sadie
20th May 2008, 08:31
Although I rarely dabble in commercial video 'backup' encodes (I'm basically a home video DV person), I thought I'd share the following experiment with you all.
Curious as to what the HD hype is all about I got a hold of a friend's high def file of a well-known TV show episode in order to compare it with my SD version of the same. Of course not having a true HD screen the playback on the computer was less than optimal and also extremely erratic. But the difference was obviously there.
Then I had the idea to try a rip and test compression on the file in the new h264 avc format. Too long and nothing in my antiquated set-up to play it back smoothly on. So, then I thought why not try it with xvid. I was truly overwhelmed with the result. With a compression ratio of something like 6-7 to 1 the quality of that encode was not only far superior (sharpness, color, contrast) to a similar rip of my SD episode, it was even better than the SD DVD source itself. And I'm talking about full 720x DVD resolution at bitrates in 1000-1100 range at 1/3 mpeg2 file-size without any artifacts or blocking. Perhaps this might not surprise anyone but I'd be curious about anyone's comments.
Curious as to what the HD hype is all about I got a hold of a friend's high def file of a well-known TV show episode in order to compare it with my SD version of the same. Of course not having a true HD screen the playback on the computer was less than optimal and also extremely erratic. But the difference was obviously there.
Then I had the idea to try a rip and test compression on the file in the new h264 avc format. Too long and nothing in my antiquated set-up to play it back smoothly on. So, then I thought why not try it with xvid. I was truly overwhelmed with the result. With a compression ratio of something like 6-7 to 1 the quality of that encode was not only far superior (sharpness, color, contrast) to a similar rip of my SD episode, it was even better than the SD DVD source itself. And I'm talking about full 720x DVD resolution at bitrates in 1000-1100 range at 1/3 mpeg2 file-size without any artifacts or blocking. Perhaps this might not surprise anyone but I'd be curious about anyone's comments.