| User review:
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With a little help from guides it is possible to create very good video from several common sources.
Encode speed for single pass WMV 9 is comparable to TMpeg on Motion Estimate Search for MPEG2 at same resolution input/output and no resizing or filters.
Encode speed for 2 pass is longer (5-6x original movie time on my Athlon 1.33 GHz). However, when compared to TMpeg using resizing and SOME filters, WMV 9 encodes much faster than TMpeg doing MPEG2.
I've observed WMV file sizes 30-50% smaller than MPEG2 at comparable bitrates.
Visual quality of the video is noticeably better than MPEG2, even when using filters and highest quality in TMpeg.
On the downside, if you are familiar with MPEG2 encoding, there is a little bit of a learning curve to go into WMV9, but not too much.
On the downside, WMV 9 encoder defaults to a fairly SOFT image quality. Change this to sharp or sharper settings (75-85 or better) to get better image quality.
One preferential note: not as many processing controls as TMpeg, but these can be done using other apps like VirtualDub, TMpeg etc, prior to encoding. Besides, some people prefer this anyway. |
