x264, XviD, and DivX which is CURRENTLY the best?

Hello,

I've been on a quest for the best way to preserve near DVD quality videos on my PC for many months now. Not being sombody who works in the this field (I am a student in Finance) I have very little knowledge of matrices, B-Frames, and all of the more advanced jargon.

Anyway, I've narrowed the 3 codec that should be used for performing a good quality compression of MPEG2 video (DVD). x264, XviD and DivX. Which one features the BEST quality? and equaly important is whose impelmentation of the format is best? (for example, XviD has been remodeled by celtic, a member here and Koepi another person...)

Equally important are the SPECIFIC settings that you use with each encoder to ensure better quality (like using VHQ level 4 for XviD).

I look forward to hearing from your answers.

steve7777

 

All I really do is compile it. About the only mod I ever did was to include extra profiles for MTK based standalones.

x246 really won't give you any better quality than XviD, however it should be able to achieve it at a smaller filesize. Also, if you plan on using ffdshow for playback then CQM's are a no no for x264 for now. You really need Ateme's latest decoder or to wait until Nero gets updated with it or ffdshow gets updated.

DivX I would say is at the bottom in terms of what quality it can achieve. There is a difference between theoretical quality and the quality that each codec can achieve when contstrained to a given size though.

So if you care about filesize, x264 and AC3/DTS audio in an mkv container. Otherwise go with XviD. AVC also requires more power to decode.

 

cool. thanks for the info once again....

Tell me though, I recently installed ffdshow on my PC and I didn't see any paticular adavantage to having it... it claims that decoding is faster but my P4 3.06GHZ has a hard time doing ANY postprocessing. and the effects like resize and blur-nr are totally out of the question. It just lags, and eventually goes out of sync. Any thoughts?

PS. when I enable deblocking in XviD decoder, similar results arise. Is there something wrong w/ my PC? Any thoughts?

 

What build? ffdshow-20051013.exe. Other builds may be slower. libavcodec is definatly faster at decoding than XviD. Also this post mentioned x264. ffdshow can decode it, XviD can't, so there is definatly a point to ffdshow.

With your CPU, deblocking should be fine unless the resolution is very high.

 

Actually I tried it out with the latest build here on afterdawn (FFDSHOW 2005-10-18). Yeah, the original files are 720x540 (a workaround for acheiving 4:3 aspect ratio) and are encoded at 3750VBR XviD.

As I understand it, postprocessing is good if used in moderation... otherwise, it can dull the picture. I thought it would be nice to use FFDSHOW to scale video up to my sceen resolution (1400x1050) instead of having WindowsMediaPlayer do it (with less quality I presume). I DIDN'T USE BOTH FILTERS AT THE SAME TIME. I did at first, but then I tried one or the other and neither worked without slowing playback to a crawl.

Is it the paticualr build? I do have a laptop but have made sure that power settings don't mess around with the processing power (I leave it at home/office desk).

I'm at a loss. Anyway, looking forward to hearing from you.

steve7777

 

Well I didn't compile that build so I can't really comment.
20051013 was the last build that I released.

 

Ok, so I went and downloaded your offical build from here:

http://ffdshow.faireal.net/

Is this the correct place to go get it? If not, please tell me the correct location, and I'll go get it. (PS. How can I tell whose build I have do I go poke around in "Video Decoder Configuration"?

steve7777

 

The new DivX6 Codec really does the job! Compared DivX6 with Xvid both Nic's and Koepi's versions. DivX6 doesn't have any blocks at all, while Xvid have quite a lot blocks compared to, unfortunately DivX6 tends to make some errors in the movie while Xvid doesn't. It's hard to choose...

 

Nic's build is 1.1beta2, Koepi's build is 1.1beta2. The output from both should be bit identical. The only difference I think is that Koepi's is compiled with ICL7 and Nic's with ICL8 or 9.

How is the detail with the DivX encode? Generally with ASP if an encode has less blocks than another, it also has less detail, it really comes down to personal preference. Also the decoder can make a big difference. The DivX encode could be playing back via DivX's decoder filter with post processing and other enhancements turned on where as the XviD encode could be being played back via XviD's dshow with no pp enabled. Make sure that you use the same decoder for both when comparing.

 

By the way, I installed your version of ffdshow (the latest build you compiled) and with postprocessing at full power there is no lag.

However when I turn on NR and Blur -> with Denoise3d at 0.5, 0.5 and 5, it crashes instantly (when I play a file that is.)


Just thought I'd let you know


steve7777