Which is the best video format?

Posted on August 23, 2009
Filed Under Video Hosting, Video files | Leave a Comment

H.264 (also known as MPEG-4 Part 10 or MPEG-4/AVC) is a new video codec standard which can achieve high quality video in relatively low bitrates. You can think it as the “successor” of the existing formats like DVD (MPEG2), DivX & XviD (MPEG-4 Part 2 also know as MPEG-4/ASP) etc, as it aims in offering similar video quality in half the size of the formats mentioned before. H.264 requires a fast CPU and lots of RAM to playback fine. If you have one of those old PIIIs or any CPU less than 1GHz plus less than 256MB RAM you may have trouble decoding H264 content fast. H.264 is a codec standard, so there are various implementations around. The most important (and easy to use) tools you can use to create a H.264 video are:

Nero Digital. Their latest version includes an H.264 encoder called NeroDigital AVC.
Apple Quicktime. Using Quicktime Pro you can encode videos using H.264 in both Windows and Mac OS X platforms but it’s encoder is relative slow.
x264. An open source solution. It is command-line only, but its being used in various free programs like SUPER (Simplified Universal Player Encoder & Renderer), Fairuse Wizard (DVD to file compressor) and various other projects.

There are various other solutions like the MainConcept H.264 encoder, Sorenson and VSS to name a few, but they are either too expensive for the average user or hard to find. Some of them are pretty unstable as well. You may come across all kind of file extensions and still the codec can be H.264:

.avi – Microsoft’s container format – Yes, people use .avi for H.264 videos too!
.mp4 – Nero and Quicktime use this format. Better than AVI as you can store AAC audio as well.
.mkv – Matroska container format – can support many video and audio formats.
.h264 – This extension is not commonly used. Maybe in the future.

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