video compressions

[mystvearn]

which format is best?avi,mpeg,mpeg2, divx?and with best resolution?

[Force Flow]

Best for what? Amount of compression, video quality, or a balance of both?

[mystvearn]

Best compression with best image quality, best compresion and best image quality

[SonicVanguard]

MPEG-2 is still the best in terms of image quality while still allowing for a decent amount of compression.

I'm sure some will say DivX or even XviD, but they still offer too much artifacting. MPEG-4 is promising, but like DivX and XviD (which are both based on MPEG-4), it still has a bit too much artifacting for my taste.

Now granted, in our studio we edit any of our captured video in RAW AVI or AVI/DV - they offer the best image for our purposes (we have over 400Gig's of hard drive space so compression is not an issue). But for our client's purposes, MPEG-2 offers them the ebst image on the smallest footprint.

HTH.

[Xayd]

Assuming you're compressing a high bitrate MPEG-2 source (like DVD)..

For compression below ~1 gig (assuming 2 hours of video), DivX is still the best of the bunch imo, for playback only on a PC actually WM9 isn't bad either. It can be put into an AVI container now and encoded with VirtualDub, so you can use whatever audio type you want (drawback of previous WMV versions).

XviD does not perform well at low bitrates, you'll have more artifacts with it than DivX. However at higher bitrates you can get a bit sharper picture from it. XviD might be the superior codec at some point in the future but too many of its features are still beta and non-working now, in comparison to DivX which is a bit more mature.

[mystvearn]

there are lots of movies in Xdiv. I have some