[Dark Shikari]

This space reserved for a technical review of the encoder:

1. No adaptive quantization at all.
2. Uses 8x8dct, P-frame weighted prediction (at least the flag is set), and 4 refs in each list (according to the flags).
3. Chroma QP offset of +1.
4. --deblock -1:-1 used.
5. Appears to use spatial B-frame prediction only.
6. Uses Level 4.0, which sounds like a reasonable thing to standardize upon.
7. Uses an I-frame QP offset of -3 and a B-frame QP offset of +1.
8. Its B-frame decision seems to overly bias in favor of 2 B-frames.

This is just a preliminary glance at it, but overall the profile decided upon seems to be quite reasonable: enough bitrate for most sources without being too demanding of hardware, and not making any stupid restrictions like "no 8x8dct".

Actually quality comparisons (and speed) will come later.

Is there documentation on exactly what features are required in the DivX H.264 profile, by the way? I.e. which decisions here (such as spatial B-frames) are encoder decisions, and which are technical decisions in the spec itself. And what about the max of 4 seconds per gop--is that just an encoder limitation, or is there something in the spec about that?