A generalised rant on pres sites and their content

Pretty obvious for me
From 1 to 4

1) Real10 - see H.264
2) H.264 - Ties with Real and offered good quality
3) Snow/AAC - Audio was good, no video was showing (could be cos I don't have that codec?)
4)WMV/WMA10 - Picture quality wasn't as good as H.264 or Real and the sound quality was bad.

Well, for the WMV one, the audio quality is worse solely because they're very limiting in bitrate/sample rate combinations. They didn't provide a 32kbps stream at the right sample rate, hence it has to be internally converted from (off the top of my head) 48Khz to 44Khz during encoding. If they'd provided that, avoiding that silly conversion it would probably have come out the same audio quality as the rest.

As for Snow, *I* haven't even got it to play back yet either, as it's so experimental (supposedly in newer versions of FFMpeg/FFDShow, but I need to restart the comp to try, and its been locked all day due to Bittorrenting <.<). Therefore that file is there on a 'god knows if it even works' basis.

Nice to see an actual comparisation put up. Real10 has good video and audio quality (when done correctly). It really is let down by it's software, which I still very much so hate. WMV9 can be a good format which I've used over the years, but it ain't perfect. Out of the lot H.264 is still my favourite, but I can see the SNOW one so I can't comment on the best one really.

Yeah, I'm going to bump the Snow one off there for now, as there's definitely some fault in the encode somewhere even if it's not reporting it, but if I can get it to work, it'll go up too along with some of the other wavelet based stuff (though I dont know how runnable it is anyway as the codec is very processor heavy. 640x480 samples max out my Sempron 3000 at about 22fps ).

(Though it'll be a bit before I can do much more testing with this anyway, as I'm away from the main computer and net for a few days)

Surprised that no one has mentioned Real Alternative. I use it on all of my machines and it plays all Real files in a slimline version of Media Player Classic.

Its a free download, and I would encourage anyone to try it.

I might try that out, provided it works with all Real files it will do for me.

I mentioned Real Alternative on the last page. For all I encode using Real's proper software, I sure as hell don't use their proper software for playing back afterwards!

Forgive me, I did a bit of scan reading. I fully intended to revisit this thread in my off time, as it's an interesting subject to me.

I too use Real Producer for encoding. I don't like the interface of the player software. I'm told it's not "bloated" or riddled with spyware, but clips and movies always play back smoother and better looking in the Alternative player, in a nice square edged window with no adverts, playlists and other such things.

I've tried other encoding sotware, various flavours of WMV, Quick Time and DivX, but side by side they don't look as good as Real. I try to set them all relatively the same in terms of size and bit-rate, so it should be a level playing field.

Real is the slowest to encode on my machine, but the extra time has visible benefits.