[Hawkeye_a]

Had a lengthy argument over which codec is better with a PC-nerd friend of mine.

Benchmarks: Quality at a specific bitrate, time to encode/decode, requirements, compatibility.

Quality was a point-of-contention as i think H.264 preserves a lot of detail per frame and even in high motion scenes. His argument was H.264 'softens' the image where Xvid keeps it sharp. And Xvid(on a PC) is far more tweakable than H.264(why that matters, i have no idea and no value for).

Time to encode....considering the low complexity of the Xvid codec when compared to H.264, it's obvious that Xvid was much faster on both Macs and PCs.

Requirements, obviously requirements for playback of H.264 on devices is higher than the older Xvid.

Compatibility.... for me, given my Apple devices im set, and most BR video players support H.264, not to mention all new PCs will not have any problem with it. iPhones, iPods, Zunes, AppleTV, WDHDTVs, PS3, etc... where Xvid is sketchy at best.

Given the quality/bitrate ratio, i think H.264 is an overall better choice despite the initial inconvenience of longer encode times.

Having scoured the web for an intelligent comparison and found nothing substantial, i was wondering if i could get opinions here.

Cheers

PS>>Not sure where to post this.

[mduell]

A lot of it depends on the encoder. For the purpose of this discussion I'm going to assume ffmpeg for xvid and x264 for H.264.

Quality per bit - H.264 wins for any reasonable quality setting/bitrate/frame size. If your H.264 encodes are at reasonable bitrates and ending up blurry you need to tune the x264 psy options for your content. If you don't think x264 is tweakable you haven't read the manual.

Encode time - You can get x264 to encode just as fast as xvid if you want, but it erodes the quality per bit advantage. In the real world H.264 encoding takes longer than xvid encoding because users are more sensitive to quality/bit than encode time, but that's just a preference not an imposition.

Decode effort / requirements / compatibility (isn't this all the same thing?) - Xvid wins thanks to the piles of cheap DVD players that will read avis off a CD. But H.264 works on most non-decrepit devices.

Xvid is useful when you're stuck with a playback device that sucks (DVD player, G4 laptop, etc). Any other time you're better off with H.264.

[voodoo]

In my experience 4GB Xvid movies are of observably lower quality than a 2 GB h.264 movie (same source).

Xvid is a lot less taxing on hardware.

That's pretty much it, really.

Both suck equally much if contained within a Matroska container.

[macaddict0001]

h.264 produces much higher quality movies, but takes much more processing power. Flash videos just plain suck in comparison to anything.