Anyone tried out the RC of WMP9/corona?

andy

The release candidate has been release for a while and I am wondering what are ppl's opinion of this codec. Microsoft claim that Corona can deliver good quality videos at half the bitrate of MPEG4. Whether that is true or not I duno. I am curious about the quality of this new codec. If you have tried out the release candidate version, plz leave your opinions here. Thx

I tried encoding movies with WMV9 Encoder RC, I think it's the best codec at 500 kbits/s (even better than RV9 at this rate), but with higher bitrates, it remains a lot of blocks in the video. Moreover, I don't know why, but WMV9 can't auto-find scene changes, so the codec puts key frames not accurately... And encoding is terrible slow... (48h for Lord of the rings on my Athlon 1800+). And I don't know how to play subtitles with such videos... That's why I prefer RV9 (until the next build of xvid  

++