Small codec comparison

[N-Bomb]

First of all, this was done with animated content... live footage may differ. :)

For this comparison I used a short ~30 second clip of an action sequence. I encoded at ~815 kbps 2-pass mode in all cases except Huffy

(as a base), and XviD (I tried to approximate the bitrate).

*EDIT*
http://ice.prohosting.com/nbomb/c1.html
http://ice.prohosting.com/nbomb/c2.html
*EDIT*

Starting in the upper left:

1st Row
-HuffYUV (best mode)
-DivX 3.11 (Low Motion - no SBC)
-DivX5 (no MP4 enhancements)
2nd Row
-DivX5 (MP4 enhancements minus Q Pixel)
-DivX5 (MP4 enhancements minus Q Pixel + Psychovisual @ Normal)
-XviD (newest build)

Why no SBC? I was testing the basic abilities of the codecs on their most basic settings (IE, setting only the bitrate and encoding method). Obviously regular DivX 3.11 is blah, but it's there for comparison :)

So what do we see? DivX5 without the MP4 ('pro') enhancements comes pretty close to the huffy original, moreso with the B-frames and GMC added. Notice that although the overall image is fairly nice, there's quite a bit of egde-artifacting, and the background detail is somewhat smeared.

I didn't notice much difference with the psychovisual stuff turned on, except for a larrrrrge increase in shitframes and other garbage. I'd say it's of little use at this stage. Enabling Q-pixel also resulted in an increase in garbage.

Now XviD... Macroblocks were quite noticeable in both cases, but were less pronounced than in DivX 3.11. Despite this, fine detail was a little more apparent, and there were less artifacts around the sharp edges.

Mostly the same results as with Doom9's most recent codec shootout... but hey. :)





-Nick

[MaTTeR]

Your links are broken ATM.

Noticeable macroblocks in Xvid? Hmm...which DSF was used for post-processing? What options did you have set in the DSF?

If your shooting for a specific bitrate with Xvid then simply use Gknot so you can compare apples to apples.

[The People's Elbow]

@N-Bomb: One thing that seems to be characteristic for XviD is that single pictures often look worse than the competitors, but when it comes to motion..."magically" it looks better, just an impression i got while testing around a bit with both (DivX5 & XviD) codecs! Maybe the DSF is so much better thx to nic's work!

[N-Bomb]

Sorry about the links... stupid Prohosting randomness. :)

They're sans-DSF, as I think that gives a more realistic comparison, and post-filtering shouldn't make up for shortcomings in a codec.



-Nick