New Divx 5.03 is out.

For you video encoding freaks, I did some tests with it.
So far, I'm not blown away, but I'm a noob at using the options it has, so maybe it's got something going for it.

I took an uncompressed 1:35 avi and divx'd it using 5.02 and 5.03 just to see what the results were. In all cases bitrate and sound settings remained the same, all changes were in the video settings.

5.02, 2 pass - 9,822,208 bytes.
5.03, 2 pass - 9,846,784 bytes.
5.03, 2 pass, maxed out the slider to "low motion" during the 2nd pass only - 9,848,832 bytes.
5.03, 2 pass, maxed out the slider to "high motion" during the 2nd pass only - 9,842,688 bytes.
5.03, 2 pass, maxed out the slider to "low motion" during both passes - 9,846,784 bytes.
5.03, 2 pass, maxed out the sldier to "high motion" during both passes - 9,848,832 bytes.

So in short:
-New compression doesn't appear to be even a tiny bit better than 5.02 unless you know just what settings to tweak. The settings that do something useful might be part of the paid package.

-the new low motion - high motion slider doesn't appear to do much of anything unless I needed to fool with other settings in conjunction with the bar. Or unless my test is flawed - my avi source is a previously divx'd TBzone movie that I decompressed. So maybe that avi was stripped of all the compressible information that these slighters might affect. I don't have a capcard or digital cam so this is the best I can come up with for a test.

-In general quality across the board was pretty much identical. I think that the low motion looked a tiny itty bit worse. I notice maxed low motion encoding at 2 pass is the exact same size as the default 2 pass encoding. Fluke?

I'll keep playing with it.

PS: The watermark divx5.03 displays at the start of any divx movie for a couple of seconds can be disabled by going to the configuration through the start menu. It's under general parameters I think, it's the bottom checkbox in a list. No worries, they're not more aggressively trying to make you pay /versus/images/icons/smile.gif