Nero Digital codec beats DivX and XviD with ease

[Shagga]

DivX and XviD are well established names in the video world. Both are used to compress video and is best described as MP3 for video. But both codecs now have a big competitor heading for their positions. Ahead, the company behind the widely used Nero Burning ROM released Nero Digital.

The results were suprisingly good and Nero Digital seems to be a true competitor for DivX and XviD in both speed and picture quality. The article also has an indepth look of Nero Recode, the utility which can be used to compress movies and which is part of the Nero 6 Suite. Read the entire article on CDFreaks.com

 

[rbV5]

It looks to me that the AAC audio compression allows for a higher video bitrate for the video compared to other MPEG-4 based codecs with the same file sizes. The problem I see initially is the propeitary player required to view the resultant *.mp4 files (probably due to the audio codec). It does look easy for the enduser, but I'm not so sure the quality itself is better even in the compared images in the article, and someone experienced with encoding could likely match the quality and end up with a file that will play on any player they wanted to use. In any event, MPEG-4 based codecs (xvid, Divx, windows media and now nero) do offer excellent compression while keeping quality high. I've been using ATI's new MPEG-4 codec with MMC 8.8 and like it quite a bit.

 

[Nothinman]

"with ease" seems to be hardly relevant here, the differences are minor enough that I (and I assume most people) couldn't care less. Xvid and DivX are both free and work everywhere with tons of players and on top of that Xvid is open source, those are two things that Nero codec doesn't have and they will hopefully limit it's exposure.

 

[Mark R]

This software has been a long time coming, and looks promising.

Finally, industry standard MP4 files with standard MPEG4 encoding, together with high quality audio encoding. Unfortunately, incomplete versions of MPEG4 (e.g. DivX) have become very popular, which has meant that the full capabilities of MPEG4 have not yet been made available for general consumers. The problem now is that these new compliant files, don't play on the old software.

There are a number of MPEG4 encoders/players (quicktime works, but again is incomplete), hopefully with time, more will arrive which offer the feature set that was originally conceived.