Quicktime file sizes

[lilbandit]

Came across the new Doom movie site. It has trailers available for download in windows media and wmv but the quicktime files are huge in comparison! 320 x 180 wmv is 6.7MB
320 x 180 .mov is 15.5MB

640 x 360 wmv is 12.8MB
640 x 360 .mov is 30.0MB

I can't spot any obvious difference in quality, can anybody shed any light on the reason why wmv is so small? Is Quicktime on the back foot in this market?

[Mikuro]

They're using an older codec. Sorenson, to be precise. It just doesn't give you the size:quality ratio you get from the newer codecs. That's never been Sorenson's game; its strong points are its high quality and low playback requirements.

It's not QuickTime's fault. QuickTime is on top of the game here. It has MPEG4 and H.264, the two best codecs out there, period. WMV3's quality is good (somewhere between MPEG4 and H.264, IMO), but its system requirements are about double that of H.264 (which, in turn, is naturally a bit more demanding than MPEG4). I can play 1080p HD MPEG4 content on my 1.25GHz Mac mini with 256MB of RAM; Microsoft lists a 3GHz P4 with 512MB of RAM as the minimum requirements for 1080p WMV playback on Windows.

[lilbandit]

ahh that makess sense, cheers.