video-compare VS ssimulacra2

As mentioned those are different frames you are testing. Personally I use veryslow but most people here don't spend as much time encoding a single item as I do. Also don't use PNGs for checking use Video Compare . You can run two different MKVs at the same time and compare them frame by frame both in playback and pausing them.

use the Video-Compare tool. watch the demo here how it works

https://github.com/pixop/video-compare This one is simple but really good

Well, I would use https://github.com/pixop/video-compare for that - it's the tool I normally use to compare videos (to find differences or to check image compression issues) but it can load the same video twice to watch it frame by frame. It even shows the type of frame I'm on so it's useful when I need to find a keyframe to do a video split with no recoding.

You can preview (export as preview) test of few presets, settings, etc. on TVAI and if you wish you could also use a compare tool to check the results to see for yourself if you notice any difference between them (that would save you tons of time). or just playback the 2s / 5s of the preview(s) you generate, right after the other to see if you spot any difference in quality.

If you need to compare images easily, consider slow.pics. Or ICAT, or Video Comparison Tool. And actually, even x264 and x265 don't have perfect CRF scales as well, they are offset by a constant iirc.

You can easily check the type of each frame with the use of https://github.com/pixop/video-compare/ software - just use the same video twice (as video-compare needs two video inputs) and look for I, B, P letters near the current frame time.

Try Video compare.

https://github.com/cloudinary/ssimulacra2?tab=readme-ov-file... shows a higher correlation with human responses across 4 different datasets and correlation metrics for 1

Very well written. As others have suggested, you should do a followup using modern perceptual quality metrics like VMAF and ssimulacra2.

I was thinking about that too. Can't answer the question, but I did come across this just the other day: https://github.com/cloudinary/ssimulacra2 Supposedly good for comparing image similarity. Might depend on your use-case, I think it's geared towards image quality moreso than similar photos.

That's the kind of feedback I was looking for, thanks. I usually go by eye, but at 14:1, I was expecting a blurry artefact-ridden mess, and it just didn't look all that bad at first blush.... I'll definitely check out ssimulacra2, thanks for the suggestion. I also need to sit down and do some proper pixel-peeping on a better screen... I think my monitor falls into the 'HD-aren't' class of HDR displays, so I'm likely missing detail somewhere. My purpose is archival, I want to preserve quality but not needlessly waste drive space on less efficient codecs. I'm not concerned by the resultant bit rate, so long as it has improved compression efficiency over the original.

The fork to build - rust-av/ssimulacra2_bin | original release (works on images only) with a lot of info about the metric - cloudinary/ssimulacra2