You’re using a lot of words to describe what can be visualized with only a few pictures. You do so much work with this codec you’re bound to have a portfolio somewhere right? Some frame-accurate, frame-type comparisons between your sources, x264 and your commercial encoder at native resolution? Why not share those and prove your picture quality claims while sharing the settings used for both encodes instead of just rattling off numbers and bitrates and ending with “see for yourself!”
No I don’t, I only use x264 like everyone else here, I don’t have any commercial encoders.
And that link you gave to their websites displays some examples of poorly mastered Blu-ray discs. Got a dark area in your film? Have some banding and blocking! Got a fast action motion sequence? You get some banding and blocking!
Well mastering isn’t their issue, that’s the authoring house’s problem, all SP is is the encoder.
If the top authoring houses thought that x264 offered better quality then they’d use it instead. Sonic Scenarist and Sony Blu-print come with entry-level encoders such as Mainconcept and Sonny’s encoder, not with Sirus. They do work fine with x264 though - but do recall that x264 supports BD encoding only as of 2010 which is well after the BD spec was released, and you have to be a little more careful with the settings when compared to encoders such as MC and SP that are purely designed to produce BD compliant encodes.