OK, I'm impressed that DivX is small enough for people to ship around movies and TV shows on the Internet. But the output is so ugly! It's not like MP3, where the perceived quality is good enough that you don't feel like you're losing much in the translation. DivX is just ugly.

I'm trying to watch Red vs. Blue. So I download the DivX (encoded to 84 kbytes/sec), set it up to watch full screen, then sit back from the monitor. Ugh! Blurry, blocky, smeared. I'm watching the watery reflection of a movie. It looks better if I don't play full screen, but what's the point?

I'm beginning to think MPEG-2 set the right limits on encoding. My experiments with DVD ripping left me thinking the 5:1 disk space savings of DivX wasn't worth the quality loss.

As seen on BoingBoing
techbad
  2003-05-26 15:42 Z