very interesting. Thanks for re-doing the same clip. I am glad I can see improvement to RV9. I studied all your PNGs. Very nice MPEG-4 encode quality. I won't go into too many comparisons, leaving that to individual preferences, but IMHO in the snapshots you chose, some more grain is preserved in XviD, but also you get a lot of blockiness and noise artifacts in XviD, most notably in the two last snapshots.
Looking at the actual video clips, it's just blocks blocks blocks in XviD in the 2nd half (high action). I don't want to get into an argument over what's preferable, because there is no given answer to that. Too many factors vary, especially viewing conditions. I know what I prefer (see #4 full-screen on high-rez monitor, the blocks are everywhere), but have no problems understanding other preferences. That said, the attention to preserving detail vs filtering out blocking artifacts and/or leaving that to the user preference, has been heard. Every effort going forward will be focused towards this
Thanks! I had been looking forward to this comparison with the RV9 2-pass improvements.