How good is DivX quality?

[Michelle]

I've never seen a DivX video. I read in PC Mag where Dvorak says that a DVD re-encoded to a 700MB DivX file has no degradation in quality. I know that Dvorak likes to be outrageous so I'm wondering how close he is on this one. The new DVD players with DivX capability would be really hot if this were true.

[ZippyP.]

Well, quality is in the eye of the beholder. I find that Divx is generally about 1/2 the size of a similar quality mpeg. Being that a single layer DVD is 4.3 GB you can do the math. A 700 MB divx movie would probably be somewhere between VCD and SVCD quality.

[Innershield]

A 700 MB DivX movie can be between VCD and SVCD, but one properly done is indistinguishable from a DVD. I have several DivX that are DVD quality even on a computer screen.

[Nelson37]

I like Dvorak, but no degradation in quality my ass. A 1.6 MB XVID might get very close, or maybe for a 70-minute movie. DVD's can vary significantly in playtime, so his unqualified statement (I read the article) really makes no sense.

I have looked into about 2 dozen Divx vids, most were fairly crappy, far worse than real-time MPEG-2 cable captures, with maybe 2 about the same quality. And one of those was an XVID.

Asking the question "how good is Divx" is kinda like asking "how good is homemade beer?". It depends on who made it, and possibly also how much they had been drinking that day.

[ZippyP.]

A 700 MB DivX movie can be between VCD and SVCD, but one properly done is indistinguishable from a DVD. I have several DivX that are DVD quality even on a computer screen.

Depends on the length of the movie and the amount of action I suppose.

[g_shocker182]

I love DivX, it's great for putting videos on the net.

Try a Dr. DivX trial, see how things work out for you.

[Craig Tucker]

When encoding takes place there will be degredation in quality, whether this is distinguisable by the human eye is another matter.

Depending on how it is encoded and the bitrate allocated, divx can be of superb quality or absolute garbage.

[ZippyP.]

Depending on how it is encoded and the bitrate allocated, divx can be of superb quality or absolute garbage.

But how would you classify a 700 MB divx full length movie, quality wise?

[Conquest10]

i've seen some 700mb xvid files that are pretty great. though the movie was around 80 minutes and it was shrunken down. a 2 hour movie with a resolution of 720x480 will not look that good at 700mb. 1.4 gigs will look good, though.

[Skynet107]

Let's put it this way, a 700 meg Xvid file of say 90 minutes will be the best looking compressed video of the same size. It depends what you play it back on. If you use a 17" monitor it can look very nice. If you play it back on a 60" projection TV it will reveal the limitations of the low bitrate codec. Xvid to DVD conversions I have done turn out surprisingly good, the best ones I did came out to around 90% of the original quality. It is the extra 10% though that makes it go from looking good to being the reference standard.