DivX vs. XviD - Speed Wise

[Torrential]

Hello all,

As my knowledge in video capturing progressed, I was forced to choose a codec for my video captures. I have compared XviD 1.3 and DivX 5.2.1 but every time I get mixed results (I will not use any other codec). I was wondering about your experiences with these codecs, which have you seen to be faster?

[thor300]

Came across this at Anandtech today: http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2388&p=9
Looks like DivX is quite a bit faster, also for old fashioned single core cpus.

[junkmalle]

Came across this at Anandtech today: http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2388&p=9
Looks like DivX is quite a bit faster, also for old fashioned single core cpus.

There are no indication of what settings were used so you can't really draw any conclusions about the relative speeds of the codecs.

In my experience the two codecs are similar in speed, depending on what settings you use. For example, you can reduce the motion precision settings in Xvid to make it much faster than Divx. Or you can specify very high motion precision and make it much slower.

[Nelson37]

Just to be a smartass, both will capture and playback at the same speed.

I think your real question is "which is more CPU intensive?".

The question I consider far more important is "which yields better video quality?". The only comparisons I have done are on videos encoded by others, so this is not a scientific comparison. However, the Xvids have been of significantly higher quality, almost universally.

It may very well be that it depends on the settings used, also that those which yield better video quality are more cpu intensive. I would bet money that you could set up either one to use less processor time than the other, thus the question becomes "How much quality are you willing to sacrifice in return for encoder efficiency?"

Other questions also arise, such as future support and upgrades, the almost certain upcoming hardware support for WMV makes it a significant contender; why are you limiting yourself to Divx and Xvid?

[celtic_druid]

Well in terms of capturing generally rather than sacrifice quality you would sacfice filesize. So use a high constant quant, decent matrix, lower MSP, disable trellis, qpel, VHQ, etc.