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Comparing Codecs for 2004
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."
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?
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?
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...
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.