ExtremeTech Wages War of the Codecs 356
prostoalex writes "ExtremeTech tested Windows Media, DivX, QuickTime/Sorenson and QuickTime/MPEG4 codecs. They encoded clips from Matrix Reloaded, Monsters, Inc., X2 and Spider-Man. QuickTime/Sorenson won the encoding speed contest, for the quality tests read the entire review, as each movie sample was encoded with 500KB and 1MB bitrates. Video samples provided on the site as well, so see for yourself."
But no Xvid? (Score:5, Interesting)
Dont forget ffmpeg (Score:2, Informative)
Doom9's Comparison (Score:5, Informative)
what about ogg? (Score:3, Informative)
All hail ogg!
Re:what about ogg? (Score:3, Informative)
Are you talking about using Ogg Vorbis as the audio codec? Yes, it is very good. I wouldn't use anything else for either my CD rips or DVD rips.
Or are you talking about the bastardisation of the Ogg container format that is the OGM container format? Do some googling. From the mailing list postings I saw, the Ogg guys aren't too happy about this effort by one windows programmer to hack the Avi/VfW information into the Ogg container format. If that's what you're referring to, and using, I recommen
Re:But no Xvid? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:But no Xvid? (Score:5, Insightful)
OH NO!!! The article didn't say that Apple is 100% awesome and they didn't replace the 's' in Microsoft with a dollar sign. That must mean that the article was written by Bill 'Son of Satan' Gates himself!!! Or it could just mean that the videos generated by the Quicktime encoder didn't look as good as the ones generated by the WMV9 and the DivX encoder. Look [extremetech.com] at [extremetech.com] the [extremetech.com] comparisons [extremetech.com] for yourself and realise that in this case the Apple tool was a distant third.
Re:But no Xvid? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:But no Xvid? (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe that's why they didn't review it.
Re:But no Xvid? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:But no Xvid? (Score:4, Interesting)
I do WMV streaming at work- and it works great. Previously, right here, on Slashdot of all places, when I mentioned it, people would tell me over and over that the quality sucked.
So, if they really cared what the slashdot kiddies thought, they would have have done something to skew the results. But this didn't happen.
They did mention that the encoding took far longer for Windows Media, and that is true. (But their hardware was crap for media encoding- a single processor? If you are doing video encoding, you probably have a lot more hardware than that to throw at the problem). But when it comes to ease of hosting, and getting the users to actually view the thing, nothing beats Windows Media 9.
I did try Divx for a while- and after the 9,000th complaint in about 2 days, I finally relented, and put it up in a
Josh and Trish America want the video to play with the click of a link- which generally means Quicktime or Windows Media. I'll stick with Windows Media.
Honestly- very few of the people here on Slashdot want to watch the movies I serve up- but your parents do. Now do you really want to explain to them how to play an Xvid file?
Re:But no Xvid? (Score:4, Insightful)
Really- it's easy. In Server 2003, go to 'Manage Your Server' then do the little 'add functionality' thing, and say 'Yeah...I want streaming'.
Wait a few minutes, and you've got a streaming server that even an idiot Windows admin can manage. Simple, easy, and free.
Re:But no Xvid? (Score:3, Insightful)
I smell... (Score:3, Funny)
These encoding algorithms... (Score:2, Funny)
Episode four in under a meg!
Re:These encoding algorithms... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:These encoding algorithms... (Score:5, Informative)
In case you wanted to watch... (Score:5, Informative)
Hahahahaha (Score:3, Funny)
Yeah, as if there was any chance of THAT happening after you submitted that site to
-Erwos
Bah....... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Bah....... (Score:2)
--
Re:Bah....... (Score:5, Funny)
Close enough to nipple for
Re:Bah....... (Score:5, Informative)
this page [comicscontinuum.com] has quite a shot, though this is the one [moviecritic.ca] people usually think of, with the webslinger getting an upsidedown kiss.
stills vs. motion... (Score:5, Insightful)
It is very difficult for ME to decide between them. I have never actually seen any QT movies up for download as far as real movies go. Most movies are encoded with divx and seem to work just fine.
Do people really care about minor differences in quality when the file sizes are down to 710mb? I know I don't. Blurred motion is just something I deal with when I download something.
Encoding time is important only if you do this regularly. For those of us just watching a movie it doesn't matter. Whatever gives me the smallest file size with a decent picture is what I want to go w/.
