Divx 6

[madbunny]

I don't get it....
Why is it that .MKV, or .OGG are superior?
I'm sure that to someone who understands all this it's as obvious as the differences between a .40 cal, and a 10mm bullet. Maybe somebody could help to enlighten me.

Sure, they have some nice fancy options, like dual audio, switchable subtitles and all of that, but is there something other than that that makes them superior? Better compression, less cpu intensive playback? Native HDTV settings?

Personally, I've always hated DIVX, but that's just because I don't like the garbage that they try to package with it. The codec seems to work just fine otherwise.

Is the video compression quality better? I don't know enough. I can't for example tell you what H.264 means, nor could I tell you what most of the settings on Xvid that are not obvious do that that matter.

If you look at it from a person watching fansubs... dual audio is useless, since fansubbers are supposed to stop subbing a show when it's licenced. Probably not too many anime are going to have an English track when they are released. So if you're into that, you're most likely watching DVD rips, IE: you could have rented or purchased it.

The switchable subs are nice, since some groups are better than others, and I guess you could do lots of languages and stuff without recompressing the subs into it for each version (for fansubs), but even so, that hasn't really been an issue so far. The only people that are likely to get excited about removable subs are people like US that use the footage for videos and whatnot.

For people like us that make AMVs, is there a reason why one container is better than another, other than compression and compatibility?

[Scintilla]

I've heard that Matroska is also capable of variable frame rate.

But the compression shouldn't be any different as far as I know, since you're still using the same video codecs as you did for AVIs, though you can't put an Ogg Vorbis audio stream into an AVI file, so you gain something there.

The way I see it, the main advantage for us lies in the absence of hardcoded subtitles.

[trythil]

For people like us that make AMVs, is there a reason why one container is better than another, other than compression and compatibility?

Not really, but compression can be a big, big deal.

For example, with Matroska, there's support for multiple B-frames, multiple reference frames, and arbitrary frame coding order, none of which is natively supported in AVI (or, for that matter, Video for Windows). These are features necessary to realize the full potential of codecs like those based on the H.264 standard. (Multiple B-frames may help compressibility, as you can store less information, and having multiple frames reference a given frame can really help compressibility in stuff like anime -- think Donald Graft's Dup). Codecs such as XviD can also gain from this by avoiding the B-frame hackery in AVI and Video for Windows.

Another benefit is real variable bitrate audio stream support, which allows you to generally produce higher-quality audio at a lower size cost. (You can do it in an AVI container too, but it's really, really messy, and there's no real reason why it should be so difficult.)

I think these benefits also apply to the MPEG-4 container format as well. I'll have to make sure of that one.