Feedback on the 3rd codec comparison

[Infophreak]

Well that was an interesting read, even though I didn't like that XviD (my personal favourite) performed so badly. But as Doom9 said, we'll just have to wait and see. I can only see XviD getting better overall, but there is bound to be some hick-ups underway. I guess he ran into one.

Your impressions of Real Video 9 surprised me, but I still have great gripes about using it:
1) You lock yourself into using Real Player... with all the spyware and annoying interface that the latest version has (it's awfully SLOW and unresponsive on my 600MHz machine)
2) A lack of detail on backgrounds KILLS anime encoding. The backgrounds are often gorgeous and very detailed in anime, so that is a big no-no for me.

Good work, Doom9. Looking forward to more codec comparisons when XviD/DivX Networks/Real release a new version with a little more than cosmetic changes (like DivX 5.01 -> 5.02).

[theReal]

I was also surprised of your very positive impressions of RM9.
I mean, nothing beats RM9 for encoding the Simpsons - it just handles this stile of animation much better than any other codec, but for non-animated movies I think it kills too much details (it handles uniformly colored areas just like it were the Simpsons: it makes them the same color, just like a really good and strong spatial smoother). In the two rain-scenes, you can't even see the rain anymore with RM9 - that's a bit too much smoothing for my taste (btw I don't only judge it on these few screenshots, I've tried to encode some DVD chapters with RM9 myself but gave up quick because of the bad results).

Oops, I almost forgot: I very much appreciate your codec comparisons, thanks for these extensive tests!

[tanksimpson]

@TheReal: I know what you mean about RV9 and rain, I ripped "Gosford Park" a while back and the opening scene (where its raining) looks weird because you have these people running around with umbrellas, but you can't see any rain - LOL! I'm also leery of a file format controlled by just one company. That said, however, I think that RV9 represents the state-of-the-art in low/mid bitrate codecs for streaming.

I'm still using DivX 5.02 for my archival rips because I want to be able to use the .mp4 file format, and XviD still isn't ready for prime-time. The best results I've had with XviD were from the early July releases, the recent ones seem to be broken again when muxed into mp4 (i.e. XviD .mp4 played back with QT6 result in green screen). I've seen some excuses being made in the XviD forum for the poor XviD performance in Doom9's codec comparison, to the effect that if you don't learn to love the rampant XviD macroblocks, you must be some kind of "newbie". So what if DivX smooths out more details, if the end result looks better to the viewer, that's what matters.