Converting Videos for Good

[Rapmastac1]

Ok, so pretty soon, before school starts, I thot I would jus use one Media Player for each type of media. So, I have done the taks of converting all my songs to MP3, which was a no brainer.
Then I converted all my pics from BMP to Jpeg a long time ago, and now any photo I get goes through Adobe Photoshop, for many reasons.
Now, I need to convert all my movies. Now, I want all my movies to remain at their highest quality, so I'm not looking for compression. I am going to use my Windows Machine for the conversions, since it's a lot faster and I already have WinAvi installed. The thing is, I don't know which format, you know, with MP3 it was a no brainer, same thing with Jpeg, it just works on all formats. But as far as video is concerned, I don't know. I have three formats in mind, but they need to be cross platform compatible, and good with size. The formats I want are...
Mpg
Mov
Avi

Now, could I have some advice on which format would be the best choice, once I choose the format, every single video I get will be converted to that format, so I need something that is future worthy, but also something that lets me have high quality video at a low size.

 

[Rapmastac1]

OK, if no one gets what I'm saying yet, basically I want to know which format I should make all my videos.
Should it be Avi, Mov, or Mpg? If you have any others, bring them up. But remember, I'm looking for a decent quality to size ratio and want something that I can open with jus one app, like with Quicktime on Windows and Mac.

 

[projectle]

x264 has the greatest compression quality compared to any other avaliable codec at this time, however it takes forever and a day to encode...

(Ok, maybe an exageration... but on my Powerbook (1.67GHz w/ 2GB DDR2) I can only get x264 to render at 5.9 FPS compared to MPEG4 at 28.6 FPS.

With MPEG4, encoding something at 1500Kbps makes it look beautiful at approximately 450MB per hour.

With x264, encoding something at 1000Kbps makes it look very beautiful and scales up in size very well, leaving you with 350MB per hour.

Both of these are supported in pretty much every current media player out there, with full support under Windows, Linux and OS X.

If you do not really care about encoding times (or have a system much faster than mine [anything intel]), then go with x264, as you will like the results a whole lot more.

 

[zephead]

MOV is classified by QuickTime as a "QuickTime Movie", and AVI is classified by Windows as a "Windows video file. MPG works with both, and pretty much everything else, so I would suggest going with MPG.

 

[projectle]

As far as your audio goes, M4A (Mpeg4 Audio) has much better compression and quality than MP3 (192Kbps is roughly equivilant to 256Kbps), and also has full compatability and support under Windows, Linux and OS X.

 

[projectle]

Zephead,

MOV and AVI are container files and can contain video in one of many different codecs.

As long as you have the codec installed, you can play anything in any container on any OS at any time in any media player.

Although, usually it is a good idea to go with a "standard" format that is included with most media players so you do not need to searching on Sourceforge or compile it yourself as you need to do on occasion with updated Xvid files or some other open source codecs.

I am not saying that Open Source codecs are bad, I am just saying that they usually are not bundled with many media players (never with WiMP).

 

[Rapmastac1]

So do you think MOV would be my best bet to stick with? If so, I'm going to go ahead and encode them all to that one format.

 

[Heb1228]

What's the purpose in converting them? If you can help it, you're better off leaving them as they are. If you need the hard drive space, then convert some of the larger ones, small video files really aren't worth compressing. If you're just doing this because you like the idea of having all your videos the same format, then nows the time to ask yourself why is this really important enough to spend your time on.

 

[Rapmastac1]

Well, it all started a while ago, when I had PNGs, BMPs, and JPGs, and wanted a universal format that one app could open. I also wanted them to be about the same size for their size. As in all 800x600 pics will be about the same size.

Then it started with my music. I had OGGs, MP3s, and WMAs, and I had to pick a format while WMA sounded better at a smaller size, the support for it was Windows Only (Not an option). So I stuck with MP3 128bit, and have a good file size to song size ratio (Same with the pictures as stated above). And now I can use one universal app to open all of these files.

Now, I want to do the same thing with my movies. So I can have a good file size to length ratio and not worry so much about what app opens what movie. I would also liike to compress some of them too. Now, in the long run if I keep this up in the future, it will be the same as my music being MP3s, and all my pics being JPEGs. That is why I want to do this, not a total waste of time if you look at it.

 

[clevin]

ok, what is the format of your original movies? DVDs?
There IS NO WAY you can avoid compression and data lose during these conversion process. To avoid data lose, rip DVDs to harddisk, but that would require tons of disk space tho.
If you do want to compress, then
at the same bitrate:
H.264 is the best quality so far, but H.264 encoding is 2-3 times slower than Xvid/DivX
next will be Xvid
next will be DivX