Digital Home Thoughts: HD Encoding Face-Off: WMV-HD vs. DivX-HD

"I recently reviewed SnapStream's Beyond TV 4.3, which among its large feature set includes the ability to save (or re-encode) recordings in a wide variety of formats. The review contained just a few before-and-after screenshot examples, but I actually ran a number of other High Definition encoding tests. I thought the results would be useful to those of you trying to decide which format is best for HD recording. Why is it important to worry about compression options for the HD video file format? The answer boils down to how much money you want to spend on hard drive space and how much content you want to have available without having to resort to archiving to DVD. OTA HD tuner cards generally output MPEG 2 in Transport Stream format that requires an average of 10 gigabytes of hard drive space per hour of recorded programming. At 10GB per hour, a 400GB hard drive is going to fill up with HD recordings in about 40 hours. Considering that the average TV viewer watches 17 hours of TV per week, you would fill your hard drive with HD content in a little over 2 weeks!"



Another interesting read over at DenGuru, this time a comparison of the WMV-HD and DivX-HD high-def encoding schemes. His conclusions? WMV-HD gives a cleaner picture, but DivX-HD gives a dramitically smaller file size (and shorter encoding times), while sacrificing little in quality. I haven't had the chance (excuse) to encode anything in HD yet since I don't have an HD tuner card, but I'm certain to do so in the future. For me, DivX-HD is a better choice, but by the time I actually need to transcode anything into a compressed HD format, the differences may be slighter. Anyone here using either of these compression schemes? What are your impressions of it?