x264 Video Codec

x264 Video Codec is a free library for encoding H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video streams.To decode use a recent build of FFDShow or a player that supports H.264 internally – like MPlayer. See the Intel Installer.

x264 Video Codec

The x264 codec as you know is a free and open-source software library. This software is used for encoding video streams into the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC format. You will find this in many media players. Today this is still widely used in the multimedia industry. It is very efficient as well as delivery high video quality. The codec is used in many video editing software as well as media players. See the x264 VfW as well as the FFDShow MPEG4 and Panasonic MPEG-4.

The x264 library implements a number of compression techniques. These include the motion estimation as well as the spacial and temporal prediction. There is also the use of intra-frame prediction as well as entropy coding. The software also allows you to balance video size to video quality. As you can see there is the Windows 32bit and well as Windows 64 bit as well as Linux. This development was done under the GNU General Public License version 2 or later. This allows you to modify the software and re-release it again. See the avc1 codec download below.

There are few interesting frontends for Windows: MPlayerUI, MPlayer Frontend) and VLC (VideoLAN Client).

Encoder features :

– CAVLC/CABAC
– Multi-references
– Intra: all macroblock types (16×16, 8×8, and 4×4 with all predictions)
– Inter P: all partitions (from 16×16 down to 4×4)
– Inter B: partitions from 16×16 down to 8×8 (including skip/direct)
– Ratecontrol: constant quantizer, single or multipass ABR, optional
– Scene cut detection
– Adaptive B-frame placement
– B-frames as references / arbitrary frame order
– 8×8 and 4×4 adaptive spatial transform
– Lossless mode
– Custom quantization matrices
– Parallel encoding of multiple slices

Advanced settings :

– Enabling Cabac: approximately 10% bitrate reduction
– Enabling De-blocking Filter: smooths out visible blocks
– x264 doesn’t support the error-resilience features of baseline

Changes from x264 Video Codec rev. 668 to x264 rev. 675 :

– (r675) fix some integer overflows. now vbv size can exceed 2 Gbit.
– (r674) allow –vbv-init to take absolute values (in kbit)
– (r673) remove a bashism
– (r672) reorder headers so that largefile support
– (r671) regression in r669: broke saving of configure args
– (r670) regression in r669: –enable-shared should imply –enable-pic
– (r669) Add a –host flag to allow overriding config.guess
– Normalize any host triplet into a quadruplet via config.sub.
– Move option parsing before any use of architecture information.
– (r668) Update config.guess.

Updated: 20 Aug 2015