Re:stills vs. motion... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:stills vs. motion... (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think this was neglected at all; it clearly influenced the choice in what codecs to test in the first place. The four codecs in this article are the four most popular - wmv comes standard on PC's, QuickTime is Apple's standard and works across all major platforms, Divx is still the non-Linux geek's codec of choice (and it works with WMP) and MPEG-4 is now supported in the latest QuickTime.
The codecs chosen for review, then, are the ones that work with the players used by the greatest number of people. A lot of earlier posters complained about this or that codec not being included here, but they obviously missed this pretty critical point of the article. It doesn't matter to me, as someone working for a commercial enterprise that has to encode videos for our customers, whether Xvid or whatever offers slightly fewer artifacts. Because the fact is my customers probably don't have that codec and aren't going to bother downloading it just for me. Even Divx is probably barely at the saturation point where it's worth covering in an article like this, but for certain purposes and for a certain audience (PC gamers, for example), it's worth considering.
As others have pointed out, there are articles out there dealing with the lesser-used codecs if you just want to know who the absolute quality winner is. But in the real world and unless you're encoding video only for yourself, whatever codec wins in absolute quality is basically irrelevant. What matters is which codec offers the best quality among those in widest general use, and I thought this was a decent article on that basis (though in all honesty simply seeing the examples is probably good enough - I don't need an explanation of how blocky MPEG-4 is in an image, I can see it myself).
And it seems to me that what this article is saying is that if you want to use a cross-platform codec that everybody probably has (even on Linux), use plain old QuickTime. If you want to encode for the geek crowd, use Divx. If you want the best quality overall and you don't care about excluding a small percentage of the audience, use WM9. Whatever you do, avoid MPEG-4. Simple, and helpful to any professional whose job includes either encoding or contracting out encoding of videos for customers.
Re:stills vs. motion... (Score:5, Informative)
The article can really give people the wrong idea - it's not the MPEG4 codec, but maybe Apple's implementation that's to blame. Perhaps it just doesn't support all of MPEG4's features. Then again, perhaps the people doing the review just didn't know how to set up the encoder properly. Regardless of codec, there's quite an art to good encoding.
Re:stills vs. motion... (Score:3, Insightful)
The actual encoder that is used and the parameters used for encoding are of at least as much importance.
Then, there is a whole lot of compromises to be made. I am not too familiar with sorenson and wmv9 but for mpeg video you have a lot of things you can tune on the encoder side (for all mpeg versions, tho the actual tunables differ). At any given resolution and average bitrate, you still have a choice to use more I frames,
Quicktime != codec (Score:4, Informative)
This misunderstanding doesn't invalidate your argument, although I would disagree with you about MPEG-4. I've gotten good results with it, sometimes even great results.
Of course people care (Score:5, Insightful)
I like having all my movies and music and shows just a mouse click away. No fondling media, no DVD drives whooshing and movies stuttering halfway throgh because some tiny piece of schmutz got on the precious disc. In order to do this, I don't care at all what 500kbs or 1mbps files look like - The Twins effect [lovehkfilm.com] alone occupies about 2GB on one of my drives, and I still haven't been able to produce a rip of Natural City [hkflix.com] that satisfies me even when the last one I tried was nearly 4GB (lots of film grain in that one and I don't care to lose it).
Yes... many of us care about quality. In fact, this is the very reason I rip DVDs - so the programs I enjoy play (more smoothly) from my hard drive.
Re:stills vs. motion... (Score:3, Insightful)
It's also important if you wish to capture video and encode it in real time, a la software based TiVo.
Don't underestimate that aspect of encoding.
I don't care. (Score:4, Insightful)
Get mplayer [mplayerhq.hu]
me neither (Score:3, Interesting)
http://xinehq.de/ [xinehq.de]
Damn Codecs! (Score:5, Funny)
No XVid? (Score:4, Informative)
Well it might be licensing (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:No XVid? (Score:5, Funny)
Now that's clever.
Or does it stand for something like:
X Vid Isn't Divx
Re:No XVid? (Score:5, Informative)
The opposite is true (Score:5, Insightful)
If you always encode to 650MB or 1300MB/Movie, then yes.
But if you want to use disk space efficiently, you get too big file sizes for easily encoded movies and too bad quality for hard encoded movies.
IMO, nothing beats quality based encoding, ie. you specify a quality setting and the movie will have whatever size is needed for that quality.
