[x264-devel] recommended settings for screencapture encoding?

[Loren Merritt]

On Mon, 5 Nov 2007, Maarten de Boer wrote:

> I am making a demo video for an application. I capture with xvidcap,
> convert the capture to 4:2:0 y4m, encode with x264, and combine it
> with aac audio with MP4Box. Everything works okay, but I was wondering
> if I could improve the video quality with settings more suitable than
> the defaults for this kind of material. It's a typical GUI interface,
> buttons, sliders, some scrolling audio waveform visualization. Any
> suggestions?

Are you sure you want to use h264? There are formats designed for screen 
capture, which work much better within their domain than a general purpose 
video codec does. e.g. ZMBV may be lossless at bitrates where h264 looks 
merely ok. (But screen capture codecs are all(?) lossless only, so if you 
need to reduce bitrate below what they give, h264 may become useful 
again.)

--Loren Merritt