I downloaded a hq mpeg music video to do some more test with, the result far much better with live action then it does with my anime for sure. I would have guessed that because my anime requires less info per frame because of solid colors and some frames not needing update that it would look better at lower bitrates, but its not all that much of an impact as the codec still can't maintain fine lines unless you use a high bitrate.
I found that 75Kbit decimated video is quite watchable for live action, is it me or does ppc have a way of makeing crappy video look better? It allways looks better then when it does on my pc when I test it after encodeing, even when I dont enlarge the video on my PC so its the same size almost as my PPC.
I did 3 test, all 320x200 (the music video was widescreen), and all of them used the same 80Kbit stereo ogg audio track. The music video is not CG laden, but it has very high motion, many scene changes, fades, split screens, and numorouse water sequences with bubbles. the first one was 75kbit decimated by 2, watchable, no frames droped. the 2nd was 150Kbyte, full 25fps (it was a japan music video), it was generaly unwatchable. lost half the frames, and of course because I doubled the framerate with the data rate, the quality per frame did not increase. Live action decimated video seems to be far more tolerable then I find decimated animation video so the 3rd one which was 150Kbit decimated video was the best. I droped 18 frames over a 3 minute 33second period. For me, my choice of music videos is the 3rd one, but for those with smaller storage cards, go for #1.
I dont have realvideo encoder nore do I ever plan on reinstalling it in my life, ditto for the player, so no test there.
