Battle of the Codecs
- March 12, 2004
- 1 comment
ExtremeTech put four popular video codecs head-to-head to see which one would come out victorious. The players were DivX, Windows Media Video 9, QuickTime with Sorenson 3 and Quicktime with MPEG-4.
Care to take a guess which one came out on top? I’ll tell you it was neither of the QuickTimes. In fact, QuickTime with MPEG-4 sucked. It sucked donkeys. DivX was the winner, but narrowly. It seems that WMV9 has been drastically improved over 8.
Virtually all of my work starts out in DV and eventually ends up in MPEG-2, but I often have to kick out some downloadable samples. I normally use Quicktime with Sorenson 3 for compressing video clips for the web. I have tried compressing video clips using the MPEG-4 codec before, and it was an awful experence.
One topic I didn’t see covered in the report was, Black & White video compression. It sucks in just about every codec that Quicktime uses, except for a few.
DivX seems to really be gaining in popularity, and I have started to look into it more as an alternative to Quicktime Sorenson 3.