<html><body><div style="color:#000; background-color:#fff; font-family:HelveticaNeue, Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, Lucida Grande, sans-serif;font-size:16px"><div id="yiv0911240708"><div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1440787641960_3227"><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" id="yui_3_16_0_1_1440787641960_3226"><div id="yiv0911240708yui_3_16_0_1_1440785890129_4269" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: HelveticaNeue, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 16px;">I am seeing a problem in the single-pass version of the x264 encoder where there appears to be a huge bitrate at the beginning, resulting in unacceptable amounts of compression to maintain the bitrate in the video that follows the initial high bitrate.</div><div id="yiv0911240708yui_3_16_0_1_1440785890129_4268" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: HelveticaNeue, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 16px;"><br></div><div id="yiv0911240708yui_3_16_0_1_1440785890129_4254" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: HelveticaNeue, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 16px;">From what I can tell, the issue appears to be a bug, and SEEMS to be related to some kind of 1/2 second wallclock timer within the encoder: any encoding performed in that wallclock time has an ridiculously high bitrate. And once that time period has passed, massive compression follows. It can take several seconds for the resultant artifacts to clear up.</div><div id="yiv0911240708yui_3_16_0_1_1440785890129_4254" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: HelveticaNeue, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 16px;"><br></div><div id="yiv0911240708yui_3_16_0_1_1440785890129_4254" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: HelveticaNeue, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 16px;">If you slow down the encoding process (such as reducing the number of threads severely, or using a slower machine), the amount of playtime high bitrate goes down, with the simple formula:</div><div id="yiv0911240708yui_3_16_0_1_1440785890129_4254" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: HelveticaNeue, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 16px;"><br></div><div id="yiv0911240708yui_3_16_0_1_1440785890129_4254" dir="ltr" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: HelveticaNeue, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 16px;">NumberOfHighRateFrames = ~0.5 seconds / NumberFramesProcessedPerSecond</div><div id="yiv0911240708yui_3_16_0_1_1440785890129_4254" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: HelveticaNeue, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 16px;"><br></div><div id="yiv0911240708yui_3_16_0_1_1440785890129_4254" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: HelveticaNeue, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 16px;">Running a 2-pass encoding of course fixes this, but such a solution clearly won't scale: it increases the wallclock time of the encoding process severely about 40% on an unloaded machine, and cannot be used with any sort of live stream (easily).</div><div id="yiv0911240708yui_3_16_0_1_1440785890129_4254" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: HelveticaNeue, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 16px;"><br></div><div id="yiv0911240708yui_3_16_0_1_1440785890129_4254" dir="ltr" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: HelveticaNeue, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 16px;">For complete information on this topic, complete with a timeline of research into this issue (it was originally posted as "Linux quality worse than Mac"), graphs supporting the current theory, and links to MP4 files to reproduce the issue, please see this FFMPEG thread:</div><div id="yiv0911240708yui_3_16_0_1_1440785890129_4254" dir="ltr" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: HelveticaNeue, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 16px;"><br></div><div id="yiv0911240708yui_3_16_0_1_1440785890129_4254" dir="ltr"><a href="http://ffmpeg.gusari.org/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=2296&p=6651#p6651" id="yui_3_16_0_1_1440787641960_3264">Buggy, unacceptably high initial bitrate with libx264 codec • FFmpeg Support Forum</a><br></div><div style="width:450px; font-family: 'Georgia', 'Times', 'Times New Roman', 'serif';margin-top:5px; margin-bottom: 5px; background-color: #ffffff;" contenteditable="false" id="enhancrCard_0" class="link-enhancr-attachment link-enhancr-element richcompose-card"><table class="link-enhancr-element" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" border="0" style="width:450px; 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background-color: #ffffff; font-size: 0pt; border-collapse: collapse;"><div class="link-enhancr-element" style="height: 9px; background-color: #ffffff; font-size: 9pt;"></div></td></tr><tr class="link-enhancr-element"><td class="link-enhancr-element" colspan="8" style="height: 1px; background-color: #e5e5e5; font-size: 1px; border-collapse: collapse;"><div class="link-enhancr-element" style="height: 1px; background-color: #e5e5e5; font-size: 1px; line-height:0px"> </div></td></tr></tbody></table></div><div id="yiv0911240708yui_3_16_0_1_1440785890129_4254"><br></div><div id="yiv0911240708yui_3_16_0_1_1440785890129_4254" dir="ltr"><br></div><div id="yiv0911240708yui_3_16_0_1_1440785890129_4254" dir="ltr">As an aside, it was mentioned that a large number of threads is a BAD thing in the x264 codec. Can someone please explain why this is? Without knowing implementation details, this seems highly counter-intuitive.</div><div id="yiv0911240708yui_3_16_0_1_1440785890129_4254" dir="ltr"><br></div><div id="yiv0911240708yui_3_16_0_1_1440785890129_4254" dir="ltr">Thanks!</div><div id="yiv0911240708yui_3_16_0_1_1440785890129_4254" dir="ltr">-Mark</div><div id="yiv0911240708yui_3_16_0_1_1440785890129_4254" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: HelveticaNeue, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 16px;"><br></div><div id="yiv0911240708yui_3_16_0_1_1440785890129_4254" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: HelveticaNeue, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 16px;"><br></div><div id="yiv0911240708yui_3_16_0_1_1440785890129_4254" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: HelveticaNeue, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 16px;"><br></div><div id="yiv0911240708yui_3_16_0_1_1440785890129_4254" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: HelveticaNeue, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 16px;"><br></div></div></div></div></div></body></html>