I don't think you can make the wrong claim. The blurring is intentional and a product of countering xvid style artifacts I belive. That's the whole means of x264 achieving superiority at lower bitrates, as is my understanding, whilst XviD goes for blocking when its heavily compressing, x264 blurs together blocks to make the picture look good. At higher bitrate, where blocking doesn't occur as much, there's really slight/no blocking with xvid, but x264 blurs loosing film grain and detail. That is why its great, its very scalable and capable under all conditions, but it does blur, that's how it can achieve this. RV10 is another blurrer, only that codec is shite since it does it way more than x264. Its the same debate though, blocking vs blurring.
Its a great codec, but the advantages only become "revolutionarily" evident at lower bitrate and if your a fan of preserving film grain and detail you'll see blurring as an annoyance at very high bitrates.
That's not to say it isn't
great looking at very high bitrates, it just means you've got to oversharpen to compensate imo and that means it doesn't match the original. I prefer details and grain on my picture, gives it a more filmy look.
Its a trade off to whether you prefer sharpness or blurriness but its a fact that x264 blurs, that's how it works. Here's a neat rundown i found in the first few hits of google, i can't be arsed looking for a whitepaper on the difference between the codecs. I'll leave that for you to do if you so wish.
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In the 400kbps version, XviD produces rather extreme blocking, to such an extent that I don't consider it watchable. x264 also shows signs of blocks yet it blurs them amicably, making the clip watchable. At 1000kbps, XviD produces a relatively crisp image with still a substantial quantity of artifacts, the crispness also comes at the cost of the artifacty edges of sharp lines and rapid movement. x264 produces an overall smooth and a bit blurred outcome, blending together fields with similar colors to such an extent that it's hard to point to a single, clearly visible artifact - obviously at the cost of detail in the midst of such fields.
At 3000kbps, the same trend continues - XviD is pretty crisp and produces slight artifacts around fast moving areas and sharp edges. x264 keeps smearing a bit, producing overall a more pleasant outcome for my taste. There's hardly any noticeable difference with 5000kbps.
Turning off the deblocking filter stops the blurring effect with x264 - at the cost of substantial, big artifacts in the 1000kbps version. Still, I prefer that to XviD's small artifacts all over the place. |
Here the author picks X264 all the time like you do. Some people prefer blurriness, its not true to claim it doesn't though and that's the whole XviD vs x264 fight really.
Please don't take this observation as knocking the codec as unusable, I'm just calling it how i see the results and how the codecs work.
Kicking its ass might have been a tad too much admittedly, that's just how i write stuff to save me having to explain myself
, so that can be reworded as "a sharper and compatible, less resource intensive result", so if your on the fence about the improvements with 1/3rd DVD rips the compatibility thing tips it to xvid in my book, or something
So my ultimate final thoughts, its not yet ready for ripping and releasing in that format given the demands, and at higher bitrates there's really not that much difference at all, its blurring versus blocking. Because its so much better
at lower bitrates, that's why it will replace xvid in several years... perhaps. Its adoption now is rather pre-emptive for my tastes, i would have to fire up a pc to appreciate it atm and that's rather inconvient.