Doom9 2004 codec shootout: and the winner is…

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>Part of conclusion:

I was once again not impressed with the progress DivX has made. It’s nice to have additional features available, but quality wise I just don’t see one year of development. Plus, if you spend as much time using settings that are called insane by the codec, I’d expect to see something. Though, this time there were no problems with Futurama, something which was a problem in the last test.
[..]
Ateme’s NeroDigital AVC codecs really impressed me. The Main Profile encoder is already available to every Recode user, and thus a very good AVC implementation is already publicly available. Considering that AVC was only ratified in spring 2003 (and only became an ISO standard in December 2003), and that 1.5 years later we already have a fast encoder that delivers good quality, that’s quite a step ahead from how long it took MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 to make that step. The High Profile codec left a very slightly better impression, but I cannot shake the feeling that I just expected more. But, not all of the features of the High Profile have been integrated yet, and considering that the profile has just been ratified in November 04, I guess I cannot expect too much right now (though still, it’s the best codec I’ve tested).
[..]

Finally, XviD, one year
after taking the crown, had to give it back. It would’ve won again, if it
were not for ateme’s AVC codecs. So, if you make DVD backups now that need
to work on a standalone or slower machine, XviD is still a very good
option, but I guess we’ll see AVC capable decoder chips in
2005.