HD Encoding Face-Off: WMV-HD vs. DivX-HD

5. HD Vs. WMV-HD

But to better answer the question of whether WMV-HD or DivX-HD is the better way to go for getting your HD recordings into more manageable size, we need to do some direct comparisons. So check out Figures 5 and 6, which are split-screen comparisons of HD and WMV-HD and HD and DivX-HD respectively. Both encodings were done with the "High Quality" settings.

Note that I needed to stretch both of the compressed files from 1280x720 to 1920x1088 to match the resolution of the original HD file for the comparison images. Pay particular attention to the pattern of the grass on the green and the text on the scoreboard for clues to differences in image quality. The WMV HD high quality format is really pretty impressive in Figure 5.

Figure 5: TS HD / WMV-HD comparison (click on image to enlarge)

To my eye, the highest quality DivX file (Figure 5) is not quite as nice looking as the WMV against the original HD file. (Again, keep an eye on the scoreboard and the smudgy grass on the green.) But when you consider DivX-HD's 5X faster encode time and its approximately 50% smaller file size vs. WMV-HD, the format starts to look more attractive!

Figure 6: TS HD / DivX-HD comparison (click on image to enlarge)

So for another look, I put the DivX and WMV screen captures together to directly compare the differences between the two formats (Figure 7). I thought it was interesting that the DivX-HD output looked pretty bad to me next to the original HD file, but when directly compared to the WMV-HD output, it doesn't seem that much different.

Figure 7: WMV-HD / DivX-HD comparison (click on image to enlarge)