Jeff’s Brain Dump

Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.

ClearType makes bloated Screencasts

Posted by Jeff May 03, 2006

I’ve been making movies for ShowMeDo about Nose and PyWinAuto. As a matter of course, I turn off Windows ClearType rendering. It looks pretty, but I don’t think it’s worth the bits.

I recorded the same movie with and without ClearType, capturing to Microsoft Video 1 at 100% (lossless) quality:

  • ClearType ON : 31,157 KB
  • ClearType OFF: 11,263 KB

The movie had audio, and things get even more interesting when looking at it with GSpot:

  • Cleartype ON Bitrate: 11743 kb/s
  • Cleartype OFF Bitrate: 3219 kb/s

So: Cleartype makes the video 264% bigger. Is it really worth it?

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