Use H.264 for videos

I’m going to categorize this under “Technology”, since I don’t have a section on Geekie.org dedicated exclusively to multimedia.

H.264 is a really good video compression standard. It’s also known as MPEG-4 Advanced Video Coding. You can read more about the technical details on Wikipedia.

The benefit of H.264 is that the resulting output files are substantially smaller as a result of significantly reduced (low) bitrates. Yet, H.264 is able to do so without sacrificing image quality; the output video quality is often comparable to an uncompressed AVI. Trials have shown that H.264 outperforms DivX and Xvid, in terms of quality, thanks to the new features in MPEG-4 Part 10.

Apple QuickTime is one of the major video players (and encoders) which supports H.264 and is proud of it. Their page about H.264 has the following description:

H.264 uses the latest innovations in video compression technology to provide incredible video quality from the smallest amount of video data. This means you see crisp, clear video in much smaller files, saving you bandwidth and storage costs over previous generations of video codecs. H.264 delivers the same quality as MPEG-2 at a third to half the data rate and up to four times the frame size of MPEG-4 Part 2 at the same data rate. H.264 is truly a sight to behold.

Standard definition video (ie. 640×480) is imperceptibly encoded to only 1 to 2 mbps, while maintaining the same degree of quality. HD support also exists, at amazingly low bitrates (comparatively).

Unfortunately, Microsoft isn’t embracing H.264 in the same way, and neither Windows Media Player nor Microsoft Silverlight (at the time of writing) support H.264 or MPEG-4 Video. They have chosen, instead, to create “Microsoft MPEG-4″, a semi-proprietary implementation of an open standard. Shame!

If you want to distribute H.264 media, the best containers are MP4 (MPEG-4 Video), MOV (Apple QuickTime Movie), and very recently, FLV (Adobe Flash Video). Each of them can carry a H.264 stream. For instance, here is a QuickTime Movie encoded with H.264.

Software that can be used to create H.264-encoded video include:

• Apple QuickTime Pro and other programs like Camtasia which use the QuickTime toolkit
  
• MediaCoder (free and open source!), using the x264 library (also free and open source!)

You, too, can create high quality H.264 videos. Read Apple’s instructions (for QuickTime Pro) or blip.tv’s how-to. (Did I recommend blip.tv as a place to upload your videos? It’s really good.)

(2 votes, average: 3.5 out of 5)

 Loading ...

Ubuntu 8.04 »« 5 blogs to see