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Video Codec Comparison 266

Posted by timothy from the comprehensitivity dept.
FonkiE writes "Doom9 wrote a good article: After more than 3 weeks of work and no free time during that period it has been done: The latest codec comparison is online. 7 codecs have been put through one of the hardest tests in the history of codec testing. The results: find out on your own ;) I had planned to change the presentation somewhat but certain events (forum problems and such) prevented me from completing this for the release. I plan to eventually supply an updated version of the comparison."
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Video Codec Comparison More

Video Codec Comparison

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  • Spoiler! (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 04, 2003 @11:51PM (#5878665)
    In conclusion: When encoding regular movies, if you look for a quick and dirty average solution DivX5 is your fix. If you're an SBC guru, want maximal details at high speed you can still stick to SBC, if you want details and are not worried about the alpha status and speed you should give XviD a shot. DivX5 and XviD also offer standalone playback capability on selected devices. If you don't worry about details too much and prefer to remain almost blockfree you should give RV9 a shot, or alternatively WMV9. Interestingly, the lead developer of XviD has offered to send me a build that would perform just like RV9.. I might take up that offer one day when I'm bored.

    For animated features, the two proprietary solutions deliver good results with XviD pulling slightly ahead.

  • heh (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 04, 2003 @11:53PM (#5878675)
    test 1: The Matrix
    test 2: Saving Private Ryan
    test 3: Futurama

    Heh, the pinnacle of humankind's moving image creations

    • Re:heh (Score:4, Informative)

      by Wheaty18 ( 465429 ) on Monday May 05, 2003 @12:08AM (#5878749)
      The DVD's of The Matrix and SPR are pretty well done, transfer wise.

      I agree that some better choices could have been made though (keeping in mind this is a video test only), such as:

      - Terminator 2: Ultimate Edition.
      - LOTR: Fellowship Extended DVD.
      - Star Wars EP 1 or 2.
      - Bridge on the River Kwai (awesome 2.40:1 transfer).
      - Lawrence of Arabia
      - Doctor Zhivago

      The last 3 are about as visually stunning as movies can get.

  • Why use Jpeg? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Nutt ( 106868 ) on Sunday May 04, 2003 @11:58PM (#5878699)
    Along a few of the pictures he says along the lines of "jpeg helped this codec. In this one it hurt this codec.." Granted he probably wanted to save bandwidth but why couldnt he post zipped up uncompressed files to download? Also, I think a single image with side by side comparisons of parts of each scene would be nice as I cant flip back and forth between all the pictures and remember what I liked and disliked about them all.

    • Re:Why use Jpeg? (Score:2, Informative)

      by zakezuke ( 229119 )
      Right click, save picture as.

      View in your favorite slideshow program.

    • Does the phrase 'slashdotted' mean anything to you?

      -s

    • Re:Why use Jpeg? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by wmansir ( 566746 )
      If this were a still image compression test I would agree that using a lossy format for presentation would be completely unacceptable. But, as Doom9 stated several times in the review, the real judgment comes from watching these codecs in motion. As such the screen-caps are merely aids which, while useful in demonstrating differences, are not meant to be used solely to determine the quality of the codec. Unfortunately, offering clips to be downloaded is out of the question for practical and legal reasons.

      I
    • He should have used PNG, which is lossless RGB 24-bit.

      Of course, encoding in JPEG @ 100% quality would have been effectively as good. There really isn't any excuse for having still image artifacts on top of the source artifacts in this kind of article.

  • music codecs (Score:2, Insightful)

    by goombah99 ( 560566 )
    speaking of codecs i've been doing my own anaylys of the apple acc and mpw and aiff formats. I've been converting acc to Aiff then to mp3 by two methods 1) use audio hijack to grab the itunes output and 2) use imovie to convert the acc to aiff.

    what is odd is that while the final mp3 shows only 12% rms distortion (actually that's a fair bit if you're an audiophile) the intermediate AIFF shows massive added noise when I convert by imovie. this added noise is spread over the spectrum but has significant c

    • Re:music codecs (Score:5, Informative)

      by eht ( 8912 ) on Monday May 05, 2003 @12:06AM (#5878738)
      Real easy answer, the distortion is part of what mp3 just throws away, it's actually quite a lossy codec in some areas.

