Finally going to make the time to author DVD-Rs from the many hours of home videos I have amassed over the years, simply because the very lack of convenience of using tape-based video is all that prevents my family and me from watching old home recordings.

But before I start putting in the time, I want to see where things stand in the codec wars. I watch various DivX and XviD videos all the time, and of course I also watch DVDs and other MPEG2-esque video (such as DirecTV), so I'm very familiar with how they look and what sort of bandwidth they require, if not the nitty gritty specifics. I have also watched one or two WMP9 720p videos, down- (or up-) converted from 1080i broadcasts.

My observations: DivX and other MPEG4 codecs can achieve respectable image quality at about 1.1 megabits/second, when the source is reasonably clean, such as a DVD. This is less than a third of what DVD MPEG2 averages.

The implication is that if a given MPEG4 codec were to utilize the sort of bandwidth a DVD uses, for the same amount of video, then the potential would be there for superior video reproduction over what MPEG2 offers.

This is bound to be inaccurate. I have also observed that MPEG4, for all that it clearly provides more video for less bandwidth, seems to offer inferior image clarity in unidentifiable ways, vs. MPEG2. Granted, most .AVIs I have seen were probably ripped from DVD.

Now we come to the WM9 movies I have seen. Of course, the 720p aspect made them quite remarkable. But there was one very important thing I noticed early on: Superior color depth. What did this mean? Fewer instances of false contouring. The thing I hate most about MPEG2 is its inferior bit depth and the inevitable false contouring which results. Anyone who has ever seen lines crawl across the screen while viewing a fading sunset can sympathize with me. A particularly blunt comparison between WM9's bit depth and that of MPEG2 would be this: One of the 720p encodes was Fifth Element. I also own the Superbit DVD release. There's a scene, fairly early on, when a Mondoshawan ship gets attacked by two warships. In one shot, the two warships head towards the Mondoshawan ship, away from the camera, and we see a shot of their exhaust. On the WM9 encode, the exhaust fades away in a normal manner. On the Superbit DVD (as well as the original release, which I also own), the exhaust fades away like breath mist on a window. Why? Because MPEG2 has execrable bit depth, which translates into very few gradients of grey near black, among other things. WM9 is evidently drastically superior in this regard.

But WM9 is just another MPEG4 codec!

So what's the final verdict? Should I stick with MPEG2 and its false contours and other issues, or would it make sense to go for one of the more recent codecs? Can MPEG4 be better than MPEG2?

(Please note: Whether or not the resulting DVD-R plays on Bob's DVD player is immaterial to me. I already know that it probably won't if it's not MPEG2. That's not the focus of this query.)