X264

• Website: http://developers.videolan.org/x264.html
• Fan site with lots of (mostly Win32-oriented) links and utils: http://x264.nl

x264 is a highly successful H.264 encoder. It provides a library and a simple frontend application that accepts raw YUV input, and outputs either a raw H.264 elementary stream or a Matroska or .mp4 file.

While its encoding speed is not as fast as most ASP encoders, the output quality is quite high. x264 managed to win a recent codec comparison by Doom9.

x264 was born in late 2003. Originally developed primarily by Laurent Aimar, since about mid-2004, the majority of the work on this encoder has come from Loren Merritt.