      Like you said, out of band from the codec's point of view is the most likely answer I can give without playing with the files myself.

    • quite the wrong way to go about it (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Trepidity ( 597 ) <delirium-slashdot@@@hackish...org> on Monday May 05, 2003 @12:12AM (#5878763)
      A signals-processing attempt to measure audio quality isn't useful in general, and especially when dealing with lossy codecs. The various measured distortion values aren't really interesting -- the only relevant result is audio quality. As such, the only interesting tests are blind listening tests.
    • so you are converting a lossy format to lossless to lossy? what is the point of that?
    • I intuitively lean towards the "out of band per mp3" theory, but I don't have a genuine good explanation as to why the noise would surface in the AIFF. Seems to me that the AIFF should consist of the very same bits that an mp3 player would feed to the sound hardware. And, that encoding a noisy AIFF to mp3 should relatively faithfully reproduce that noise. The sounds that mp3 compression remove are generally not audible; the related psycho-acoustic model is geared towards deciding what sound subcomponents
      • One of the major sources of quality degradation in transcoding is re-quantization. Almost all (all?) lossy compression algorithms do some sort of quantization, whether it be in the frequency or time domain, to save space where it seems possible; for example, taking a 16-bit quantity and storing it in 12 bits (2^16 gets mapped to 2^12, 0 gets mapped to 0, and everything in between gets rounded to its nearest corresponding 12-bit value). Now say you transcode, and the new algorithm uses 10 bits on the same

  • Mirror available (Score:5, Informative)

    by paulproteus ( 112149 ) <slashdot@[ ]eesh.org ['ash' in gap]> on Monday May 05, 2003 @12:01AM (#5878716) Homepage
    To avoid Slashdotting the poor server, a mirror is available here:

    mirror [128.220.194.209].

  • nice article, but.. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Squarewav ( 241189 ) on Monday May 05, 2003 @12:03AM (#5878725)
    there is lots of things left out like bitrate/quality comparisons, some codecs, like realvideo do a much better job at low bitrates (200k/s) then say xvid at the same bitrate.

  • many things left out... (Score:4, Informative)

    by pinqkandi ( 189618 ) on Monday May 05, 2003 @12:07AM (#5878743) Journal
    there are a lot of common codecs left out of here, for example Sorenson. (yeah yeah, can't view on Linux, but it's popular and quite good)

  • Bink? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 05, 2003 @12:10AM (#5878756)
    I keep hearing good things about Bink [radgametools.com]. Anyone have any experience with it, one way or the other? Seems to be used in a lot of games.
    • One thing that I noticed was Blizzard used to use this Video Codec when they released trailers of their games and such. This would make me believe that they also used Bink for their in game footage. But with the release of Warcraft 3, all their in-game movies are encoded with DivX....

      Who knows.

    • Re:Bink? (Score:3, Informative)

      by benwaggoner ( 513209 )
      I've done a lot of Bink encoding (Bink is featured in one of the tutorials in my book).

      Bink's adavantages are a really mature, widely ported (lots of consoles, Mac, Windows, Linux), fast, and highly-featured API. However, its internal codec isn't really THAT great in terms of compression efficiency (bang for the bit). It's fine for CD-ROM games where having a rich, fast, stable video playback system is more important than keeping space to a minimum. But I certainly wouldn't use it for content to be downloa

  • 3ivx and encoding (Score:5, Interesting)

    by shepmaster ( 319234 ) on Monday May 05, 2003 @12:19AM (#5878786) Homepage Journal
    Well, if you have read the article, you can see that 3ivx (not 3ivX as the article states :) ) does not fare well. However, 3ivx does have one thing that the others do not have whatsoever... it was built from scratch for QuickTime compatability. The reason that this is a good thing is the versatility you can achieve with a QuickTime movie. I have personally ripped and encoded an anime movie, and was able to put both English and Japanese, as well as English subtitles, all controlled by a flash menu. The few OGMs I have seen have similar capabilites, but nothing quite as nice as QuickTime.

    The video quality is actually pretty damn good, IMO. I suggest trying it out for yourself. Check my webpage for more relevant information.
    • What is it about OGM that makes it "nothing quite as nice as QuickTime"? Hey, with OGM you can use just about any video/audio format you want, no quicktime limitations to worry about.

