h.264/OS X

[nicolasonline]

hello everyone,

i'm currently under the process of converting all my videos from home movies to dvds, movies, through with h.264. I have recently found out through the Mpeg industry forum head Gary Sullivan that the "main" profile was a profile that was implemented on a semi-temporary basis until they came up with the "high" profile. now as many of you know, the high profile doesn't exist in QTPro or FCP. I also found out that at the same bitrates "high" has better algorithms than "main" and "main" better than "baseline" so perceived visual quality is better at the same bitrate. Obviously it would be advantageous if I could encode all my videos using the "high" profile. So on to my questions:

1. What is the best/most widespread application to convert your videos to the "high" profile for h.264?

2. If I have videos encoded in the high profile, will QT natively support them and play them back or not?

3. Is it worth going with "high" over "main"?

4. What is the difference when encoding in h.264 to using a .mp4 container or a .mov container?

Thanks everyone.

Nick

 

[TheStu]

Well, I can really only answer some of your questions.

1: No Idea
2: It should, I see no reason why it wouldn't. But I would suggest seeing if you can convert them to HIGH and then test.
3: That is a tricky one. I see the visual difference between AVIs and h.264 MP4s at the same file size, but I am not sure about MAIN and HIGH.
4:Well, h.264 can be contained in either MP4, or MKV. I personally would suggest MP4 since it is a little bit more widely supported. So, you don't get file.h264, you get file.mp4 which is an h.264 encoded video.