Here is the explanation why libopenh264 videos compressed have bad quality. It is very possible that I am not considering all the parameters that can be modified to improve on things so I wanted to ask, Is there anything I'm missing here? Are there other parameters that I can change to substantially improve the quality of these videos? Even after increasing the bitrate, framerate and reducing the GOP of the videos with libopenh264, the images still look worse than those generated with libx264 with the original parameters (!). image quality is much poorer, worse resolution, blocks are more apparent, 'water-like' effect during movement between frames).

However, the videos generated using openh264 are considerably worse (i.e. The framerate (24 fps), bitrate (600-700 kb/s), frame size (760x760) and bit encoding (yuv420p) are the same for both (as checked using ffprobe on the final output video).

For this I have used ffmpeg command line calls using either libx264 or libopenh264 (1.6, 1.7 and master). I have been running some tests by generating videos from a sequence of tif files.

Libx264