3. WMV-HD

I then ran a series of tests to measure encoding time, output file size, bit rate, and image quality of my seven-minute test file using the WMV-HD high, medium and low quality settings in Beyond TV. Table 2 contains a summary of everything except image quality, which you'll have to judge for yourself using Figure 3.

Table 2: WMV-HD Encoding Comparison

A couple of areas stood out to me where the difference in quality was visible. The lines on the grass between the high and medium samples becomes slightly less clear on the medium sample, and the grass near the sand trap between the medium and low samples becomes a bit more fuzzy in the "low" sample. All three samples are encoded at 1280x720, but the changes in bit rate dictates the quality of each file. The differences were fairly subtle between the three quality settings. In fact, I had to really search to find any differences at all. Note that the "high quality" converted file ended up being a bit more than 100 MB larger than the "low quality" file without a really significant change in quality.

Figure 3: Three WMV-HD Quality settings (click on image to enlarge)