:Dglynor,
Thanks for the information.
I would like to say that my choice of products and codecs are what I like the most and I feel that what other people do is what they like the most. There are differences in what is important as far as listening and watching. There is also a great indovidual difference on the "hassle" factor. How much time and fuss do they want to put in.
I also am of the belief that for any numbers and stats, everything comes down to what individuals prefer for hearing, watching and their preferred media type(s), and hardware.
Two things on the audio why I like ogg as my favorite lossy format.
- It is open source, and without royalties. Microsoft and Apple hate it, although I have been seeing it used more and more, if I install PC games for my kids.
- For me personally, I think I hear a fuller, more complete sound than MP3 and when I use that aoTuVb4.51P3 version of Ogg (from rarewares.com), at a quality level of 5 or 6, I cannot hear the differernce from a DVD or the original.
I think I may stay with the cute front ends that I am currently working with.
I would say that ogg is my codec of choice for portable listening. I use my Palm Tungsten T3, with a 2gb SD card and Pocket Tunes software on my Palm, which is excellent and flexible with audio formats, for portable listening.
I am truly proud to say that I have never downloaded anything (or ever will), from ITunes and I only once, had a DRM crippled audio file on my PC. After I figured out how to remove the DRM, I deleted the file and just won't bother with any DRM. I also can use ogg on my DVD players. I usually listen to money's APE format when listening to music on my PC.
I use this adorable little program oggdrop. I also use AlltoLame as a front end as well. I just want to say, to be different, I never use EAC, although I use to use it. If the audio source is of high quality, I do not understand the reason for all the fuss. I do believe that EAC must be great is the audio source is not in great shape and a CD or possibly a record is being ripped. But, from a quality CD, I don't see the difference from MC or EAC in the rip. I also will use Cdex, the newer beta version to rip.
I like to take whatever media I have and first do a byte for bye, image file create. Then put my original media away in a safe spot, as my image file serves as an exact backup. From there I can do whatever I want, create other formats, or just listen to the image file. When one is listening from a byte for byte exact copy, that truly is as lossless as one can get.
hear what you said about re-encoding from one compressed movie format to another is analogous to converting from a lossy audio format to another.
I am not sure that it is exactly the same as audio, but you have way more technical knowledge than me in this and I respect your thoughts on that.
I appreciate the link to the analysis and blind tests, but from my "own eyes and ears" test here is what I have seen:
- The acceptance of Divx on more and more stand alone DVD players is of utmost importance to me. That is where I evaluate videos from and it is important for my home movies as well as backups and edited videos that I can play them and share them with friends and family.
- When the cost of the DVD plus Divx DVD players hit from $40 - $50, it made a great difference in how I would use Divx.
- This part is views and heard from my PC. If I re-encode a Xvid created video and when I create Divx from a DVD source, I see a dramatic improvement in the video quality. I find the colors much more alive, the elimination of any synch issues, a consistency and smoothness of the output and a video that looks about identical as the original.
[li]On the PC end, there has been I feel a dramtic improvement in the Divx player quality. - I find that Divx 6.25, with Virtualdub, doing a 2 pass encode, with the audio re-synched on the last pass only, is the best looking compressed, most compatible and errorless output that I have ever used.
- While most of the Divx pack is free, at $19.95 for the pro version of all of their tools, I have never had to pay an upgrade fee. I hope the Divx Labs folks get to make a living and I really hope that a non-Microsoft/Apple format keeps spreading to all DVD players, etc. They do base their products and upgrades on user input from the forums.
- I have to admit that after a couple of years of doing this audo/video stuff as a hobby, I allowed my self to get my head spun up and down, spend countless hours in reading some of the super technical stuff from vcdhelp.com, hydrogenaudio.org and Doom. I think that some of the most humorous battles I have seen between some heavy duty tech engineers was on hydrogenaudio, when this string went on and on about one encoding technique was better than another. What was humorous to me about it, was that the argument was about differences in frequencies that the human ear cannot hear !!
But I have learned so much from all of the brilliant audio/video engineers. I just had to work out my own style and what was best for me. - No matter how much large audio/video oligopolies try , the RIAA and MPAA tries and congress gets paid off to create law after law to limit creativity. Even to go to the extent of blaming their top customers for bad movie scripts, bad movies, stupid region codes, copy protection schemes, arrests of children and old ladies, lack of creativity with Hollywood movies (Rocky 100000000 is about to come out, with a 60 year old Sly Stallone), payola, attacks on librarians and trying to control art, the field of audio/video keeps changing daily and getting more and more interesting.
Jon