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You are here: MacNN Forums > Hardware - Troubleshooting and Discussion > iPhone, iPad & iPod > Encoding in h.264 or plain mp4

Encoding in h.264 or plain mp4
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Jumbonium2007
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Aug 7, 2007, 09:55 AM
 
I built a media center PC.. I was encoding my dvd's in regular mpeg 4 video.. I started doing them in h.264.. Which is better the mpeg 4 video or the h.264 video. The HTPC is running XP MCE 2005..
     
GORDYmac
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Aug 7, 2007, 12:53 PM
 
h.264 results in smaller files. That is the only benefit I can tell. MP4 encodes a lot faster.
     
icruise
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Aug 7, 2007, 03:37 PM
 
Well, that's a pretty huge benefit. You can get higher-quality at small file sizes. I see no reason to use regular MPEG-4 unless you need compatibility with something that can't play h.264 or you're really constrained in terms of time (or have a slow computer).
     
Earth Mk. II
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Aug 7, 2007, 04:01 PM
 
Originally Posted by icruise View Post
Well, that's a pretty huge benefit. You can get higher-quality at small file sizes. I see no reason to use regular MPEG-4 unless you need compatibility with something that can't play h.264 or you're really constrained in terms of time (or have a slow computer).
Actually, I see no reason to encode in H.264 unless you're in a situation where the bitrate is a limiting factor. Which is almost never the case on an HTPC (disk space is cheap and widely available).

When considering playback on a HTPC, it makes the most sense to choose the codec that will be the most efficient to decode, given the space you have available. A more efficient codec will be less likely to cause the CPU or GPU to be taxed to the point where the HTPC's fans to kick into high gear during playback - generating extraneous noise. I'd even go so far as to store them in MPEG-2, provided you have the storage space available.

Of course; if you're not worried about fan noise, or if your HTPC makes so much noise already that it doesn't matter, or HDD space is at a premium for you, encode away into H.264 and make the most of your storage space.
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Jumbonium2007  (op)
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Aug 7, 2007, 04:04 PM
 
My HTPC Setup is as follows
Intel P4 1.7ghz
256MB Radeon 9550
768MB RAM 20GB Boot Drive
160GB Media Drive 2 partitions one for recordings and one for media
I have encoded the last 2 dvds with handbrake in h.264 and the quality is good
     
icruise
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Aug 7, 2007, 04:04 PM
 
Well, admittedly I am coming at the situation from the standpoint of the iPod/iPhone/Apple TV (that's what this forum is for, after all) and for those products, space is pretty much always at a premium.
     
Earth Mk. II
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Aug 7, 2007, 04:06 PM
 
Originally Posted by icruise View Post
Well, admittedly I am coming at the situation from the standpoint of the iPod/iPhone/Apple TV (that's what this forum is for, after all) and for those products, space is pretty much always at a premium.
Understood. OP mentioned his HTPC, and I would have suggested moving this to the A/V forum.... but that seems to have mysteriously disappeared in my hiatus. :shrug:

[edit:]
H.264 is definitely the way to go for iPod/iPhone videos.
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Jumbonium2007  (op)
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Aug 7, 2007, 04:23 PM
 
The plain MP4 encoding seems pixelated
     
GORDYmac
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Aug 13, 2007, 02:52 PM
 
If it's pixellated, it may be your choice of encoder, encoding quality, etc. I had no quality issues with my MP4 files.

However, I now fly through my h.264 encodes with Turbo.264. It was not a real option for me previously, since encodes cralwed at 2-3 fps. I now get real-time encoding.
     
vmarks
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Aug 18, 2007, 08:27 AM
 
Depends on target device.

iPod / AppleTV all have lower bitrate expectations, so using h264 gives them slightly better quality at these lower bitrates.

HTPC, you can encode whatever you like, including some bizarre vorbis video or matroska wrapped around an h264 with cabac b frames - because the computer will always have enough power.

But if you want to make the video useful, and by useful I mean, playable in a range of places on a range of devices, h264 isn't there yet. I have a number of network video players that can handle WMV-HD or MP4. So I encode in MP4 and will have them on ipod/appletv/networkvideoplayer.

If I didn't have a need to play on more than just Apple devices, I would probably encode everything in h264.
     
Graymalkin
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Aug 19, 2007, 01:46 PM
 
H.264 offers far better motion compensation and inter-frame prediction than MPEG-4 does, along with variable size macroblocking. This means at lower bitrates an h.264 video is going to look a lot crisper and continue to do so even with a lot of in-frame action (fight scenes, fades, etc). To get similar quality in an MPEG-4 ASP encoding it will need to be about double the bitrate of a similar quality h.264 movie. With h.264 you can easily preserve "DVD quality" video at 1.5Mbps, barring generation loss converting between two compressed formats the h.264 video will look almost identical to the MPEG-2 source. The same cannot be said for MPEG-4 part 2 encoding.

If you're going to be encoding media for use on an HTPC and an iPod it can pay off encoding two versions of everything, one meant for the iPod/iPhone, and one meant for the HTPC. If you're specifically concerned about the iPod, it's only got a QVGA screen resolution and there's little reason to waste the space encoding VGA sized movies for it. At QVGA size you can easily get away with a bitrate lower than 512Kbps, I've had great luck with 384Kbps and even that is a little bit of overkill. You can drop the bitrate on the iPod rip to 112Kbps or even 96Kbps without a noticeable drop in quality (unless you're super picky, have ultrafine hearing, and have headphones with amazing audio reproduction). The HTPC version can be encoding using features the iPod doesn't support (Main profile, high bitrate, etc.). Doing this might take a little longer than encoding a single version of a movie for every device but I've been doing this for a while and it works very well. The iPod version of a movie doesn't take up an undue amount of space on the drive (nice for videos on my iPhone that still look awesome) while my AppleTV versions are basically full quality DVD rips.
2GHz 15" MacBook Pro, 120GB 5400rpm HD, 2GB RAM
     
   
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