As soon as the CD dies as the major storage for movies (being replaced either by hard-disk or DVD), we will hopefully see more focus on quality-based encoding and less on bitrate-based, because it's pointless.
Re:The opposite is true (Score:3, Informative)
Bitrate limited is great if you care about file size or bitrate more than quality.
Each has its place. Real-time streaming obviously has a hard requirement for the latter.
Made on a Mac? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Made on a Mac? (Score:3, Insightful)
Becauses it's a Mac of course! (Score:5, Insightful)
In all seriousness it comes form the fact that many Mac users toss around apple marketing terms (like Velocity Engine) without understanding what they mean (it's a floating point vector math unit, like 3dnow or SSE2). They just assume it makes things better since that's what the hype claims.
Re:Becauses it's a Mac of course! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Made on a Mac? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Made on a Mac? (Score:3, Informative)
There are simply too many video codecs out there for us to test them all -- and most of them wouldn't be useful anyway. We focused on four codecs, all of which are free and can be used with free tools. (Or very cheap ones - QuickTime requires a $30 Pro registration for full encoding capabilities.) You don't want to pay $500 for a professional video authoring program just to send grandma a video of baby's first steps, so we stuck with these four very popular codecs...
The article is te
Quality versus Speed (Score:5, Insightful)
Think about it, how many times are you going to encode a movie? How many times are you going to watch it? Typically, you are going to encode once and probably watch it multiple times. Therefore, I would happily accept a little longer processing time in the beginning if that means I will end up with a better quality production.
Re:Quality versus Speed (Score:3, Insightful)
-B
Re:Quality versus Speed (Score:4, Insightful)
doom9.net (Score:2, Informative)
Not the best evidence. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not the best evidence. (Score:5, Insightful)
If I considered that as their worst methodological flaw, I'd tend to agree with you completely.
However, for those who haven't bothered to read the article, two points (well, more than two, but as examples...) stuck out as completely invalidating their results:
and...
Anyone else spot the problem, here?
First of all, starting with lossy source material automatically injects artifacts into the video. A codec that looks for similar ways to trim bits as the original (MPEG2), ie, MPEG4, will natually have a distinct advantage in having fewer artifacts in the final result. Not that I can think of any means by which they could have obtained high-quality "raw" video, but any valid test of an encoder's capabilities would require them to do so.
And, as if that didn't introduce enough bias, they then reencoded in Indeo 5 format, before using each "real" codec under consideration. Again, that injects its own artifacts, and favors codecs that look for similar ways to trim bits. But, all four of the codecs tested can deal with MPEG2 as source material, so even the "to make it fair" argument falls flat here.
Overall, this so-called "comparison" has zero external validity, in the strict experimental sense. They managed to waste a few hours of CPU time, nothing more.
At the very least (if they couldn't get ahold of raw HQ video), going straight from MPEG2 would have given a meaningful comparison of "how it will look ripped from a DVD". But by the Indeo pass, they removed even that as a possible claim.
Re:Not the best evidence. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Not the best evidence. (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, considering that WMV9 supposedly uses the MPEG4 AVC (while the rest use the ASP), I would say that by more-or-less tying with DivX, MS lost, big-time. It took twice as long (damned good, for an AVC implementation) to produce comparable results (damned bad, for an AVC implementation). I had seriously expected WMV9 to utterly crush the competition in this test, before reading the article, yet it did not.
This m
Re:Not the best evidence. (Score:5, Informative)
Well, if you want a somewhat technical explanation, I would recommend reading This [fastvdo.com] (warning, PDF). Very well written, with enough technical details to satisfy the casually interested geek, while readible enough for non-geeks to get the general idea.
For just the quick-and-dirty... The MPEG4 AVC (aka MPEG4 part 10, aka H.26L aka H.264.10) includes quite a few new techniques at every step of the encoding, from preprocessing to interframe prediction to new frame types to new residual handling methods. These make encoding a lot more CPU intensive, but produce considerably better results (Oddly, most sources claim only 40-50% better than MPEG2, which I find absurd, since even ASP encoders manages to do better than that).
It may help some people to better appreciate the difference by seeing some side-by-side comparisons (not exactly the best possible test conditions, but they make their point)... Balooga [balooga.com] has a brief overview of the MPEG4 AVC vs the ASP and even MPEG2 available... Check out the screen shots, in particular.