      The fact that Vorbis audio is standard in OGMs is good enough for me. Quicktime still doesn't have built-in support for Vorbis, AFAIK.

      Also, 3ivx isn't your only option. You could just as easily have used VP3, and would have had no licensing/patent problems to deal with. Not to mention that it's almost universally accepted

  • Sigh, Quicktime and MP4-video? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by 2nd Post! ( 213333 ) <gundbear.pacbell@net> on Monday May 05, 2003 @12:25AM (#5878802) Homepage
    I wish they tested that too, the encoder isn't free, but it is cheap. Then the question is, is the price worth it?

  • Which formats are the most durable? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by astrashe ( 7452 ) on Monday May 05, 2003 @12:28AM (#5878810) Journal
    If you wanted to make video files that will have the best chance of being viewable in 10 or 20 years, what are the best file formats and codecs?

    Are any file formats and codecs likely to be visible?
    • ONLY on BEOS!

      Seriously, I think that the persistence of Atari video cartidges and C64 hackers proves that we will have access to this stuff, at least on a hobbyist basis, for a long time.

    • Re:Which formats are the most durable? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Raster Burn ( 213891 ) on Monday May 05, 2003 @12:43AM (#5878851)
      Fully standards compliant mpeg4. It's not going to look nearly as good as XviD or DivX5, but it will be "durable."

      • Re:Which formats are the most durable? (Score:5, Informative)

        by Sangui5 ( 12317 ) on Monday May 05, 2003 @02:01AM (#5879103)
        Both XviD and DivX5 can be fully standards complaint mpeg4. They offer a few (very few, optional, generally experimental) features which are outside the standard, but for the most part, they *are* mpeg4. Some of the seemingly basic differences between XviD and DivX5 is that mpeg4 has a lot of features which are not mandatory for encoders, and (for the longest time at least) they implemented different sets of optional features. And while the XviD and DivX5 teams are both attempting to implement as many of the fancy features as possible, they haven't polished them all off yet.

        To repeat: DivX5 and XviD are both implementations of the core MPEG4 specification, plus some set of optional features which are included in the MPEG4 specification, plus an extra or two which don't really make any quality differences (yet).
        • Unfortunately, most people use XviD and DivX5 with AVI instead of the standard file format (MP4) and MP3 instead of the standard audio codec (AAC). But they're getting closer.
          • AVI instead of the standard file format (MP4)

            Actually, the 'official' container format for MPEG-4 is Apple's .mov format used in QuickTime. .MP4 files are usually just raw MPEG-4 bitstreams dumped into a file with no real container format.

            • Actually, the 'official' container format for MPEG-4 is Apple's .mov format used in QuickTime. .MP4 files are usually just raw MPEG-4 bitstreams dumped into a file with no real container format.

              This is incorrect. MP4 is a container file format, originally based on the QuickTime .MOV format. Google: mp4 file format, or see ISO/IEC 14496-1, "Information technology - Coding of audio-visual objects - Part 1: Systems" (MPEG/4 systems specification).

    • Re:Which formats are the most durable? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Kris_J ( 10111 ) on Monday May 05, 2003 @01:25AM (#5878985) Homepage Journal
      If you wanted to make video files that will have the best chance of being viewable in 10 or 20 years, what are the best file formats and codecs?
      Burn a Video CD or DVD. If you can produce a disk that will play on 90% of the stand-alone (DVD) players in any given electronics store then you'll probably still be able to play it in 20 years time, so long as the media hasn't degraded.
    • MPEG-2, hands down.

      Dave
    • Xvid, because it is the closest to the official MPEG4 standard and open source (and OSS never dies).
    • I use huffyuv to archive my videos, it's a quite simple lossless codec with the source code available. If it dies it shouldn't be too hard to write a own decoder to it after 10 years...

      Only disadvantage is the size of the videos, it only compresses to about 40% of the uncompressed original.
    • MPEG-1 playback will certainly will be around until the end of time. MPEG-4 will probably be in the same position in a few years. I'd probably stick to ISMA complaint, using Simple Visual for video and AAC-LC mono or stereo for audio. Those files will play in QuickTime, RealOne (on windows), MPEG4IP, and other players today, and in the future. And MPEG4IP is even open source.

  • MPEG1, still the best (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 05, 2003 @12:40AM (#5878843)
    All these years and MPEG1 is still the only truly universal video format.

