Microsoft DV Codec?!?

[ApacheWraith]

There was a time when i used the M$ DV codec on what was originally a pixelly looking video. Instead of compressing with my usual mpg2 or whatever I decided to see how the DV looked. I was adding effects to certain shots and needed to produce the file and then add it in later to the complete movie as its own scene. The DV compressor seemed to clean it right up. looked great. Is this a good codec, as in better than Huffy? Does it actually make the file look better?

Thanks...
Wraith

[Sefy]

Huffy/PicVideo are both MJPEG codecs, they are both ment at archival and not for encoding, they give the ultimate high quality and reducing file space.

MPEG4 is for giving you the best possible quality for the smallest file size, but the quality is no where near as good as an MJPEG codec, but then again, each has it's own purpose.

[ApacheWraith]

So visually the M$ DV codec(?) is not as good as mjpeg (Huffy)? It seemed like I took a really pixelly shitty picture and turned it into a good one, but then I would have to encode to mpg which would make it worse right?

Jamie

[Sefy]

Think of MJPEG like this:
Uncompressed AVI = TIFF
AVI with MJPEG = JPG
If you take a high quality TIFF image, and compress it to JPEG but even use the higher quality 100% JPEG, it will still be like 21:1 if i'm not mistaken, of course that depends on the picture.

Now, AVI with MJPEG is like each frame is a JPEG image, compared to each frame that uncompressed is like TIFF, so quality looks to the human high just about the same with MJPEG.

Now MPEG4 works diffrently, it will reduce the image quality as much as it can but will try to maintain it as viewable as possible given the Bitrate you told it earlier.

But because it is so compressed, if you try to further encode it to MPEG, it will lose nearly all it's viewable display.