Interstingly, on the topic of nomenclature, I think it would make people far less confused if we all called it H.264.10, rather than MPEG4 AVC. Up to and including what we normally think of as MPEG4 (the MPEG4-2 ASP), all the MPEG versions remained backward compatible. An MPEG1 stream counts as a valid MPEG2 stream, and an MPEG2 stream counts as a valid MPEG4-2 ASP stream. The AVC standard, however, departed from that backward compatibility. Not necessarily a bad idea, but by not picking a new name, everyone seem rather confused about exactly which names refer to which standards (similar to USB2, but worse, because each version has several sub-versions).
Re:Not the best evidence. (Score:5, Funny)
Because 5 minutes after being reported on Slashdot, they'd all have been replaced with "This site has exceeded its download limit for the next 5 years. Please come back in 2009."
QTPro doesn't have the best encoders (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, QuickTime's MPEG-4 encoder is not the best MPEG-4 encoder out there. But there are better ones available, and of course MPEG-4 being a standard, the output of those other tools will be playable in QT Player.
So to make the comparison valid, both in terms of encoding speed an quality, some other tool should've been used.
Re:QTPro doesn't have the best encoders (Score:3, Informative)
Hell there *are* free MPEG-4 encoders that are better than Apple's encoder, e.g. ffmpeg.
Re:QTPro doesn't have the best encoders (Score:3, Insightful)
Thanks, I think? (Score:4, Insightful)
I for one, will continue to obey my DivX Masters, they have always been good to me. It seems that the author had a hard-on for QuickTime and M$, both of which annoy the ever living crap out of me... QuickTime, with it's little icon in the toolbar that just won't go away, and Microsoft because I just can't trust them to not tell MPAA which movies I have on my HDD.
$0.02 Flamebaiting, Trolling response concluded.
(and my Karma just got back to Neutral, dang it)
Re:Thanks, I think? (Score:2)
Come on! (Score:5, Funny)
Come on! Are we now suddenly supposed to actually read those frickin' articles? Just tell me who won. This is the internet and my attention span ... wait, what's that shiny thing? ...
Xvid rules the scene (Score:4, Interesting)
Stupid test (Score:4, Insightful)
And the samples are all live action.. Test encoding some hand drawn animation (ie; an old bugs bunny), a computer generated animation, a anime style animation, a dialogue type scene, a live action scene with a lot of action, black and white vs color, etc, etc.
The types of images on screen greatly affect the performance of different algorithms.
Plus, each codec has about a million tweaks and optimizations for different types of footage.
I doubt highly that there's one clear "winner". It's really not that simple.
Which is why I hate sites like ExtremeTech that always have to boil it down to "this product is the best, the rest suck!".
Like the ATI vs nVidia flamewars. ATI may benchmark faster, yet nVidia has effects in games ATI lacks. There is no clear "this one is the best". Or Intel vs AMD or Linux vs Windows, etc, etc..
Nothing in the realm of computer science is that simple.
Re:Stupid test (Score:3, Insightful)
Personally, I gave up gloating about my superior hardware when 3dFX fell apart. I looked at my very nice 16 meg TNT2 graphics card and said to myself, "You know? Without the Voodoo2, this card would never have been made. The TNT1 was sped up to take market share from the Voodoo1. The GPU was invented to stave off ATI and PowerVR. Competition resulted in me getting a better product faster."
So you know what? I don't
Re:Stupid test (Score:3, Funny)
What, you mean Mike Wasowski is real? I knew it!
Fair and yet unfair comparison (Score:5, Insightful)
What would be interesting is taking the original raw film footage (that hasn't been digitally compressed with a lossy method) and encoding, then comparing the results.
Re:Fair and yet unfair comparison (Score:3, Interesting)
On2 VP4 (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:On2 VP4 (Score:2)
And VP6! (Score:3, Informative)
VP3 was the one that was open-souces, and is used as the basis of Ogg Theora.
The current On2 codec is VP6, which is free for personal use.
What really matters. (Score:4, Interesting)
What were they thinking? (Score:5, Insightful)
While they might not have want to try to argue fair use through education or reviewing, they could have found at least one clip they could distribute. Hell, rent a high end digital camera and make one. Tape traffic on a highway, both daytime and nighttime, and you've got a motion video test, or a fountain, or anything.
What? (Score:2)
No VBR in tests? (Score:2)
Th
Give it some time (Score:4, Interesting)
Regardless, Apple has been one of the biggest supporters of MPEG-4, and I thank them for that.