    1. MPEG1 is not encumbered by patent problems as MPEG2 and 4 are. http://www.mpegla.com Thus it is effectively free-as-in-beer by default.

    2. MPEG1 is playable everywhere from the old Solaris and SGI boxen to the newest PCs.

    3. No finding out after the fact that the .mov or .avi you downloaded requires a codec you don't have.

    4. It is not a tool to let Microsoft, Sorenson, or Real dominate all online video and divide the web into gated communities.

    • Re:MPEG1, still the best (Score:5, Informative)

      by updog ( 608318 ) on Monday May 05, 2003 @01:42AM (#5879026) Homepage
      It may be more open, but even MPEG-2 has enormous advantages and features over MPEG-1. Here are just a few:

      Defines the "transport stream", for delivery over unreliable networks (Internet). MPEG-1 only has the concept of "program streams", useful only for data stored on a reliable media (eg CDROM or DVD);

      Defines profiles and levels, which put contraints on ranges and parameters. For example, MainProfile @ MainLevel is good for standard def video, while MainProfile @ HighLevel is suitable for HD;

      Support for interlaced pictures;

      16:9 aspect ratio, pan and scan;

      scalable coding profiles, 3:2 pulldown, concealment motion vectors, 9-10 bit quantization, etc, etc etc

      MPEG-2 is really what spawned the digital video age, and it's the standard used for practically all of the digital video that you watch (digital cable, satellite TV), DVD, SVCD, and many PC codecs.

      MPEG-1 just doesn't cut it for all of these applications.

      • Actually, MPEG-1 also supports aspect ratio switching. Not all players do, but most of the modern software ones do.

        While all of the above are important for digital broadcasting applications, for storing progressive-scan content, MPEG-1 is pretty much identically good, and players are much more widely distributed (it still costs $2.50 to distribute a MPEG-2 decoder legally).
  • But am I alone to see really not much difference between STANDING shot ? Am I alone to think that in a motion picture (aka the resulting film) the blur and the tendance of the eye to average anything would gum-down any slight diffference ?

  • Where's libavcodec/ffmpeg ? (Score:4, Informative)

    by vlad_petric ( 94134 ) on Monday May 05, 2003 @12:53AM (#5878880) Homepage
    libavcodec [sf.net] is actually just as good as divx5, and certainly better than xvid. While it's true that it produces stuff that's compatible with divx decoders (theoretically all MPEG4s should be compatible with each other, but that's only the theory), it is certainly not subsumed by divx5. It also has many of the codec features of divx5 pro - e.g. B-frames, Trellis quantizer (which improves quality / reduces bitrate big time(tm))
    • Despite the claims of mplayer documentation, I have found, for at least animated content, that xvid performs *FAR* better than libavcodec. Content encoded with libavcodec was downright blocky at even 200-300 kbps more than xvid's smooth output.
    • In MPEG-2, any particular implementation is defined by a Profile and a Level. A profile defines the tools available to a particular bitstream (like interlaced video, or B-frames), and levels define the parameters of those tools (like maximum resolution and data rate).

      For an encoder Profile@Level defines the maximum features you can use to make a compliant bitstream (so it's okay not to use all the tools and still claim to make an Advanced Simple stream - the encoder is compatible, just not maximum quality)

  • What a decoding (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 05, 2003 @01:00AM (#5878912)
    It seems that everyone is worried about encoding and what I would like to know is which format takes the least cpu to decode. I'm running on a rather weak laptop and even mpg1 gives me mismatched audio. Are the mpg4/SBC decoders less cpu intensive?
  • I have a problem with re-compressing an already compressed source. MPEG-2 for DVD can run between 2Mb and 9Mb (8Mb realistically). I have always been a believer in the garbage in/out theory of compression (please don't make me explain). Each of these titles I am sure were encoded at diffrent bit-rates. I dare to say, the cleaner the source, the better the compression. In this instance I believe the best compressor is the one that can best smooth out the errors of MPEG2, not necessarily the best compressor.
    • nice idea, and you're right, but all the attention seems to be on (re)compressing commercial DVD movies, and no one has the original uncompressed source to those apart from the movie studios... i'm not sure how useful an MPEG4 codec that's great at such material would be, assuming everyone is using it for warezy purposes (i guess the video coming out of camcorders etc is also compressed in a similar way?). Anyway in case you don't know it's normal to apply some pre-processing to DVD source with filter like
    • Never mind that so far as video goes, getting totally uncompressed source is nearly impossible. 640 wide*480 high*24 bit*30 fps = 221Mbps. Yep, two-hundread and twenty-one million bits per second. That translates to under 30 seconds of video on a standard CD, or about 6 minutes on a DVD.

