XviD vs. DivX...

[takearushfan]

Hi all,
I'm just curious, what are your preferences when it comes to encoding video and why?
I prefer the quality of XviD, but it doesn't seem to have the ability to choose what resolution you want. Also, I don't think you can tell it to remove scan lines.
So, what's the general consensus (sp?) here?
Thanks,
Justin

[jagabo]

Yes, Divx includes some scaling, noise reduction, and deinterlacing options in their encoder. Xvid does not. Divx is faster than Xvid at similar settings. But Xvid is slightly higher quality and gives you finer control. Pick whichever suits you.

I do almost all my Divx/Xvid encoding with AviSynth and VirtualDub and do any filtering there. I use Xvid most of the time.

[takearushfan]

Thanks... and deinterlacing is what I meant. When I said scan lines I guess I had arcade games on the brain

[jman98]

That's not really a good question to ask. Divx vs. Xvid is almost a religious thing with some people. jagabo's response is pretty thoughtful. Most Xvid supporters are not like that. My personal feeling, and that of a few people here, is that the current commercial Divx codec is as good as Xvid. However, there are a lot of Xvid zealots out there, some of whom may yet post followups. who will tell you how Xvid is a bazillion times better than Divx, yada yada yada. I've seen both and I don't see that much difference. Either are fine. It's just not that big a deal to me which people prefer, but I do think it's incorrect for some of the Xvid supporters to say that "Divx sucks" when they haven't actually used the commercial codec in years and they are basing this on the version 4 codec which at the time was indeed inferior to what Xvid could do.

[takearushfan]

I see what you mean by the reviews of the Divx codec. People can practically start holy wars.

[poisondeathray]

In my opinion, they are very similar (or used to be) but I might add few points:

DIVX did not (until very recently) have custom CQM's, this meant for serious encoders, XVID was clearly superior.

If you leave DIVX on default "balanced" quality settings, it is clearly worse than XVID on default settings. Settings "better" and above are comparable to XVID settings - you can test this yourself to see

XVID is open source, DIVX is not.

The talented devlopers seem to have left XVID and moved on to x264. There has been little or no improvement in XVID in >2 years. DIVX is continuously being refined with new versions.

SSE4 implementation with DIVX on penryn processors can increase encoding speed by 30-40%. XVID doesn't support SSE4

Multithreading and scaling is implemented much better with DIVX. With the advent of cheap, powerful quad cores this favors DIVX.

Cheers

[zimminy]

It's funny, I have been trying to figure out which codec to use myself. I just ripped a 1 hour TV episode using both. I used Auto GK with DVD Decrypter and ripped a 1.9GB file down to 360 Mb. I tried it using both Divx and XVid codecs. The quality from both was very good. My unbiased, honest opinion is the one using Divx codec seemed just a wee bit sharper. I went into this expecting to like the Xvid more because everything you read seems to indicate that Xvid is better however allot of the posts that I read were comparing the earlier versions of Divx. I'm not ready to give up on Xvid and use Divx. Like I said, the difference was negligible and the quality of both was very good. I'm going to try ripping a few other items to compare the 2. I would have no problems using either one though.

[ricardouk]

I've been using divx/xvid for the better part of 4 years now and i have to say at the moment divx gives better quality than xvid even if you try virtualdub/autogk/avi.net/staxrip etc.

I only encode using HT profile and besides giving better quality its way faster then xvid on my P4, 2.66MHZ single core PC by a BIG margin.