MPEG-2 SSIM and PSNR

On D600 1.6Gz Pentium-M CPU mencoder could do MPEG-2 at 15fps with avisynth script and 33fps without (CPU <80%), but result is bad. Apart from video getting stuck (probably because mencoder could only do I and P and no B frames) SSIM 0.59 or 0.49 and PSNR 11.89 both times.

At the same time TMPGEnc could do 14.5 fps when encoding using "Constant Quality" = 100% and average bitrate 6Mbps which quality and size wise is the same as "2pass VRB" with average bitrate 6Mbps and 8Mbps max. The following table demonstrates that on "Dance" video with 2658 frames i.e. 88.7 sec or 01:28

Encode	Time	FPS	kbps	Size	SSIM	PSNR
CQ100-8-ME	3:17	13.5 fps	7718	83M	45.24	31.46
CQ80-8-ME	3:07	14.2 fps	6720	73M	44.95	31.45
CQ100-6-ME	3:03	14.5 fps	5819	63M	43.42	31.40
VRB-8-6-ME	8:12	5.40 fps	5820	63M	44.08	31.44
VRB-8-6-HQ	10:41	4.15 fps	5816	63M	44.29	31.45
VRB-8-6-HighestQ	24:16	1.83 fps	5815	63M	44.51	31.46
VRB-8-6-ME (NR)	45:28	0.97 fps	5806	63M	43.90	31.31

From the table it is clear that neither "High Quality" setting, nor "2-pass VRB" nor especially TMPGEnc noise reduction filter really matters and most efficiently encoding should be done either CQ100-6-ME or if time is of no importance VRB-8-6-ME.

TMPGEnc also has built in deinterlacer that at VRB-8-6-ME encoded in 6:42 to the same 63M using "Deinterlace Even-Odd - field, adoptation" filter, but the video became noticably jerky.