      I've done some work in video compression, and it was a non-trivial task to get never-compressed source. Indeed, we had to generate it ourselves, and were limited to low-motion real life (stop motion-style pan over a roo
    • Well, a modern high-end Hollywood DVD is going to be pretty clean. Given all the other filtering going on in preprocessing, the artifacts don't wind up being THAT big a deal. In a head to head comparision between uncompressed source and a professionally mastered DVD of the same source, the end-point will be pretty similar. Also, since all the codecs used the same source, it was still an apples-to-apples comparison.

      Still, it befuddles me how much time people are willing to spend copying a DVD that only cost

  • yay, the good guys won (or something) (Score:3, Interesting)

    by real_smiff ( 611054 ) on Monday May 05, 2003 @01:16AM (#5878961)
    I'm really happy to see XviD come out on top (well, i think it did anyway :p). The devs really deserve it, with all the work they've put in, and the problems they've had with commercial companies ripping their code off, users whining, the brain numbing difficulty of what they're trying to do, not getting paid for it, and so on and so forth.

    I've been semi-following XivD for about a year, occasionally compressing one of my DVDs to see how it's doing. (which always seems to be: Great, but better the next week (i.e. a severe double-edged sword!).

    One thing you know about Xvid is that those problems (the ones Doom9 found) will get addressed. Cheers XviD team.

  • Isn't there something missing from this "review"? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Svartalf ( 2997 ) on Monday May 05, 2003 @01:26AM (#5878987) Homepage
    To be sure, he's comparing the performance of the codecs against content that is popular (and typically difficult to compress...)- but he's pulling it from a lossy format, namely the MPEG2 stream off of a DVD.

    There's a reason why you're really supposed to re-encode from the CD when you're producing .OGG's or something like them instead of pulling them from MP3's as source. With a lossy format, you're deliberately losing content, introducing hopefully un-noticable distortions into the reproduction of the sound. Unfortunately, the varying formats use different assumptions, which produce differing kinds of distortions into the result. Because of this, re-encoding from MP3's, your sound files end up with distortions on top of distortions- the quality and compression suffers as a result.

    The same applies to video files.

    This is not to say that what Doom9's doing isn't important or relevant- it is if you're using the codecs to space shift (i.e. Put several movies on your laptop so you're not carrying the DVD's on your business trip...) or pirating movies. The reality is that the codecs he's reviewing are largely designed for previously untouched video feeds- someone ought to test that as well.

    Anything else is not really a proper review- unless you're only caring about ripping and re-encoding DVDs. To me, that's something useful to know about, but I'm as or more interested in the intended usages of this stuff as well.
    • You make a good point but it's not just DVDs that use compressed video. Digital cable, satellite, digital video cameras, etc. are all pretty common sources for people using these codecs and they're all compressed. Heck, most of the stuff I encode has been through compression/decompression twice allready, once by Directv (mpeg2)and once by my pvr (mjpeg) and when I want to store it long term I use mpeg4.

    • That is a valid point, but in terms of really clean, complex footage, there aren't many places to go for uncompressed, digital content. Professionally published DVDs of high bitrate provide nearly artifact-free video, and I would say that is certainly 'good enough' for the purposes of showing off a codec.

      What I don't agree with is the use of JPEG to encode captures of the footage for demo purposes. PNG would have been a far far better choice. I know still images alone are never a good indication of a c
    • I would gladly encode material from the digital master tapes but my chances of getting access to those are pretty slim :/

  • DivX 5 (Score:2, Interesting)

    by foxalopex ( 522681 )
    Myself I get most of my anime thanks to the existance of these compression formats. I'm a fan of DivX 5 simply because it's easy to get a hold of the codec and it works for all my historical DivX 3.x movies. I have nothing against the Xvid team but it's a bit annoying when I get the occational anime that won't play on anything else but the Xvid codec, requiring me to find it and install it into my system. And as the reviewer noted it's got a few bugs still. DivX 5 may not be the best but it's certainly

    • Re:DivX 5 (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      You don't need the XVID codec. XVID attempts to be Mpeg-4 compatible as does DIVX5. That being said You can decode XVID with the DIVX5 codec and vice versa. What you need is a simple FourCC changer to change the FourCC (the software "marker" which tells your computer what codec is being used and what to decode with).

