Warp wrote:
> Orchid XP v8 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
>> At lower bitrates, the ridiculously-named codec "H.264" seems to look 
>> slightly better than Xvid, which looks a bit better than DivX, which 
>> looks quite a bit better than MPEG1.
> 
>   They will look better at lower bitrates if you use multipass encoding.

OK, I'll try that. Like I said, I basically just ran the codecs with 
everything at default.

>> I am not, however, seeing the reputed "massive" difference in image 
>> quality.
> 
>   Not in image quality. In quality/size ratio. Try lowering the bitrate
> for all the codecs (trying to keep all the resulting file sizes about
> the same) and until you start seeing significant differences.

Well, all the files came out almost exactly the same size, as you can 
see. (And given the same average bitrate, you'd expect that.)

In the dying minutes of last night, I quickly tried using a different 
video, and got radically different results. I think my test video is 
just too easy to compress. (It's 80% black pixels, and 20% green pixels 
of varying brightness.) So I think I should rerun my experiment on a 
harder video.



The slightly weird thing is that if I play back, say, a DivX video in 
WMP, there are a small amount of visual artifacts. But if I take the 
DivX video and use Virtual Dub to decompress it to an uncompressed AVI 
and then play that in WMP, I get slightly different visual artifacts... WTF?

(Also, as I mentioned, this happens with "lossless" codecs. When I play, 
say, a Huffyuv video in WMP, it looks very slightly fuzzy, and the black 
becomes dark grey. But if I decompress it and play the decompressed 
version, it looks perfect again. Very odd...)

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