A rather odd way of making an objective comparison unless of course you plan on viewing your finshed video one frame at a time. :-)

I took another approach using two instances of VCDCutter to view the same video rendering with TMPGEnc and another using the MainConcept edcoder so BOTH videos play simultaneously along side one another.

Repeating the experiment with three different AVI source files TMPGEnc had slighly less artifacting on the first, MainConcept did slighly better on the second, and for all practical purposes no difference on the third test.

Conclusion:

It depends on the source file and what rendering options you select. Duh! No real surprise there. It seems that TMPGEnc has less artifacting on light colored backgrounds when the video has a fair amount of action. The higher the quality of the source file the less artifacts regardless how the file was rendered. Again, no surprise. Having only used the MPEG 1 plug-in from Ligos that came with VideoFactory, I'm pleased with the superior performance of the MainConcept encoder. Not saying that the TMPGEnc encoder isn't good, it is. Afterall I was the guy that first mentioned it in the Video Factory forum many months ago. The bottom line is the MainConcept encoder seems superior to the Ligos encoder and for many projects will save a step, which pleases me. Of course it is still very early and only after many more tests can anyone form more reasoned opinion. And that too is really the bottom line. What makes a good rendering is far more subjective than factual and must also take into consideration how the video is going to be viewed. With such a wide variety of hardware out there it becomes difficult to compare results and we haven't even touched on the human factor.