2009 Encoder Shootout

Telestream started offering watch folder functionality with version 5.1 of Episode Pro, a nice addition for those sharing Episode over a network. Episode is also a serial encoder with no multiple-instance capabilities, which, as we’ll see, makes it glacially slow when performing Flash encoding.

On a positive note, Episode has the fastest and highest quality deinterlacing that I’ve seen short of Algolith’s now off-the-market AlgoSuite. This makes Episode a great tool if you’re converting batches of existing interlaced source files—with Squeeze, you’d be tempted to scale and deinterlace in your editor, which would be a time- and disk-consuming hassle.

Episode’s H.264 performance is strong across the board—quality, features, and speed—but make sure that you’re running version 5.01 since this release really boosted H.264 quality. Episode also gives compressionists lots of encoding options with support for all three relevant profiles, CABAC entropy encoding, and control over the sequence of B-frames and number of reference frames. If you like to tinker with your H.264 encoding, this is the sub-$1,000 tool for you.

The quality and features Episode provides for Flash Video are also very good, with support for both two-pass encoding and VP6-S and E, but multiple-file encoding times are awful. For example, Episode rendered five 1-minute source files to FLV format in 47:40 (min:sec) on our 8-core Apple workstation, while Squeeze did the same work in 6:48 with equal quality and feature support (albeit working from a predeinterlaced source).

Episode would definitely not be my first choice for WMV encoding, with quality significantly below Squeeze and very slow encoding times (13:55 for the five-file encode test compared to 1:20 for Squeeze).

On2 Flix Pro 8.5
On2 must have done an extremely good job making its VP6 code easy to use since VP6 output quality is relatively consistent among all encoders, even Flix Pro. In this "no-good-deed-goes-unpunished" world, this means that there is no qualitative reason to choose Flix Pro, at least today.

On the other hand, On2 will soon release an update to the VP6 codec, and Flix Pro will obviously be the first tool on the block to benefit, with other vendors’ VP6 encoders taking at least an update cycle or two to respond. So if you’re looking for optimal quality down the road, Flix Pro might just be the best choice.

Running down our encoder scorecard, Flix Pro gets an asterisk on batch encoding because it can only encode multiple files to one set of encoding parameters, not a single file to multiple parameters. For example, if you produce five files at three different encoding parameters every day, you can’t set them up in a single batch; you’d have to run the batch three times, one for each set of parameters.

On a positive note, since you can run multiple instances of Flix Pro on both the Mac and Windows platforms, running separate batches is fairly easy to do. In fact, if you’re encoding multiple files with Flix Pro, multiple instances is definitely the way to go. For instance, this technique reduced five-file encoding time on the Windows HP workstation from 48:10 to 10:03, and it dropped the Mac’s encoding time from 31:30 to 6:22.

Using this technique, Flix Pro had the fastest five-file encoding time of all encoders on both the Mac and Windows platforms. Finally, as you would suspect, On2 also offers the optimal VP6 encoding feature set, with support for both two-pass VBR and VP6-S/E encoding.