Compression sizes, please help.

[marcusaxavier]

Here's the part I need help on. I am looking to compare the rate of compression for these file types - mpg, mov, rm, asf, DiVX, wmv, asf, or any other compression type that you can think of.

I have Quicktime 5 Pro and TMGPEnc, so I can test the files in both of those. What I want to do is convert 10 seconds of a 320x240 ~30fps (NTSC standard is fine) uncompressed avi clip to each one of the formats and see which comes out with the best quality/size ratio for future use.

- Please use only real video (not cartoons)
- Do not edit the video in any way (no enhancing)
- Put down the video size (in KB or MB) before and after converting
- Put down video quality before and after converting
- Put down what format you converted to, and what the file extention name is (mov, asf, etc.)

Thank-you to all that participate in advanced!!!

[devinemi83]

The only two I would consider at all are MPG, and divx. It depends on what size you need and what quality. If you want VERY high quality with compression, use MPG set to VCD standards, 1150kbps, 224kbpsaudio. It will be like 10MB a minute. The video will look good. Only thing you'll see is slight pixilation on high motion scenes. But it usually isnt an issue. Now the quality it gives may not outweight the cost in size. About an hour per cd or so.

Divx will give you near VCD quality and a very good rate of compression. For good quality I go for about 4MB a minute. You dont want to go much lower because your video will blur and shift around on you.
Good thing about both is that the are very compatible with most players. And you can easily resize their video dsiplays without a huge drop in quality.

Things like .MOV quicktime files you are wasting time with. Although yes they have good quality, they are very long encoding files, I experienced 15X recording, 1 minute took 15 minutes to encode! And not to many player will play them.
RM and WMV and ASF, yes if you do them just right they look okay, but I have used this alot a couple years ago and they are shit when it comes to quality. Only use them if you NEED VERY small file sizes, like less than half a mb a minute. They suck. Best to leave them to web broadcasting. And once in these formats, RM cant be easily reencoded to another format without expensive software, WMV looses ALOT of quality, the video will many times look washed out and slow or jumpy.ASF is really made to be watch live over the internet, not for its astounding quality.


So basically, MPG if you want very high quality and ability to reencode if needed without loosing tons of quality. Its also more compatible with players than divx is and it doesnt need a specific codec like divx does.

Use divx if you want pretty nice quality but very good compression.

Simply put in my opinion use only MPG or DIVX. Anying else and the results are iffy.

I hope this helped you a little, and if you have any more question, just ask me or ask another guy on the board.

[marcusaxavier]

Actually, I prefer MPG when compressing, but I wanted some numbers to go behind the preference. Here's the results from MPG and MOV formats. If anyone has the ability to create any of the other compression formats, it would be greatly appreciated.


Original AVI - 48,784KB
320 x240, 16bits 311 frames, 29.970fps, 4701kbs, MS-YUV PCM, 44,100Hz, 16bit, Stereo

MPG - 1,825KB - 37.4% compression rate
MOV - 14,031KB - 28.7% compression rate

Problems - Had problem converting to Quicktime using QT 5Pro. The program wanted to download a filter for the uncompressed avi, and when it did, it said that no filter existed.

Besides compressing, no other features were changed from the original avi.