This is just a general impression from a relative newcomer\'s point of view, but I would be interested to know what other people think?  I wanted to find out which is the best codec - re quality of picture, ease of use, speed etc -  for reducing large Dvd  files to more manageable ones.  To test this I used Xvid (the latest Koepi build), Divx 5 and Nero Recode 2.2, to encode a 3min (200mb) Dvd music video.  And I used the settings that “Afonic” recommends in his webguides for these codecs.  (BTW thank you Afonic for the guides, they are the best ones I have been able to find, at least from a “newbies” point of view).  The clear “winner” in all of this turns out to be Xvid.  It has the best compression ratio, reducing the 200mb to 15mb, an astonishing 7.5% of the original!  Divx did 20mb, 10% of original, and Recode would only allow a min of 30mb for this size file.  All the above were done in one-pass mode.

Although they are similar I also think that Xvid has better picture quality than Divx.  This is just a personal opinion and you can do your own tests but just looking at one clip after the other, Xvid seems to have a little more sharpness and colour depth than Divx.  Also Xvid is quicker than Divx, taking about 7 mins on my pc whereas Divx took about 9mins.  I must say that I didn’t notice a huge difference between one-pass and two-pass mode and I am not really sure exactly what the second pass does, but I suspect that it smoothes out any jerkiness and perhaps adds a bit more detail?

Of course Recode has the fastest speed and is the easiest to use but the end result I was able to achieve was very disappointing.  Even in two-pass the frames were often jerky, the pictures blocky and the colours  having a kind of “bleached” appearance in places.  In fact I think that Xvid has better quality in one-pass than Recode has in two-pass, and that rules out the speed advantage that Recode has  because at these settings the time difference is not that great.  And this with a file that is only half the size of the Recode one.  So overall I think that Xvid has the best performance, with Recode coming in a poor third.

(A possible problem with the above “test” – besides the fact that a 3min clip might be too short to get very accurate results!? – I used BSPlayer for the clips but when I first tried to play Recode files I found there was a picture but no sound. When I looked in the BSP forum there was a recommendation to someone with the same problem to get the 3ivx codec. I installed it and Recode had sound. But when I later tried to play Xvid videos in BSP they kept crashing after about 10 seconds with the M/soft \"send/don’t send\" error report coming up. I uninstalled 3ivx and Xvid worked fine again. – Is 3ivx unstable and therefore giving a poorer picture with Recode than I should have got? Is 3ivx incompatible with Xvid?  [Although it doesn’t seem to have a problem with Divx, so is it Xvid that is unstable?]  Is there another codec I can use with Recode that wont affect Xvid? Or are there some settings I need to change in order to have both codecs work with BSP?).

Yes I noticed last night when I was looking for an alternative to 3ivx that Apple has their own encoder.  I must take a look at it.

Have you tried the latest version of Xvid, or do you think it is much the same as Divx?

(Just a footnote.  I found a solution to the Xvid/3ivx conflict - \"disable Xvid compatability in the 3ivx configurator\".  Both codecs are now living in harmony on the same computer.  Thanks to \"Stux\" on the 3ivx forum.)

Thanks for the link.  I notice that survey was 2003 and I think that Xvid, and perhaps some of the others, have had new versions out since then?  Looks like Xvid is one of the best but the mpeg4 market is developing rapidly and things could easily change.

Think I should revise my first post.  Since I fixed the xvid/3ivx conflict Nero digital has been playing much better, without the stuttering,poor colours and blockiness, and as it will encode in less than half the time of Xvid I think that moves it into 2nd place in my estimation.

It\'s just a few months and XviD only became better. No new DivX versions since then, so the comparison is really up-to-date.

I have not tried Quicktime, actually I don\'t think it\'s that good for movies, usually it is being used for online videos.