I noticed too, that H.264 has some special threatment to improve encoding of uniform regions which frequently occur in artificial images. Regardless of what vi

I noticed too, that H.264 has some special threatment to improve encoding of uniform regions which frequently occur in artificial images. Regardless of what video codec you use, the rate-distortion greatly depends on the encoder software and how you use it. When you use MEncoder's x264-compression for example you can tell it to do multi-pass encoding, more accurate motion estimation, use less keyframes, more frames for pixel prediction, ... . Many people don't even use multipass encoding when they convert their videos. Update: Here's an interesting website about work on the theora encoder http://web.mit.edu/xiphmont/Public/theora/demo8.html http://web.mit.edu/xiphmont/Public/theora/demo8.html