Anonymous #C8F7
"[@hexado":](/forums/meta/topics/thumbnail-not-yet-generated?post_id=4314#post_4314
)
Bad quality comes purely out of encoding settings, for any codec, even XVID. There's always a compromise between speed of encoding and quality of the image. Being MP4 (aka h264 inside of MP4 container) changes nothing. VP8 and its brother VP9 require far less processing power while still retaining good results in both quality and the filesize than h264 does. I haven't checked if the site actually outputs VP8 instead of VP9, but I can tell you this - switching to VP9 would improve the quality a bit but would slower down the speed of thumbnail generation.
You speak about **"devices"**, let me tell you about **browsers**. Alas, there's a plethora of browser distros on Linux/Android that play Webm/VPx but ignore MP4/h264 because of its license restrictions, and vice versa - there are several browsers on Windows that kick out Webm and Ogg Vorbis/Opus support out of spite (or because MPEG consortium bribed them to do so).
With current FFMPEG's optimizations, video processing takes actually less than or comparable to the "common" image formats, as it's capable of taking advantage of the multicore/multiprocessor architecture. PNG, being just a container for Zlib-compressed data, has no advantage by design (aside the fact you can simultaneously compress 32 of them if you have enough cores/CPUs). JPEG, with its Huffman tables, while in theory can be accelerated, is still a complex beast at higher quality settings. GIF, being one of the oldest image formats out there with its LZW (iirc) encoding, is probably less optimized than anything else here.
Bad quality comes purely out of encoding settings, for any codec, even XVID. There's always a compromise between speed of encoding and quality of the image. Being MP4 (aka h264 inside of MP4 container) changes nothing. VP8 and its brother VP9 require far less processing power while still retaining good results in both quality and the filesize than h264 does. I haven't checked if the site actually outputs VP8 instead of VP9, but I can tell you this - switching to VP9 would improve the quality a bit but would slower down the speed of thumbnail generation.
You speak about **"devices"**, let me tell you about **browsers**. Alas, there's a plethora of browser distros on Linux/Android that play Webm/VPx but ignore MP4/h264 because of its license restrictions, and vice versa - there are several browsers on Windows that kick out Webm and Ogg Vorbis/Opus support out of spite (or because MPEG consortium bribed them to do so).
With current FFMPEG's optimizations, video processing takes actually less than or comparable to the "common" image formats, as it's capable of taking advantage of the multicore/multiprocessor architecture. PNG, being just a container for Zlib-compressed data, has no advantage by design (aside the fact you can simultaneously compress 32 of them if you have enough cores/CPUs). JPEG, with its Huffman tables, while in theory can be accelerated, is still a complex beast at higher quality settings. GIF, being one of the oldest image formats out there with its LZW (iirc) encoding, is probably less optimized than anything else here.