anyone still testing the new realvideo9 codec?

[travis morgan]

i was just curious if anyone was still doing any testing with the new real codec and what are their impressions to this point?

[RadicalEd]

Well actually I just finished my first true backup using RealVideo. At 640x480 and 1625 kbps, I have to say the results are impressive and noticeably better than XviD and DivX 5 (only slightly, but enough to make some difference). It was anime of course, and while I'd like to burn it, I'm busy figuring out why the heck the
<switch>
<audio src="Japanese.rm" systemLanguage="ja"/>
<audio src="English.rm"/>
</switch>

command won't work. I'll figure it out sooner or later though (nobody turn this thread into a thread about RealAudio switching, hijacking is evil)
Anyway it looks good, as soon as I can get the audio and subs to work I'm gonna switch to Real for all of my anime backup needs. I once tested RealVideo in an early version of XCD, and surprisingly it worked! (I havent posted this yet because I wanted to re-test and make sure it works... but oh well)

[travis morgan]

what kind of file sizes to you get at 640x480 and a 1625 bitrate? i usually encode in terms of streaming...320x### and a 300 bitrate. i did thirteen ghost (91 mins) the other day...file size approximately 200 meg.

[atracus]

dear friend,
I've done 6 DVD rips with RV9, each to the size of 700MB with audio @ 96Kbps, DS Stereo.

Results are impressive; for the resizing, I use GordianKnot suggestions, and I hae samples ranging from the smallest 480x to the largest 708x (if I well remember), for a movie full of still scenes.

After 95 rips all in DivX, I've definitely left DivX as it's blocky, and surely (TO MY EYE) at a lower overall quality.

Please see my other oistsposts in RV threads for my small "guide" and other coments; also, ask me any question may help you to improve with your experiments.

regards

[atx]

[RadicalEd]

Well that encode is destined for XCD (since as I said it does work, all I had to do is add .rm or .rmvb as the extension instead of .dat and I could read it directly off the CD, more testing is needed though).
Anyway Real is really great for packing bitrate into video, because in my experience RealAudio 8 at 64 kbps sounds almost perfect. Its definitely superior to ogg, mp3, and aac at that bitrate. Since I'm doing 2 audio tracks, 128 total audio bandwidth is great compared to the 192 I use with ogg and divx (2 96 kbps audio streams).
On top of that, Real is definitely superior to anything in terms of encoding animation.
For 320x240 encodes, I usually use a bitrate of 512 or 768 if it is high motion. 768 and above at this resoltion border on completely artifact free (and I'm a quality freak). Mostly 320x240 stuff is just clips though or if I'm trying to pack a lot onto 1 CD- I did an hour a few days ago at 512 and it came out around 230 megs.