[chme6583]

I got some episodes of the Simpsons that are in the Quicktime movie format, but they are pretty big. Is H.264 a better way to go? My main concern is size, right now the 21 episodes take up nearly 10 gig. I must admit I am also concerned about quality. Everything I read about H.264 has said it is a better compression. Is this true?

[wataru]

QuickTime .mov is a container format, not a codec. To find out what your movies are encoded with now, open one in QuickTime Player and choose Show Movie Info from the Window menu.

If you want to transcode, go ahead. But realize that you will lose some quality.

[chme6583]

Here is the format:

MPEG-4 Video, 720 x 480, Millions
IMA 4:1, Stereo (L R), 48.000 kHz

Is H.264 better?

Thanks for your help, I am new with videos.

[chme6583]

Here is the format:

MPEG-4 Video, 720 x 480, Millions
IMA 4:1, Stereo (L R), 48.000 kHz

Is H.264 better?

Thanks for your help, I am new with videos.

[wataru]

You will lose quality, but you might not notice it. Just give it a try and see what you think.

[osxrules]

You can save space but I think H264 will take forever. I would use XVid instead. Also, change the audio from IMA 4:1 because that's probably wasting a lot of space. Try changing the audio first on its own and see how much space saving you get.

With mpeg-4 compression, half an hour of near DVD-quality video should only take up about 200-250MB. You should manage to get all 21 videos onto one DVD. The rough bitrate you should go for before you start losing quality noticeably is 768kbps. If you use Quicktime then automatic setting on high gives you this. Don't use a fixed bitrate.

The advantage of H264 in an mp4 container is that future HD-DVD players might be able to play them but like I say, it's slow at encoding and decoding so I would go with xvid. Again though, aim for the 768k mark with vbr encoding instead of cbr. FFmpegX is a good encoder for xvid.

[chme6583]

Thank you!!!