ultra high bandwidth ?

[pieroxy]

I finally read the "Codec shoot-out 2004" and am startled by a couple of things:
1. What is the "ultra high bandwidth" thingy? Videos look slighly better than the "normal bandwidth" for which we have all infos (filesizes, etc...). So it looks like the "UHB" has somwhat increased the bandwidth, but by how much? Is that the maximum quality?
2. Still, even in UHB, there are very significant loss of details... Startling. I guess my DVDs will stay in MPEG-2 format for a while...

Is there a way to have a "very similar" encoded movie? This shoot out seems to prove otherwise... If yes, how much space will a movie take? There are still no way to know that unfortunately...

[Koepi]

Erm. The "ultra wide bandwidth" thingy is about the images (the screenshots). It's about lossless PNG compression of the screenshots vs. lossy JPEG compression.

IHTH

Koepi

[pieroxy]

Ah! :o I was so wrong, it's a shame to have even posted that... :(

Well, anyway, anyone knows of the quality of, say, Xvid when pushed to the maximum? What are filesizes in that case?

I know pretty well MPEG1 and MPEG2 cause I was doing a lot of (S)VCDs, but I now have a media center(c)(r)TM and am ready to rip a bunch of my movies (DVDs mostly) to my HDD. The format/codec/bitrate question is now my last question to resolve, knowing that I might very well have a crappy 20 inch TV for now, but I might very well have a 100" Front Projection screen next year. So crappy compromises such as the screenshots described in the codec shoot out are de facto ruled out.

If anyone has any insight...