"Flights of Fancy", version 2

trythil · Post by **trythil** » Wed Jan 01, 2003 9:36 pm

This is mostly copied from my journal, but I figured that I might as well post it here for anybody who cared (yeah, like anybody actually does...) It's an announcement, albeit not much of one.

After getting xvidcore and the XviD VfW interface compiled*, I decided to try my hand at XViD encoding. "Flights of Fancy" was the only video for which I had the QuickTime master at hand, so I decided "what the hell, it can't be made any worse" and, with XViD, AviSynth, and VirtualDub, I went ahead and did this:

http://www.animemusicvideos.org/members ... hp?v=11787

The results were very pleasing. Here's a side-by-side comparison of the MPEG-1 and the XViD:

http://www.rose-hulman.edu/~yipdw/mpg-x ... me4290.jpg (~650 KB)

The MPEG-1 exhibits clear macroblocking to the left of Shiro's face, while the problem is not as pronounced in the XViD encode. Additionally, the MPEG-1 is substantially desaturated (which is obviously no fault of MPEG-1, but rather a fault on my part.)

No post-processing can truly compensate for fundamental video problems, however. In this case, the video was edited using MJPEG conversions of the North America release of Wings of Honneamise. Manga's transfer wasn't exactly top-notch, and the MJPEG conversion didn't help anything.

Regardless, I'm convinced that the XViD encode looks better. If anybody actually cares, you can grab the higher-quality encode now.

* I couldn't get the binaries to install correctly, but when I compiled it from the sources with VS .NET, everything worked swimmingly. I dunno why.