Carlsbad Cubes Wolf Paulus

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DivX, H.264, Video Codecs, etc.
By Wolf Paulus <wolf@wolfpaulus.com>

Posted Thursday, April 28th, 2005

While the big guys fight over the next DVD standard, (Blu-ray optical discs and HD DVD discs, two different and new DVD formats offering higher capacity than current DVDs, which aren't capable of storing an entire high-definition movie on a single disc), what are you and I do when capturing a movie from a DVD or TV Capture board or (USB device)?

Years back, when I was recording every episode of Millennium (a Chris Carter creation), I was using DivX, but since I wanted to be able to watch it on TV, I ended up encoding in MPEG-2 and writing in onto a CD in VCD format.

Today, one can find quite a few DVD-Players supporting DivX (http://www.divx.com and http://www.divxnetworks.com)out of the box and most of you probably have some kind of PC or Mac mini sitting right next to the TV, able to feet it with all kind of video stuff, no matter the format.
However, imagine for a moment, you still had the goal to burn your captured video onto a CD or DVD, what codec would fit the bill? Apple seems to be pushing H.264, a next-generation MPEG-4 video compression technolog, quite heavily and beside Quicktime, Vsoft for instance has codecs available. DivX, which has arrived at Version 5.2.1 for the Mac is also still an option.
A couple Russians have put together an amazing 66 pages long comparison (don't worry - it's written in English) of some of the most popular CODECs (DivX, H.264, Fraunhofer, AVC, etc.)
Looks like current H264 codecs are approximately on a level of DivX 2.0 but are catching up quickly and the next versions should be similar DivX5.

Any thoughts?

-wolf




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Published on: Thursday, April 28th, 2005  •  Category: [embedded]

Article URL : http://wolfpaulus.com/journal/embedded/codec.html