      Or you can just DL FFDSHOW (check SourceForge. I reccomend the Alphas... lots of features yet quite stable) And use that to decode all your MPEG4 type files.

    • The format war continues, but ultimately the majority of the codecs are trying to implement the mpeg4 standard. Surveys and comparisons aside, if you trawl around you'll find that most "users" (ie not companies) are using either DivX3/5 or XviD.

      Some clever individual has come up with ffdshow, which you can get off doom9.org, which will play either DivX or XviD without having either codec installed on your system. And at around 500k, it's a smaller download than either of those codecs

  • Tables Aversion? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by MonkeyBoyo ( 630427 )
    Does whoever wrote this for Doom9 have an aversion to presenting the tabular information in tables? The analysis is full of sections like:

    As you may know, not every rate control mechanism is perfect so here are the final movie sizes I got:

    3ivX: 723'574 KB (Matrix), 1'493'398 KB (SPR), 178'754 KB (Futurama)
    DivX5: 717'642 KB (Matrix), SPR: 1'435'154 KB (SPR), 179'250 KB (Futurama)
    mpegable: 920'234 KB (Matrix), 1'144'774 KB (SPR), 171'168 KB (Futurama)
    RV9: 722' 977 KB (Matrix), 1'447'144 KB (SPR), 180'976 KB

  • Helix license forbis comparison? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Internet Ninja ( 20767 ) on Monday May 05, 2003 @02:04AM (#5879118) Homepage
    IANAL but looking at the Helix binary EULA there seems to be a clause disallowing this sort of thing.

    https://reguseronly.helixcommunity.org/2002/clic kw rap/eula-clickwrap
    Entry 2(a)(vii)
    You may not make available to any third party the results of any evaluation or testing of the Software by You under this License. Any such forbidden use shall immediately terminate Your license to the Software.

    Just a thought
  • See article [heise.de] (unfortunately only its beginning, and without illustrations) if you understand German. Reading the full thing (very thorough) in the print version, you'll learn that WM9 'wins', closely followed by Real's latest codec.

  • Sound and vision... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by hughk ( 248126 ) on Monday May 05, 2003 @03:16AM (#5879426) Journal
    It is interesting that some encoders tend to do bad things with the sound. What does this have to do with the video playback quality, well if the player has to seek between the video stream and the sound stream, then video (requiring the higher bandwdth) suffers. Playing from a fast HD masks some of this out, but usually not from CD.

    For whatever reason, some programs mess up the spacing of the video and sound streams, for example, Variable Bit-Rate Audio often gives problems. The thing is that it isn't the video codec itself, just the delays getting sound and vision to run concurrently.

  • How much detail is needed? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by CAIMLAS ( 41445 ) on Monday May 05, 2003 @03:56AM (#5879529)
    I don't know about anyone else, but for the most part (with the exception of 3ivX) I didn't notice enough image degrigation to matter. Especially at 24fps.

    Don't believe me? Try this: scroll through the screenshots (at about the rate of 1 image going from the bottom of the screen to the top per second - 1fps) and tell me if you can pick out the glitches in most of these codecs.

    What's more, if anyone was walked into several rooms in sequence, all playing the same movie, but one being DVD, one being DivX3, one being WMV9, etc. I suspect nobody would be able to distinguish one from the other, provided they're encoded at one of the higher quality settings - even if they're intimately familiar with the film.

    This is a load of garbage. DVD is a broken codec to begin with.
  • ... whether artifacts in the screenshots are down to the video codec, or down to the fact that the author has jpeg compressed them? This is one of the few places where it really would have been a good idea to use a non-lossy format.
  • DivX will do multiple passes, and the Gordian Knot that he was using will do six by picking it from a drop-down.

    An increase in quality has been debated, but DivX with six passes has, at least for me, always come within 1MB of the target size and never over.

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