Anyone seen this post on codec comparison

[dlaborde]

Interesting post "a guy named George" did on Canopus vs Matrox. Haven't had time to read completely - rather skimmed it but seems to be interesting.


http://home.insightbb.com/~george/codec/Intro.html

[Elie]

There was a quick update from George indicating that the Matrox codec is better than the Canopus codec when outputing to NTSC.

Link as follows...

http://forum.matrox.com/rt2000/Forum8/HTML/001062.html

Just read Georges post!

[Brian Ellis]

Doc

If you wade through to the end of the first link, he says the same. However, this is the point I've often made: it doesn't matter two hoots what goes on in the meanwhile, it's the end result that you see on the TV screen that is the most important.

Notwithstanding, I did pick up one sentence from George that may bear looking at: "In the end I decided that it must have been due to the decoder on my DVD player.". I just wonder how much these vary in their conversion from MPEG-2 to analogue? This may actually be more significant than the coder we use to burn the DVD, in terms of the final quality. Although I can try a few coders for comparison, I have only one DVD player, therefore one decoder, so I cannot make a comparison. Could different makes of DVD player "prefer" different coders? By extension, who writes the code for the decoders, which I assume is in some form of ROM? Does it come from different codec experts and is each one exclusive to a make of player? So, the end result may be something that depends on the combination of the coder and the decoder and the "best" codec used for generating the MPEG-2 file may be "best" on only a limited number of DVD players. I think this may bear a little thought and research.

I'll go a little further along this line of thought. As we can burn DVDs with different bitrates going down from the sublime to the gorblimey (Cockney slang for US guys, meaning literally 'God blind me' and used as an expression of bad surprise), how do the different decoders in the DVDs cope with these, as far as the visual image is concerned? I've a suspicion (not confirmed) that above a certain bitrate, there is little or no improvement to what is seen on the TV screen but this could also be a limitation of the TV set itself, as much as the decoder. If so, there is no point in going over a given bitrate. My subjective feeling is that, with my set-up, there is not much improvement at a bitrate more than about 5,000. Has anyone done less subjective tests, especially with different DVD players and TVs?