StarCraft 2 Cutscenes

As it has been well established the new international gaming sensation StarCraft 2 uses the Theora codec to compress its prerendered video content. I've selected a few stills from one of the cinematics to look at the quality of their result. Maybe they jsut didn't use a high enough bitrate but these stills look subpar to me (though much better than the Smacker cutscenes from StarCraft 1.

Input #0, ogg, from 'cinematic_thedream.ogv':
  Duration: 00:02:45.70, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 3984 kb/s
    Stream #0.0: Data: skeleton
    Stream #0.1: Video: theora, yuv420p, 1280x720, 24 fps, 24 tbr, 24 tbn, 24 tbc
    Stream #0.2: Audio: vorbis, 44100 Hz, stereo, s16, 160 kb/s
    Metadata:
      ENCODER         : ffmpeg2theora-0.24

The thumbnails link to full size stills.

Frame 484
This looks very blocky to me.

Frame 548
There seems to be ringing around Kerrigan's body, especially her legs.

Frame 1072
More blocking.

I'm not saying that these cutscenes are necessarily representative of Theora's top quality. I merely think we should take the quality of the result into consideration when scoring this as a victory for Theora. Perhaps the cutscenes should have been encoded at a higher quality at the expense of releasing releasing on BluRay or multiple DVDs or some more content should have been pushed off the disc onto the release day patch. If they were absolutely stuck with this amount of space for cutscenes, I would have gladly paid a few extra cents for H.264 cut scenes.