. At least, that’s what I get from the following (all images taken July 8, 2006).
HB’s Keroro Gunso. While not seeded, notice that the population on the xvid batch is 3 times larger than the x264 batch.
Simoun-Fans Simoun episode 7. The xvid release has 5 times more seeds and twice as many leechers as the h.264 release.
The populations of the m33w fansubs and Ayu-C1 x264/h264 releases put together still don’t even reach 50% of the volume on the Ayu-C1 xvid release.
HB Sergeant Frog batches. xvid outpaces h.264 by slightly more than 4 times in download count, 6 times in transferred data, nearly 10 times in total torrent population, after 77 days.
FnT’s releases of The Third. Completed xvid outpaces completed h.264 by >4x on every release.
Eclipse released all of Fate/Stay-Night in both x264 and xvid, in dead-even parallel releases. Every release follows the same pattern. ~7000 h.264 downloads, ~45000 xvid downloads. Lodged in the middle of that is Shakugan no Shanatan, which follows the same pattern, though at a lower volume.
I’m noticing a very consistent trend.
It could be possible that people aren’t actively choosing xvid over h264. Some torrent indexers consider the two releases as a single release event, and link to the xvid torrent (baka-updates, for example). However, would that account for the prevalence and consistency of this trend, given that other indexers (animesuki, tokyo toshokan) do in fact differentiate? I don’t think that effect is enough to explain it away.
I think the conclusion to be drawn from this is that people prefer convenience and familiarity to newer shinier tech — at least to a point. As long as the release is good enough I think that fansub-watchers will be happy with it. The agendas of the viewer and the encoder are simply not the same.
July 8th, 2006 at 3:18 pm
h.264 and XviD are too similar in quality for most people to get excited about a switch. As has been demonstrated many times in the past, it takes a significant shift in quality for people to abandon the standard.
For one thing, people like XviD because it is well supported by free software. Free software is not as strong when it comes to h.264, where the main decoder is still Quicktime, which is generally hated by the scene. To my knowledge the x264 codec is still not all that good, but I may just be out of date. Many people are also probably of the belief that Quicktime or Apple “owns” h.264. And of course, people using these torrents already have a huge collection of XviD, and consistency there can be viewed as an advantage for whatever reason.
However, h.264 and Quicktime are advantageous for Mac users since Quicktime is so integrated into the OS, and of course the iPod supports h.264 and not XviD, although I think there are special iPod-sized versions of movies, so the full-size ones aren’t really relevant when it comes to the iPod.
July 8th, 2006 at 3:29 pm
x264 is actually pretty good, roughly on par with h.264 from my understanding of it.
Most of what I\’m interested in is the fansub world. Quicktime can burn, for all I care. In fansubs, h264/x264 is almost universally packaged in an mkv container.
And the main h264/x264 decoder these days in the scope of fansubs is libavcodec (ffmpeg on linux, ffdshow on windows), which does a pretty dang good job of it too.
You see a lot of ipod-sized tv-rips going across mininova, for example, but I think most people are probably turned off by the idea of trying to make out teensy little subtitles on ipod-sized fansubs.
July 8th, 2006 at 4:35 pm
Personally, I’d love to go h264 (and I generally download both formats – mkv to archive, other to watch).
However, I have found (on Linux) h264 support to be awful.
VLC jitters amongst other things while attempting to play h264, whereas mplayer bombs out most of the time, and as I would regard these as the main two players, I’d say linux support is still immature.
As I’m sure the majority of people are on windows machines, this will not affect them – however codecs still are an issue. I would guess most people (viewers of anime) have downloaded at least one mkv/h264 (I’m putting them together, since I assume a lot of people still presume they are linked/same thing), and I’d also assume a lot of people had issues in playback. The majority of people will see this as being, avi works, mkv doesn’t.
I know it is easy to fix/rectify on windows, but I’d assume this would be classed as effort, or something which the user thinks is out of bounds for their current understanding level.
It’ll probably take over in time (for people to upgrade players, get used to seeing mkv, and downloading working mkv’s).
July 19th, 2006 at 10:41 am
“x264 is actually pretty good, roughly on par with h.264 from my understanding of it.”
Hey there
x264 and H.264 can’t be directly compared. H.264 is the actual standard that basically describes the syntax of a H.264 bitstream, the actual encoders can be as different as you imagine, provided they both create a stream that has the same basic format. x264 is an encoder that encodes streams that comply to the H.264 specifications as far as syntax and coding tools (such as B-frames, CABAC, CAVLC, reference frames etc.).
Of course there is a H.264 reference encoder which people call “JM”; now if you refer to H.264 and mean the reference encoder, then yes you can compare; and in fact x264 is higher quality and infinitely faster than the reference model. In an average of tests that pengvado (a developer of x264) made, it was found that x264 takes an average of 0.2226 sec/frame and JM took 5.817 sec/frame. You can find more here http://students.washington.edu/lorenm/src/x264/jm_comparison/
Anyway, H.264 will properly take off when people start really lowering those filesizes, because Joe Average cannot even see the quality gains between an XviD and H.264 fansub of the same filesize. The reason is that most people encode to a high quality, and retain the details the eye notices most, therefore switching to H.264 means you get the same quality, but in addition to that, the efficiency allows you to store the finer details that the eye doesn’t necessarily notice. The quality is there, just the average person doesn’t notice a big enough difference.
July 19th, 2006 at 11:46 am
Thanks for the clarification… I’ve been somewhat avoiding jumping into the details of the two. When I refer to “H.264″ for the purpose of comparison, I’m generally talking about the “real” h264 encoders I’ve seen used, which basically means quicktime and I guess CoreAVC.
I think it’s just a slow-moving shift, like the shift from divx 3.11 to xvid was. There’s a lot of inertia resting on xvid right now, because it’s the “good enough” answer, just like you said. Even if there’s serious, compelling reasons to switch (as there were with xvid), it’s still always a headache to do so.
Also, I don’t think the filesize issue matters to the majority of people. Sure, it’d be nice to be able to burn 5 anime eps per cd, or burn a whole season’s worth to dvd with some space left over, but I think the majority of people probably aren’t doing that, they’re just downloading and watching, not really archiving. I don’t really know anyone who says “I’ll download the smallest filesize fansub” … I know “I’ll download the first” and “I’ll download the best” but it really seems like a reduction in file size is just sugar for most people. Except for dialup users, I guess. But who cares about them? :p