XVID vs H264 on Youtube

[wrathi]

Hey all, today I made couple test videos of Quake Live encoded with XVID 5.5k bitrate/advanced simple @ L5 and 5.5k bitrate high profile for H264. Both videos use variable bit rate/multipass. They were recorded with 1280x720 resolution and 30 FPS.

I was surprised that you get a better result with XVID. Here are the videos recorded:

XVID:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6upt51liD3c

H264:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yOvI1iHISw

Screenshot comparison of the same image:

XVID

http://img266.imageshack.us/i/youtubexvid.jpg/

H264

http://img141.imageshack.us/i/youtubeh264.jpg/

As you can see XVID image is sharper. You can clearly see more rocks on the roof and wall tiles behind the teleport on the XVID image.

I also had serious problems when I recorded Warcraft 2 640x480 videos with H264. Original encoded file was very good but when I uploaded to Youtube all the fonts and the image itself became messy. However with XVID they were sharp as knife.

So is Youtube's H264 encoding crap or what?

[hech54]

Nobody cares because this is video game crap.

[intracube]

As you can see XVID image is sharper. You can clearly see more rocks on the roof and wall tiles behind the teleport on the XVID image.

Could you upload the original Xvid/h264 files to a site like megaupload.com?

I'd be interested to see if there's any differences in the originals.

[wrathi]

PROBLEM SOLVED!

I think the main problem was that I used x264vfw codec and the settings weren't really up to date with it. Now that I've encoded new gaming videos with x264 codec and proper settings the image quality is really sharp as can be seen here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ARMbafwd5U&hd=1