Re:Give it some time (Score:3, Informative)
Most MPEG-4 professionals would use something like Squeeze or Compression Master instead to make a
Doom9's Comparison (Score:4, Informative)
And yes, Doom9's comparison includes XViD.
Sorry (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sorry, but some hand-waving, subjective "Hey, this thing kinda looks better than that thing" is not a test. Calling it a "War of the Codecs" is even more ridiculous.
Indeo? What the fuck? (Score:5, Informative)
STUPID! YOU'RE SO STUPID!!!
I call shenanigans (Score:5, Interesting)
Very Strange Results -- Artifact of Methodology? (Score:3, Interesting)
What's particularly suspicious is that Apple's MPEG-4 came out so poorly, though WMV9, and DivX are nothing more than early MPEG-4 codecs. Sorensen3 is the only substantially different algorithm used. And why use MPEG-4? It was originally designed for low-resolution low-bitrate applications (PDAs, cell-phones, etc.)
Why so slow? I do most of my video transcoding under Linux, but they aren't getting much better throughput than I do, and their machine's at least 4 times as fast as mine? I suppose it's got to do with using Indeo (my source is DV), so there's an extra decode step, but it's still quite slow.
I've distributed a number of my own videos in the MPEG-4 format, and don't see the sort of horrible results they demonstrated in their examples -- but then again, perhaps I do preprocessing (quantization, denoising, etc.) that they don't include in their process.
Regardless, my personal experience is that at high or low bitrates, most of the codecs are interchangable. Perhaps you need to fiddle with the encoding parameters, but you can almost always get results close enough to identical as not to matter. It becomes more difficult with mid-range bitrates (2-3Mbps@720x480x29.97) that some codecs show strengths over the others. In that department, I almost always go with MPEG-2 with custom quantization matrices...
Taxonomy of MPEG-4 (Score:3, Informative)
QuickTime encodes and decodes Simple Profile MPEG-4
DivX did Simple in V4, and V5 added support for Advanced Simple.
Most of this will be moot soon, since the MPEG-4 Part 10/AVC/H.264 codec is way better than the old Simple or Advanced Simple, and will rapidly replace the old versions in the next couple of years.
Limited value (Score:5, Interesting)
All fail miserably at making good encoding easy (Score:5, Interesting)
Clear Winner (Score:5, Funny)
They should have use the scene every /.er knows... (Score:3, Funny)
Kirsten Dunst's wet t-shirt scene.
No "fair-use" or editing comparisons are missing! (Score:4, Insightful)
For example - I don't see anywhere where it points out that Quicktime and Divx are by far the most DRM-less codecs out there. WMP9 can stick you up the ass if you're not careful. Plus, there are plenty of times that WMP9 will refuse to operate properly with multi=monitor setups (my friend's brand new ThinkPad, for example, refuses to play over the external VGA port....)
i also don't see any mention of the ability to cut/copy/paste with the built-in default players as a comparison tool. How many times have you wanted just a sliver of a movie to playback - ro to have the ability to quickly convert it to DV to put onto a workflow with some other editing? Even the average goofball making iMovies wants to do that all the time - but is 100% prevented from doing that with WMP9
While the quality of QT is obviously lacking - i'll use it EVERY DAY OF THE WEEK because its far more powerful for everyday use, and much more free of DRM issues.
this would explain, of course - Hollywood's facination with it - its got great quality while sacrificing little things... like fair use.
Re:No "fair-use" or editing comparisons are missin (Score:3, Informative)
The codec itself is neutral from any copy protection mechanism, or you just like to yell "DRM" for some cheap mod points.
What the? (Score:3, Funny)
Pros: decent image quality
Cons: Horrible image quality
Terrible, useless article (Score:5, Informative)
Some fundamental errors:
They're using MPEG-2 sources, which are already highly compressed (this has been amply covered by other posters).
They talk about converting to an "uncompressed" AVI, but never specify which flavor of uncompressed. They should have used a lossless codec that uses the native Y'CbCr color space of video, like Huffyuv. They way they just said "uncompressed" suggests they used the AVI "None" codec, which is uncompressed RGB. This causes two lossly color space conversions - one from the Y'CbCr of the source to RGB, and then back to Y'CbCr in the delivery codec.
