witch is better, DivX or XVid...?

[roise_r]

hi, i have a big project a head of me, that i plan to accomplish offhandly, and i want to get over with. I want to get all my movies in my harddrive to DVD-s in .avi format, couse there is not a single MB free now. the thing is that i want also to be able to read tha .avi's from my DVD player which can't play bigger resolutions then 720x560, and most of my movies are 800x336, so i need to re-encode, which is better Divx 6.1 or Xvid 1.1.0, i use to encode PocketDivXEncoder which despite of its name will convert to Xvid also. i am asking this couse it seems there is a problem with xvid sometimes, when played on dvd->TV, sometimes in motion moments of the movie, some areas will appear in small pink or green boxes, and will dissappear after 1 to 2 sec. its very rear, maybe 3-4 times during the entire movie, but it is anoying...and i have encounter this issue in other forums too. I have seen other threads where divx and xvid are compared but the test is very old, before Xvid even came out with their 1.0 version, thats why i asked anyway.

10x

[guns1inger]

Those squares are encoding errors. They might be from the encode itself, or because the original had corruption in it (and don't say it doesn't simply because you can play it back - doesn't mean anything).

Aside from that, there really isn't a great deal of difference. Both are mpeg4 based, both are lossy, both require more effort than they are worth to get good results (by that I mean as good as the DVD original).

You could always keep them as is and just play from on the PC when you want to. No extra conversion necessary then.

[jagabo]

I recently compared the two with some test videos. Xvid has a slightly sharper picture (could be the MPEG matrix option). Divx is faster at it's lower quality settings (Fastest, High Performance), Xvid faster at the higher quality settings. (These tests were run on a dual core processor system. Single core systems may vary since only Divx is multithreaded.)

I usually don't care exactly how big the files turn out. So I almost always encode in single pass, constant quality mode. I never use B-VOP's because they are encoded at lower quality. Most of my test were run with a target quantizer value of 2. At that setting Xvid created smaller files -- by about 20 percent. Both had similar amounts of macroblocks (almost none) and, as noted earlier, Xvid had a slightly sharper picture.

A quantizer of 2 will give results almost identical to the source. But the bitrate may turn out too high for some Divx DVD players. At 3 there will be some macroblocking but it won't be visible at normal playback speeds.

Divx test encode:
Fastest: 71 sec, 172 MB
HighPerf: 76 sec, 165 MB
Balanced: 82 sec, 163 MB
Better: 205 sec, 160 MB
Extreme: 250 sec, 160 MB
Insane: 400 sec, 159 MB

Xvid test encode (Motion Search Precision/VHQ mode):
High/Off: 86 sec, 131 MB
VeryHigh/Off: 93 sec, 128 MB
UltraHigh/Off: 103 sec, 127 MB
UltraHigh/ModeDecision: 172 sec, 126 MB
UltraHigh/WideSearch: 338 sec, 125 MB

I didn't test lower motion search precisions in those tests but from prior experience I know they won't encode much faster (maybe a second or two faster) and file sizes will get larger. So there's no point in using them.

[mats.hogberg]

See the Doom9 codec shootout

/Mats

[celtic_druid]

XviD is multithreaded to if you run the patched 1.2dev build.

[jagabo]

XviD is multithreaded to if you run the patched 1.2dev build.

Is it stable enough for daily use? I'll try it out.

1.2 alpha crashed with a divide by zero error as soon as I started encoding. Tried several different settings, VirtualDubMPEG2, VirtualDubMod, etc. Had to go back to 1.1 release.