Monday, November 10, 2008

H.264 vs Xvid for the lamer

I unfortunately have this conversation that has periodically come up in the last two years. It always occur because of two things. One of them being complete ignorance and some sort of elitism perceived from knowing a few things about video quality. The second is the worst and usually involves selfishness or just plain stupidity.

For most people this conversation will never come up because you would only worry about video quality when you are actually using it to perhaps back up dvds or some sort of media for personal use. The conversation however will come up from those who are leechers. Now leechers have existed long before edonkey which made sharing easier for the less technical savvy usenet group. There are nothing but complainers on the internet but when there was private sharing of movies from the divx/xvid era in irc it has exploded with bittorrent.

That ease of use has come about with the lack of wisdom and common sense. In the persuit for video quality which was the initial goal of divx/xvid came H.264. At the gain for a few measily megabytes which has become increasely cheaper to the point I no longer buy dvds to store my media files (I just buy a large hard drive on sale now), processing power was needed to encode and decode video arguebly with fewer problems which is rare problem not noticable with a skilled xvid encoder. So what's the problem than? H.264 should be the goal for most encoders right? WRONG!

I will now use a few reasons to chastise anyone who waste anyone's time arguing for H.264 encoding while downloading movies which you did not pay for and which you did not encode just cause you think the video quality is better. First off, thank you for making global warming worst by using more processing power to encode media for marginal savings in media size. Thank you for considering the many fully working divx/xvid players that do not and will not play H.264 movies well or at all. It's very considerate of you to be environmentally friendly by causing tons of electronics obsolete and end up in landfills because you think H.264 is superior than xvid/divx. The economy is better off for everyone because you download H.264 movies from the internet at no cost while thousands are laid off production companies losing money making those movies and the minimum wage workers at blockbuster or any brick and mortar business selling them.

So in essence. If you are worried about the quality enough to advocate H.264 movies from the internet please consider buying them rather than show yourself as a complete loser and plain old A$$Hole on the internet.

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