...the results are better than the source.. Is that possible?

No.

You are being fooled. YouTube encodes all video at 320x240 but displays them at 450x370 on their web pages. This causes jagginess and blockiness due to upsampling errors, which are particularly noticeable since the upsampling is an uneven multiple of pixels. A video file always looks better at its native resolution, so even if you re-encode (which always causes picture degradation) but play it back at the native size, it will look better than the original encoding at the wrong size.

I examined the files in detail and the re-encodes are all worse than the original. If you want to compare codecs, compare a frame with motion instead of a still like the screenshots. Stills are easy to encode, but even slight differences in codec quality are obvious during rapid motion scenes.

Charles wrote:No.

You are being fooled. YouTube encodes all video at 320x240 but displays them at 450x370 on their web pages.

I know. You are being fooled]I examined the files in detail and the re-encodes are all worse than the original..[/QUOTE]I agree; YouTube encodings are pretty bad. My point was the FLV encoding was very similar to the original YouTube clip; crap in, very similar crap out.. Even if the screenshots were of stills (actually, they're clips of slow motion video), the FLV shot looks more vibrant with richer saturation. The clip was encoded for free, in less than 1 minute.. Did I mention that?

YouTube has lowered the bar for what's acceptable quality video on the web. Here we have a free tool that takes YouTube quality clips and converts them to AVI for Windows, MOV for Quicktime, MP4 for Podcasts, 3GP for cellphones, or just MP3s for audio.. I think that's pretty cool.

Actually, I thought this post was NJR, but it turns out to be from Japan!
http://vixy.net/blog/

*edit - the encoding does put a single frame advertisement at the end of the clip. Easy to remove with Quicktime, but not sure about the other formats.. Also, it ONLY converts from Flash; I don't think I made that clear earlier..

GJ

[quote="GuyJean"]I agree]
I think the contrast is higher, which decreases the subtle tones and increases graininess. There are ways to deal with this more cleanly using more advanced encoding tools, but FLV is pretty much the worst at everything. The stupidest thing is that FLV is just a wrapper that can contain many different codecs, just like QuickTime, but everyone uses the default FLV codec, because the advanced encoder costs like $300.
I wish everyone could just use QuickTime instead of Flash, then all these problems would be solved.