[iptv-users] Open Source x264 Encoder

[João Serra]

I noticed that almost all of you are working at some IPTV provider,
I'm just an IPTV application Developer and i don't deal with encoders
at all, so i have a question for all of you:

Have you tried the open-source X264 H.264 encoder? According to the
things i read on the net, x264 can out perform every hardware encoder
on the market, even in real-time, both in quality and speed... In the
last version it can even encoder in real time without latency, making
it suitable for video-conferencing applications...
I suggest you to read this post in one of the x264 developers blog -
http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=249&cpage=1#comment-2427 According to
him, there are no h264 encoders in the market(both software and
hardware) that can achieve that level of low-latency... (I know IPTV
doesn't care much about latency, I'm just trying to illustrate the
power of x264)

My IPTV provider, for instance, uses 2 MB/s(in average, they use VBR)
h264 streams for SD content(they're using Harmonic's Divicom Electra
8000) and it really looks awful when compared to a couple of x264
files i have encoded with x264 at 500kb/s(average - VBR encoded) Yes,
i know i can't compare off-line encoding with real-time encoding, so i
did another test: I encoded a video in real-time on a Core 2 Duo with
the same average bitrate of 2mb/s and again, my provider hardware
encoder looses again in quality... I tried Sports, Movies, News, etc
and looking to my Samsung LCD, o difference is very visible, x264
wins!

So, my question to you is: why do you use those very very expensive
hardware encoders that produce mediocre results, if Software encoders
can easily outperform them? And they are much more cheaper(they are a
just standard servers, you can even add SDI/ASI PCI cards if you
want)...

I know x264 can be a pain in the ass to configure, given the bazillion
features and options it supports, however, i think it's a fair
trade-off, if you consider it's price...
I only think i cannot test is it's stability, have any of you tested
it? For instance, letting a Red Hat Enterprise Linux box real time
encoding a stream for a couple of months without interruption?