Jason Dunn
11-06-2004, 11:00 PM
I've always heard how much faster the DivX encoder is, and I've always bemoaned how slow the speed of the Windows Media Encoder. But I'd never done any actual comparisons of the encoding speeds, so when I had selected a particularly funny part of a Dennis Miller episode, I decided to export it in both formats and see how they stacked up. The clip in question was 2 minutes and 27 seconds long, and originally captured in 720 x 480 MPEG2 format. I used Sony's Vegas Video 5.0 for the task. I wasn't able to exactly duplicate the video settings, but I tried to come as close as possible.<!><br /><br />First I exported the file as WMV. I set it to 3 mbps quality, 640 x 480, and it took 18 minutes 57 seconds on a machine with a 3.2 Ghz CPU. There was no option for de-interlacing, but I noticed that the resulting video was de-interlaced, so that must be automatic based on the template I selected.<br /><br />Next, I exported it using the DivX Pro codec, version 5.2.1. This is the registered version of DivX and is supposed to be faster than the free codec. I set it to 640 x 480, and it seemed to default to 768 kbps - I wasn't able to change it (I confess to being a newbie at using DivX though). De-interlacing was turned on, quality was set to standard, and audio was set to 56 kbps MP3 format (the highest quality I could select, which I found strange). The result? A video file in 17 minutes and 43 seconds. That time is very close to the WMV rendering time, and the WMV encoder was creating a higher quality output file.<br /><br />Interesting enough, when I set the DivX encoder to the fastest setting, it cranked out the file in an amazing 2 minutes 26 seconds. The quality was quite bad though, so I don't expect people to use this setting.<br /><br />And there you have it - not the most scientific test in the world, but it made me feel better knowing that the Windows Media Encoder wasn't quite as slow as I feared. ;-) What's your favourite encoder to use, and why? I've seen samples from both DivX and Microsoft that blow me away with their quality, so the GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) rule certainly applies in video editing.