F8 / On2 / Squeeze: Which codec ?

[BoltVanderhuge]

Hi Spirit,

First off let me say I work for On2. On to your questions; the VP6.2 codec used by F8, Squeeze, and Flix is exactly the same. So if you were to give the exact same VP6.2 compression options to Squeeze and to Flix you would create the exact same compressed frames (file sizes might be different depending on the extra information written to the FLV or SWF).

That being said, now you have to look at the VP6.2 compression options exposed by the encoding application. Usually the more options exposed the better you can tune your compressed file. You can find more information about setting the different compression VP6.2 options from a white paper at our site www.on2.com. Goto the VP6.2 product page. We will be putting up more tutorials in the future about why you would want to set the different compression options.

Lastly I would recommend always using 2 pass compression to get the best quality.

I hope that clears it up a little bit.

[vidiac]

BoltVanderhuge,

Do you have any information on what type of differences in compression time and realitive quality for 1-pass, 2-pass, 1-pass quality, etc? I understand 2-pass is the best but it's very slow even on a fast machine.

[BoltVanderhuge]

Vidiac

I just did a quick test in Flix Pro. ( I choose the 512K preset, which resizes to 320x???. Height size will be determined by source aspect ratio.) In general if you pick a lower bitrate preset the compression will be faster.

Clip 1 source is 720x480, 24fps, 10 seconds, raw avi.
2 pass took 22 seconds
1 pass took 11 seconds

Clip 2 source is 480x208, 24fps, 1:19 length, mpeg4 mov.
2 pass took 1:23
1 pass took 53 seconds

This is for Flix Pro version 8.001. I'm running on a P4 3.0GHz.

I would always suggest using 2 pass to get better quality, but this will highly depend on the source material.