sizing and resizing in wmv

[grnpte]

hey folks, trying to figure out the best video size to use for wmv. From an anamorphic ntsc dvd (720x480). I have encoded the same video at 1200k in three different sizes: 720x404, 704x396, and 640x360. the videos encoded at 704 and 640 wide look great and quality wise are almost indistinguishable from each other, the 720 wide video looks noticeably fuzzier.

Are there certain sizes of video which naturally appear sharper, maybe based on multiples of 16,32 or 64? i know this has an effect on mpg, does it affect wmv too? if youre video width is a multiple of 64 will it come out sharper?

thanks, grnpte

[bond]

Are there certain sizes of video which naturally appear sharper, maybe based on multiples of 16,32 or 64?no, you cant really say that
as a rule of thumb you could say that
- for the same quality you need a higher bitrate the higher the resolution is
- but the lower the res, the blurrier the fullscreen picture
- why use wmv9 if xvid provides the same or even better quality? ;)

so its always a tradeoff

in your case with a bitrate of 1200kbps i would say that the full res should definitely be used (meaning only cropping, no resizing), but than again i have never been convinced that wmv9 is a good codec so i cant say if it performs any good in that case, xvid should.

quality/sharpness definitely doesnt depend on "multiple of 16, 32...". this is mainly needed for technical reasons with blockbased codecs (like most widely used ones are, eg mpeg-2, mpeg-4 and wmv9) and some graphic cards