RM vs DivX

[woodysteven]

Hey! I'v just heard that the RealPlus 9 has already exceed the DivX 5.
Is this really true? What you guys think about this?

Thanks.

-
steven
steven@aintme.com

[-h]

There's nothing technically preventing Real from surpassing the advanced simple profile MPEG-4 implementation that DivX uses - JVT is already achieving similar quality in half the bitrate of MPEG-4, and that's comparing against MPEG-4's advanced profiles which DivX hasn't implemented yet.

Real probably has quite a few developers adapting ideas from JVT, so I wouldn't doubt it.

-h

[RadicalEd]

I havent done any tests on live action video yet, but I can tell you that RealVideo 9 is better than DivX 5 and XviD for animated material.

I'd sure like to find an in depth description of the specific compression technologies that Real uses, it was clear in RealVideo 8 that it was something significantly different from MPEG's classic DCT compression. At low bitrates Real gets soft and muddy almost, similar visually to wavelet image compression (and maybe that is what Real uses) as opposed to the utter blockiness of low bitrate MPEG video which is a trademark of DCT compression. It was always clear though that at something like 1024 kbps 320x240 you would almost never see an artifact in Real Video 8. They did a very good job of avoiding ringing (which is part of why its so good for anime) and blocking. Realvideo 9 is even better. The same results at 1024 kbps can be obtained at about 768 in my experience (and I do a lot of tests with these things).

[TheXung]

Did a short test last night on a clip from crouching tiger hidden dragon. It's wasn't thorough testing but results were that some scenes were really good. Better than the best I could get out of divx 5. Other scenes were not so good. There was a smoothing effect. Not sure if this was a 2-pass, bit alotting phenomenon or not. I will say that it is noticably better than Real 8.

Gonna do more tests on the whole movie now.

[woodysteven]

What's the bitrate you used in the test?

[yingx2]

from Realnetworks web site:
---------------------------------------------------------------------
KEY FEATURES OF REALVIDEO 9
Unparalleled quality ¡X State-of-the-art video at all bit rates:
30% improvement over RealVideo 8

50% improvement over RealVideo G2

Same quality at half the bit rate of MPEG-4

Same quality at quarter the bit rate of MPEG-2
---------------------------------------------------------------------

hype?

[yingx2]

downloaded their 750kbps and 1Mbps samples.
DivX is better, isn't it?

http://broadbanddemos.real.com/docs/rn/rv9/trailers/Blade2_640_1Mbps.rm
http://broadbanddemos.real.com/docs/rn/rv9/trailers/Blade2_640_1Mbps.rm

[TheXung]

I was using 750K.

After the movie finished, the initial impression is that DivX is better. However, the RM is a little smaller than the DivX so I'm gonna see about redoing the Divx at the same bitrate as the RM.

The picture was more contrasty and the edges were sharper, however there was a blurring effect on the background textures. There also seems to have been this weird motion masking or blurring effect on fast scenes. While it is debateable about wether psychovisually it is a better or worse picture, doom9 is gonna tear up this blurry effect.

[temporance]

RM looks very heavily processed/filtered. Yuck. It would be nice to be able to turn off all the preprocessing.

[Prosper]

Personally, I wouldn't use rm even if it provided DVD quality at 100kbits, I _hate_ (hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate, get the idea, lol) the proprietary software.
Gimme a nice cross platform package, that has a shot at being playable by a standalone unit, MPEG4, or even SVCD.