Quantizer 100%, 1st time compressed. This is as good as DivX can get.

5th time compressed.

1st time compressed with 93%

Uncompressed

Though this is the best compression of DivX you see artefacts here and there. This is unacceptable and means, that you shouldn't use DivX (even 100%) as an intermediary step instead of a real lossless compression (like HuffYuv). Here I have compressed another picture to show you how bad it really is.

Here some magnified parts:


1) The pink arrow above shows you that DivX produces a white line (above the black one). This has nothing to do with postprocessing. This is a compression artefacct. It indicates, that DivX increases the contrast (as in the left picture of my codec example) to fight the blurring it produces.
2) The red arrows and the orange arrow show smearing. The violet arrows in the pic below show other smears. This is due to postprocessing and is NOT encoded in the compressed material itself.


Again you see a bright border around the blacks (a compression artefact) .


The orange arrow shows, that you are losing gradients. The purple arrows show that you lose clarity. Both mean, that when you fade out to black or to white DivX introduces spots. This is a compression artefact and is not a postprocessing artefact.


The purple arrow shows you again the JPG-like artefacts. The cyan arrows show you that DivX introduces color bands (where there was pure gray in the original).

For me this is unacceptable at 100%. Of course 100% isn't meant to be lossless. But nearly. Of course you don't film fancy lines the whole day, but the above examples show you some weakness regarding gradients and hard contrasts like tiles, subtitles, TV logos, letters and like comics (walt disney, manga, simpsons...).

None of those artefacts show up when using a real lossless compressor like HuffYUV. Even in HuffYUV's lossy mode ("<-- Convert to YUY2") they don't show up.

 

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