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Comparing Codecs for 2004

Posted by michael on from the CGA-is-all-anyone-should-ever-need dept.

MunchMunch writes "Popular encoding/guide/news site doom9.org has just put up its codec shoot-out for 2004, comparing 3ivx 5.0, Divx Fusion 5.9 (prerelease 6.0), Nero Digital Main Profile and High Profile, RealVideo 10, On2 VP6, VideoSoft's VSS, Xvid 1.0, MS's WMV9 and, last, newcomer Jomingo's HDX4. The comparison covers the speed, accuracy, target-file-size-adherence and other aspects of the codecs -- but also lets you compare yourself via high- and low-bandwidth framegrabs of each codec with a nice zoomable image-swap script."

9 of 233 comments (clear)

  1. Progress by bigberk · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Overall, the progress is just astounding. When I compare clips of say movies from 3 years ago to ones you can find now, the file sizes have remained the same but the quality of both video and audio have gone way up. I don't know much about video codecs but I do recall back then there still being MPEG 4 in the game, so maybe it's more about modern tweaks?

    1. Re:Progress by bigberk · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Also makes one snicker... I recall content producers saying that selling high quality television/video streaming over the Internet is not feasible (the amount of data that has to be shipped). Well, they were wrong it seems... instead of putting all that money in lawyers' pockets, they could have helped develop technologies to produce new revenue streams. As is, they sat idly by while others made the technologies that will probably obsolete TV/movie content producers.

    2. Re:Progress by lavaface · · Score: 4, Insightful
      they sat idly by while others made the technologies that will probably obsolete TV/movie content producers

      It's just a small point, but I think it's the distributors who are in for a rude awakening. The producers of content will continue to thrive.

      --
      harmonious design
  2. Time to move on? by zmollusc · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Erm, this may only apply to old codgers with failing faculties like myself, but I think that a level of acceptability has been reached.
    Just as mp3(and similar) is good enough to listen to and jpg, bmp and gif are good enough for the various static images needs, divx(xvid) and mpeg2 fill the processing requirements for moving images.
    With the cost of storage falling there is less need to build a higher compression video codec. If you want to do some good, come up with faster and higher quality ways to transcode things to an existing open codec standard.

    --
    They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
    1. Re:Time to move on? by HFShadow · · Score: 5, Insightful

      No, they don't meet the processing requirements. "Just as mp3(and similar) is good enough to listen" - Mp3 files are small enough that even when encoded at a high bitrate, you can download a file reasonably fast. Audio quality is also alot more subjective to the listener then video is. Anyone can take a video and pause it and point out all the things that don't look quite right, something that can't be done with an MP3. Also since you know what a video is "supposed" to look like, you notice the errors more. Those stairs aren't blurry in real life, why are they in the movie? Same for faces, rain and other objects. Video codec's will always be worked on and updated, as higher quality video is demanded, sizes get larger and larger and more unworkable. When you have a large HDTV, do you really want to watch a divx video with blocky motion artifacts?

    2. Re:Time to move on? by liangzai · · Score: 5, Insightful

      What you are saying is that 640 kB should be enough for everyone, or that since we have Microsoft Word we have reached a level of acceptability...

      This is not so, since new codecs do so much more than conserve bandwidth (which is in itself a good purpose, considering the Slashdot effect and other congestions that will always occur on tah intarweb). Some of them DO have better quality per se than MPEG-2, and some of them DO scale enormously much better. MPEG-4 was developed for these and other reasons, and there is a tremendous need for such a codec, not least from a wireless perspecive.

      Furthermore, it would be desirable to have a codec that can handle as many things as possible, rather than relying on a bunch of different codecs for different purposes.

      Finally, I believe in standards rather than proprietary formats and codecs. DivX is fine, but it is a bastardized version of MPEG-4, and there are also many different implementations. Most of them generate errors in VLC, whereas I have yet to see a failing MPEG-4 video.

      There are also the aspects of cross platform implementation (forget WMV9), simplicity, scalability and ingenuity in the architecture (why Quicktime was chosen as the MPEG-4 file architecture), and industry support (everyone but Redmond City supports MPEG-4). There.

  3. Re:Theora? by Bulln-Bulln · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Argh, I don't like to reply to myself, but check out the first page:
    "I've re-included Microsoft's WMV9 (...)"
    This means that WMV9 was dropped in the past, too.

    It contimiues: "(...) especially since it is part of the specification of HD DVD and Blu-ray. There have been some improvements in WMV9 (...)"

    So this means that Theora is not dropped forever. When Theora hits a significant milestone (1.0?) and shows improvements in quality over VP3, it's likely to be tested again.

  4. Re:H.264 by michaeldot · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Thank you for today's example of Apple fanboy hating curmudgeonliness.

    Fanboy or not, he gave useful information: H.264 does indeed have more industry credibility than the list of toy codecs who main use is to swap pirated TV shows on the eDonkey network.

    And the fact that you've started to get modded up informative is what gives Slashdot a bad taste in the mouth.

    Seriously, this place is looking more like comp.sys.advocacy.* every day...

  5. Theora is a victim of xiph's own anti-marketing by rseuhs · · Score: 3, Insightful
    The sad truth is that as long as xiph is dominated by stubborn, arrogant technocrats, it will have a pretty hard time.

    Ogg-Vorbis is the best audio-codec technically - but everybody calls it "ogg" and not "ogg-vorbis" because the file extension is .ogg

    Effectively, xiph does everything possible to sabotage their own product: It doesn't have a good sounding name, it doesn't have a consistent name ("ogg" versus "ogg-vorbis"), they don't have any buttons/banners to put on products on xiph.org and there is lots of confusion about container format (ogg) and codec (vorbis), which is the "U"-part from FUD.

    The only reason anybody uses ogg at all is because it is excellent technically and beats all other audio codecs by a longshot.

    Unfortunately, the guys at xiph don't acknowledge that fact and insist of wanting to have videos with .ogg extension, too, which is doomed to fail because nobody wants to have audio and video to have the same file extension.

    The users have created a pseudo standard file extension of .ogm for XVid/Vorbis streams which does quite well in the P2P-networks (= successful), but Ogg/Theora has the problem that it isn't as mature and even when they mature probably won't be *that* much better than the others. So even if the xiph guys manage to put out a competitive Theora codec, their own confusion and uncertainity (especially their stubborn and idiotic decision to have .ogg for both audio and video) will sabotage any hopes of success, the way I see it.

    Which is really unfortunate.

    Things would be much better if they would use .ogt or something for ogg/Theora, but the guys at xiph just refuse to :-(