I can assure you that we did our testing against x264, and that we produced encodings that were better than x264
By what measurement, PSNR? x264 doesn't optimize for PSNR by default.
And when was this? x264 has improved dramatically in the past 4 years. In 2007, Mainconcept could beat x264 in many cases and Ateme's 2004 encoder was still sometimes better! There are cases where x264 has improved by a factor of 2 in this time period, or more.
You're also assuming that compression optimization can only occur in the encoder
Do you mean prefiltering? Such a thing is a dishonest comparison, as you can prefilter before using any particular encoder, and there are whole frameworks built for exactly that purpose which are widely used with x264 -- and other encoders too.
And when you're taking investor money, telling them that you're going to open source a technology that took 2+ years to develop, and hope that you'll make money from it is a great way to lose your investor money.
If your technology takes 2+ years to develop, your programmers are incompetent or your management is broken. Probably no single algorithm in x264's history has taken more than a few days to develop. Coming up with good ideas is a matter of thinking, combined with trial and error: once you have a idea that actually works, implementing it is dead trivial. The time-consuming part is the other 99 ideas you tried that didn't work so well -- and you can't plan for that.
I used the term "algorithm" as a crutch, but it seems likely there are tools out there than can do fantastic keyframe & data rate shaping.
The most apparent is whatever Apple's been using for years for their movie trailers. Not a single artifact, low data rate, etc. It's better than your average 2-pass. But who knows, the "magic" could simply be to start with uncompressed source...
By what measurement, PSNR? x264 doesn't optimize for PSNR by default.
And when was this? x264 has improved dramatically in the past 4 years. In 2007, Mainconcept could beat x264 in many cases and Ateme's 2004 encoder was still sometimes better! There are cases where x264 has improved by a factor of 2 in this time period, or more.
You're also assuming that compression optimization can only occur in the encoder
Do you mean prefiltering? Such a thing is a dishonest comparison, as you can prefilter before using any particular encoder, and there are whole frameworks built for exactly that purpose which are widely used with x264 -- and other encoders too.
And when you're taking investor money, telling them that you're going to open source a technology that took 2+ years to develop, and hope that you'll make money from it is a great way to lose your investor money.
If your technology takes 2+ years to develop, your programmers are incompetent or your management is broken. Probably no single algorithm in x264's history has taken more than a few days to develop. Coming up with good ideas is a matter of thinking, combined with trial and error: once you have a idea that actually works, implementing it is dead trivial. The time-consuming part is the other 99 ideas you tried that didn't work so well -- and you can't plan for that.