What codec & biyrate to use with media player

[Phototaker]

I have encoded into XVID & DIVX for years but then it comes to the different other codec's Now I have WDTV media player that is supposed to be able to play most off the more compressed never codec's.

I have to software to covert to most formats but am uncertain which one to use. I have never seen an comparison charts which will tell you that one format is say 20% smaller than another but the quality remains the same?

Is there any chart or consensus which is the best codec to use & what bitrate I should be using?

[foxyshadis]

There's one recent one: Dark Shikari's blog (http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=102), but that relates only to animation. (And a direct link to the graph (http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/quality_chart1.png).)

I haven't seen many recent codec comparisons, ones from a few years ago are still reasonably accurate except that AVC/H.264 and VC-1/WMV have both become faster and better looking. In fact x264 and expression encoder 3 are the only free encoders I'd recommend to anyone, or xvid/ffmpeg for old mpeg-4 players, and there's plenty of guis for all of those. But that's just my experience.

[Kurtnoise]

sorry but expression encoder 3 is not free...

[foxyshadis]

I'd rather not get too deep into that, but it's no cost for the wmv encoding features. The only features that cost money are the h.264 & aac codecs and extended screen capture. It's called still called a trial, but that doesn't mean the encoder isn't free. (Of course, it's not Free.)