CCE 2.5 and 2.67 quality differences?

andy

Hi!  Could someone detail the significant advances that CCE 2.67 has gained in quality of encoding over the older 2.50 version?   Is there a compelling reason (i.e. better quality) to upgrade, given that there are some freeware apps that are more compatible with 2.50.  Any insights appreciated!!

In my opinion there aren't any significant increases in quality. According to the changelogs, the encoding engine has been tweaked/improved, but I personally can't tell any difference. The main addition is simply an updated gui and some new filters to play with, but I think most people either turn these filters off or use them very minimally, and use avisynth for preprocessing instead.  I haven't found a reason to upgrade from 2.5 just yet.

As far as quality goes there isn't any need to upgraded if 2.5 is working for you. I can only think of two reasons.

1. You get better control of the noise/quality settings with 2.67. With 2.5 you basically only have the image quality setting and noise filter. With 2.67 you still have the image quality setting (now called Quantizer Characteristics) and three quality settings Low Pass Filter, Effect Restrictive Vertical Filter, and Dithered Quantization. They aren't a huge improvement over 2.5, but they do allow you more tweaking so you could get better output depending on your input and how much time you want to put in.

2. Pulldown detection. This could either be a big factor or trivial depending on how often you encode hybrid material. I've used it on TV shows like Larry Sanders, Cowboy Bebop, Buffy and it works great. With 2.5 you have to encode it as interlaced material which wastes a lot of bits on shows like Cowboy Bebop which are 90% film, but if you encode it as film the video parts will not be correct.

Other than that, the quality and speed is about the same as 2.5. There are a few bug fixes and I think 2.67 is more stable.