[x264-devel] Theora Ahead of H.264 In Objective PSNR Quality

[James Darnley]

2009/5/8 Jason Garrett-Glaser <darkshikari at gmail.com>:
> On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 7:25 PM, Jason Garrett-Glaser
> <darkshikari at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 6:30 PM, Jason Martens <cacepi at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> From Slashdot:
>>>
>>> http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/07/2352203
>>>
>>> Let the debunking begin!
>>
>> Apparently they seem to have used catastrophically bad settings for
>> encoding.  I'm going to guess they just encoded idiotically with
>> ffmpeg without using any presets, thus using ffmpeg's quite broken
>> defaults.  I suspect this is entirely intentional.
>>
>> It isn't worth spending time "debunking" though; anyone dumb enough to
>> actually believe such a thing deserves the godawful quality Theora
>> will give them.  And when they get that godawful quality, if they are
>> still dumb enough to not realize they've been scammed by Xiph, they
>> deserve every last bit of suffering they will experience.
>>
>> Dark Shikari
>>
>
> And it turns out the problem was a bug in ffmpeg when writing the y4m
> file prior to PSNR measurement, cutting a nice 4db off of x264's
> score.
>
> I cannot stop laughing at this.
>
> Dark Shikari

Perhaps I should point out this post (almost certainly) made by the
gmaxwell_ character you were discussing it with on #x264.
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1226313&cid=27871325
You may want to rebuff his comment "The results are real".  He also
links to a reddit page which I haven't taken a look at yet.