Someone should tell them to upload their encoder; they're apparently about 4 years out of date, which would explain why their video quality is rather subpar for the claim of "HD".
Why don't you elaborate and tell us what exactly is out of date and we'll look into it. We're always open to feedback and you should know that the YC nature is to be constructive and helpful in our community of startups and hackers.
Your x264 encoding library is quite outdated (read: years). Newer versions are faster, more efficient, and give higher quality output. You can get the latest at http://git.videolan.org/?p=x264.git;a=summary .
If you need any assistance, drop by #x264 on Freenode.
I'm always surprised by how video startups--whose most important technical resource is their video conversion system--don't seem to do sufficient research into how it actually works (or for that matter, how well it actually works). This may be because of the assumption expressed in posts like http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=933713: that all software is pretty much equal and it doesn't matter what you use or how you use it.
Then again, I can't be too harsh, because you at least used open source tools instead of Flash Media Encoder, so you must be doing something right ;)
That's interesting. We do have some very recent versions of x264 installed (Core 67 - 68, depending on environment), but it looks like Mencoder might be using a different library. I'll have to check.
Yup, that's a classic issue; you can end up accidentally using ancient libraries without even realizing it.
Also, 67-68 isn't particularly recent; the latest "stable" would probably be r1318 aka fe83a906ee aka Core 78. You can try trunk as well, but we're having some miscompilation issues with the latest improvements, so I wouldn't trust it for production use yet.
Another note is to check your settings; a lot of people have all sorts of weird encoding commandlines (you included, given the contents of the string I pasted above) from the days when x264's setting system was baroque and confusing. Now the defaults are good and there's some nice automatic presets that let you easily pick a tradeoff of time vs. quality (see x264 --help), so you don't have to mess with weird options.
Do you have a link to a good "getting started" article written for a desktop user? (someone looking to encode nice looking videos, not build an encoding infrastructure)
This seems like an issue with a great deal of nuance, and I'd find such a resource invaluable.
For a normal desktop user, you should try one of the many encoding GUIs available.
I'd recommend Staxrip, Ripbot264, or Handbrake; all are relatively simple GUIs built around x264. For Handbrake, make sure you get the latest snapshot (the last release, 0.9.3, is very outdated).
I'm not an expert, but has H.264 encoding improved that much in 4 years? Usually, it's the standard itself which provides the quality (and H.264 is better than Mpeg-4).
As you can see, a bad H.264 encoder (e.g. Apple's) can barely compete with Xvid.
The entirety of my work on x264 is contained in the past 2 years of development. The psychovisual optimizations alone probably account for at least a 50-70% improvement in compression quality.