They used Indeo 5.1 as their intermediate codec. This is terrible. Indeo uses what's called YUV-9 sampling. There is only one measurement of color per 4x4 block of pixels. This throws away 75% of the color information from the DVD (which uses 4:2:0 sampling, with 2x2 blocks), before it even touches a codec. And this results in very ugly blocks whenever there are highly saturated regions with sharp contrast. So, all the output is going to look highly compressed when rendered from these intermediates, even if further compression is lossless. Look at the Spider Man test frame for an example. Notice the red blooming around the shoulders of the vocalist. And the color everywhere is very muddled. Indeo can also be slow to decode, unless it was encoded with all keyframes. And how slow it is to decode will vary with the tool, which probably added measurable error to their encoding time measurements.
They don't know the difference between Sorenson Video 3, which comes free with QuickTime, and Sorenson Video 3.3 Professional, which you have to pay for and is what Apple uses for their movie trailers. With the Pro version, critical features like B-frames and 2-pass VBR are available.
Apple's MPEG-4 encoder isn't very good - 1-pass only, tuned for speed more than quality. A file with the exact same compatibility could be made with Squeeze, Compression Master, Envivio, etcetera with MUCH better quality. And the Divx MPEG-4 codec is, of course, also MPEG-4.
They didn't use 2-pass encoding! No quality-concious encoder would ever put content on spinning disc without using 2-pass. And they didn't mention most of the other encoding settings they used, which by context I'd guess were basic defaults.
That's from an initial skim. If I spent more time with the article.
In summary, these guys spent hours and hours analyzing the results of tests, where they would have been WAY better off spending an hour asking someone who knew anything about video compression how to administer this kind of test.
Oddly enough, their results are vaguely like you'd expect - WMV9 and DivX do well, Sorenson less so, and Apple MPEG-4 at the rear. Done properly, I imagine WMV9 would have had a slight lead, and Sorenson 3 Pro would have been a lot closer to DivX. And no one uses Apple's MPEG-4 codec for content distribution. QuickTime's decoder is fine, so folks would use a professional-grade MPEG-4 encoder instead.
Re:I love Slashdot! (Score:4, Informative)
Moderators, wake up!
If you do check the site you will see that Windows Media didn't win - it was a toss up.
Re:I love Slashdot! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I wonder what people are going to say about WMP (Score:2)
People wont say a word about WMP9 but they will question where XviD was in these tests...
Jonty! Neil! Work!!
not realistic (Score:5, Insightful)
I played with a lot of different codecs, including MPEG4-like mutants such as DivX, XviD, ffmpeg, etc. If i limit myself just at comparing DivX and Xvid, then:
- XviD is slightly faster than DivX, all else being equal
- XviD has slightly better quality than DivX, all else being equal, but it's an extremely close call (and sometimes the opposite is true)
So, in the Extremetech benchmark, if you replace DivX with XviD, it would fare slightly better overall. But definitely nothing as ridiculous as "owning the competition".
Facts please, not emotional knee-jerk reactions. Thank you.
Re:Terrible reporting - used wrong programs to enc (Score:3, Interesting)
Several codecs may be used to produce a single movie trailer, with different codecs being employed where their relative strengths are required: low motion versus action versus bright scenes versus dark scenes.
These guys are WAY more sophisticated in their technique than any home user will ever be.
Lesson: Admire Apple's movie trailers but don't think
Reality (Score:3, Insightful)
What you suggest would be like a round up of office suites that tested Open Office, WordPerfect, Star Office and KDE Office but, didn't include Microsoft Office. You can't do that and expect to taken seriously.
On the other hand, their result was that WMV9 was the overall winner. My testing is based on what is most
Re:What's up with MPEG4? (Score:4, Informative)
3ivx, Xvid and divx all postprocess, not unreasonably. The Apple codec makes itself look bad for no good reason.
Re:What's up with MPEG4? (Score:3, Interesting)
I've never seen it used in practice. The 3ivx [3ivx.com] codec, for example, adjusts it's post processing according to the available CPU which seems more sensible.
Re:What's up with MPEG4? (Score:5, Interesting)
Referring about Sorenson, keep in mind this is the FREE codec that comes with Quicktime Pro. Professionals use a several hundred dollar 'Developers Edition' with Cleaner (two pass VBR encoding, which makes Sorenson rock). I know this is a for-user comparison, but in the professional scene, Sorenson can be even better then third/second place in quality.