Quality - DivX vs Xvid

DivX and Xvid are competing MPEG4 compression formats. While DivX is arguably the more popular of the two, many gurus claim that Xvid offers quality improvements when compared to DivX. Curious, I decided to convert a movie using FairUseWizard and see for myself what the difference was. I chose six different scenes and attempted to take a screenshot at exactly the same point for comparision. Below are the results.

DivX DivX1Xvid1Xvid

DivXDivX2Xvid2Xvid

DivXDivX3Xvid3Xvid

DivXDivX4Xvid4Xvid

DivXDivX5 Xvid5Xvid

As you can see, neither comes out way ahead. I notice the biggest difference on the shot where the light is shining on his chest armor, and even then, I have to pay close attention to the detail to notice anything. Whether I would notice that at 30 frames per second might be another story.

I would say it all boils down to compatiblity. If DivX is actually more widely supported, then that’s the one I’d recommend. If all players that played DivX also played Xvid, I’d go with whatever one produced the smaller files given the extremely minor differences in quality.

5 Comments

  1. GanjaManja said,

    July 15, 2007 at 6:51 pm

    It looks like Xvid is slightly more grainy, but appears to more faithfully reproduce the original image, while DivX avoids the pixellation by washing out large areas if they’re of similar colors (see the background pillars in pic #3). Thus DivX looks smoother, but Xvid keeps more of the original image.

    Also, the compression parameters would be useful to know.
    Much larger screenshots (like 1080 px) would also be helpful.

    Thanks for posting, it’s very useful.

  2. Roberta said,

    September 12, 2007 at 8:42 pm

    Thanks! this was very useful! I think the Xvid looks better because it produces more sharpen images than the divX.
    I wished there were more dvd players that plays Xvid. :P

  3. Chris said,

    March 15, 2008 at 2:55 am

    I know this is an old article but I thought I’d mention that many if not most DivX certified players will play Xvid as well, since they are both forks of the same codebase.

  4. Shonof said,

    April 14, 2008 at 9:45 pm

    Doesn’t matter xvid is open source. Thats the way i like.

  5. oaasd said,

    May 17, 2008 at 3:01 pm

    Yay! Open Source FTFW!

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