DVD compressiblility, Do darker movies encode better?

[smokeslikeapoet]

I just encoded a one cd rip of The Crow and the movie seemed to compress extremely well. The reproduction is nearly flawless when compared with the DVD even at full screen on my 21 inch monitor. The most obvious reason to me is because the movie is so dark. Is this a major factor, just one of the factors, or just a coincidence?

[Doom9]

Is this a major factor, just one of the factors, or just a coincidence? on one hand movies with dark colors compress pretty well (like matrix), on the other hand it's really more dependent of the ambiance than of the fact that there is little light. most codecs have a hard time encoding dark uniformly colored patches, but these are few in matrix, it's just the general selection of colors that's rather dark (as compared to a movie like austin powers for example where we have a lot of bright and shiny colors). I hope you can understand me, I'm having quite a hard time explaining it. But maybe this will help: remember the night scene in the tents after the first battle in gladiator? or the scene in the church in saving private ryan? both are dark, and yet they look rather poor. this is a case of the dark uniformly colored areas I mentioned before. In contrast matrix has (almost) no such things but they don't much bright colors..

[LotionBoy]

to try and paraphrase doom9

dark, medium-contrast encodes well.
Dark, low or no-contrast encodes poorly, because the codec has a very bad tendency to block on solid color areas.
In stuff like the matrix the colors are different enough to force the codec to encode them without blocking. At least that is how I think it works. :-)
doom9, if I've interpreted you wrong, please feel free to yell at me ;-)
LotionBoy