Quality & size differences between H264 & MPEG-4 Vid

lagomatic · Post by **lagomatic** » Mon Mar 12, 2007 5:19 am

Hello all, first post so be kind.

Just a quick question. What is the quality & size differences between H264 & MPEG-4 Video? In short, what are the pros & cons of each format.

I've done a bit off googleing but can't seem to find any direct comparisions or articles between the two.

Thanks

John

MySchizoBuddy · Post by **MySchizoBuddy** » Mon Mar 12, 2007 7:47 am

H.264 is better quality at same size of Mpeg4
or same quality at smaller size. u can take mpeg 4 and cut it by ~40% in size and get same quality H.264.

H.264 is CPU hungry codec. on an ipod it will drain ur battery faster than Mpeg4.

lagomatic · Post by **lagomatic** » Mon Mar 12, 2007 11:21 pm

So a 1500kpbs ripped movie is smaller as a h264 than mpeg4?

Post by **s55** » Mon Mar 12, 2007 11:56 pm

Wrong,

1500kpbs movie is the same size but there is a quality difference between h264 and mpeg4

read this carefully

For the same output size, say 500MB, H264 will produce a higher quality video than mpeg4 will.

lagomatic · Post by **lagomatic** » Tue Mar 13, 2007 12:11 am

ahh thanks, just getting my head around all this. Doing some tests now just to get some ideal settings for my movies archive.

I'm looking for high but not 100% quality movies and their seems to be so many different settings on the forums and no definitive answer.

lagomatic · Post by **lagomatic** » Tue Mar 13, 2007 12:15 am

Also if the case is say a 1500k mepeg4 as a test level quality. Is there any way to work out waht the bitrate would be for the same quality/smaller size in h264?

Goldfish · Post by **Goldfish** » Wed Mar 21, 2007 3:21 pm

The only way I can think of would be to do the 1500k mpeg4, then set it up again for h264. Then where it says 'quality', select 'target size' and put in the final size of your mpeg4 test. Then underneath next to 'average bitrate' it will come up with the average bitrate for a file of that size.

I think. I've only been playing around with it though, so I could be totally wrong.

dynaflash · Post by **dynaflash** » Wed Mar 21, 2007 3:31 pm

lagomatic wrote:Also if the case is say a 1500k mepeg4 as a test level quality. Is there any way to work out waht the bitrate would be for the same quality/smaller size in h264?

Not definitively, but in general my experience has been about 40%. I do alot of iPod encoding so here is a rough comparison:

Mpeg4 @ 2500 kbps
h.264 @ 1500 kbps

These two produce roughly the same quality video in my experience with the h.264 version being proportionately smaller file size wise.