Best Format HD video converting?

[craige4u]

I want to convert certain 1080/720P video files into another HD format as my portable player is having difficulty reading sum files.
Now I want the best file possible without any quality loss and size is not an issue at all.

So which format frm below will provide the best identical quality as the original input material?

Locked due to necro spammer.

Anandtech Administrator
KeithTalent

 

[Mr. Pedantic]

From that list, I would go with either the HD - H.264 option, or the HD - MKV option. Seems kind of weird, mkv and h.264 are completely different things, H.264 is a compression standard whereas mkv is a container...

What is your source material? What are you converting to? Do you have the original?

 

[sm625]

The question to ask is do you really want/need HD resolution on your portable device? Xvid produces some excellent quality in the 512x288 range. Can get great looking video that takes just 200-250 MB per hour. It is hard to believe size is not an issue since it takes time to put huge files on your device.

 

[PlastikSpork]

I'm a huge fan of MKV... Yes it is a container but you can use H.264 as the compression standard. But, if you are an Apple user, (iPad, iPhone) I would go with MP4 using the H.264 standard since that is the format used on those devices. H.264 gives you better HD video quality with smaller file sizes compared to DivX. DivX is old and out-dated technology, that's why DivX came out with DivX+ which uses MKV container.

 

[MrDuma]

H.264 option seems by far the best option from your list and as sm625 said in his post the resolution is the big if in your question

 

[craige4u]

H.264 maintains quality as close to the original ? I know its hugely popular and a preferred codec nowadays coz of smaller size & higher quality. (I prefer zero compression)

One thing tht confuses me is, .MKV is a container than why the software is showing a profile for MKV video as well…. I wonder what it converts coz I had done a trial video and it played perfectly on the device.

As per the question why HD ? My device has HD screen and I have 55GB dedicated to videos.. So yes why not… I am a quality fanatic.

 

[Mr. Pedantic]

H.264 maintains quality as close to the original ? I know its hugely popular and a preferred codec nowadays coz of smaller size & higher quality. (I prefer zero compression)

As far as I can tell there is no appreciable difference between H.264 and MPEG-4 in terms of quality, encode, etc. Not sure what codec the DivX profile uses - H.264 maybe? And Xvid may be MPEG-4? I don't know. This is another reason I really like Handbrake. It's overly complicated for less knowledgeable users, but at least the program doesn't do this kind of obfuscating shit.

One thing tht confuses me is, .MKV is a container than why the software is showing a profile for MKV video as well…. I wonder what it converts coz I had done a trial video and it played perfectly on the device.

See above. What you could do if you're confused is just encode a video using each of the settings, and trying them to see which you like best.

As per the question why HD ? My device has HD screen and I have 55GB dedicated to videos.. So yes why not… I am a quality fanatic.

Again, we need more information. Is the device screen full HD? 1080p or 720p? What is your source material? I highly doubt you need full quality (especially since it doesn't really exist for video). Even if your device's screen can take advantage of the full source data stream and you can tell the difference (this is less likely than it sounds), you could most likely compress the audio stream plenty. From full 1.5mbps multi-channel audio you could most likely compress it to 192 or even 160kbps 2-channel audio without noticing anything in terms of quality. Just with this alone, over two hours of video you'd save about 1GB.

 

[Modelworks]

MPEG -4 isn't really a type of video it is more a category of encoding methods. Xvid, Divx, H.264 are all mp4 files. You can even take a xvid file and change the header information to h.264 and h.264 decoders will play the file. They mainly vary in what frame information they use to encode. H.264 has smaller file sizes because the encoding allows a frame to be built from frames both before and after the current frame, which is also why it is a terrible format to edit, none of the individual frames contain the complete frame data.

MKV is really not a good container. The reason is that it is far too flexible on what it allows and that is why you get so many incompatibilities between players. It is like a wildcard type of container where almost anything goes so not every player can accommodate all those differences. A player that says it has MKV support really means nothing but that it can open the file, it says nothing about its ability to play the content.

MP4 is the container I would use for all new content. It is standardized and fairly strict on what it allows inside it. While that makes it not as flexible as MKV , it is better in the long run because the mix of codecs and formats has done nothing but complicate distributing video on the internet. MP4 is supported by all the new and upcoming media players and they are dropping support for everything else. Codecs to use should be based on h.264 because that too will be the main codec and h.264 can decode xvid with the right software installed.

 

[Phynaz]

^ Listen to this man, he knows of what he speaks

 

[sswingle]

From that list, I would go with either the HD - H.264 option, or the HD - MKV option. Seems kind of weird, mkv and h.264 are completely different things, H.264 is a compression standard whereas mkv is a container...

What is your source material? What are you converting to? Do you have the original?

Well if you look at the MKV option in the screenshot it says h.264 below it, so you are doing h.264 in an MKV container.

 

[Mr. Pedantic]

Well if you look at the MKV option in the screenshot it says h.264 below it, so you are doing h.264 in an MKV container.

How is the HD - H.264 profile different then? I mean, wtf?!

 

[QaaQer]

Just as a warning, using the built-in cpu H.264 encoders that Intel and AMD both offer on some chips will result in terribad encodes, although the encodes are very very fast. The same holds true for gpu accelerated encodes, btw.

 

[Phynaz]

Ummm, what? Quicksync has shown to have very good quality. Just look at the review here at Ananandtech.

 

[darckhart]

rather, the first question you should be asking is: "what are the limitations of support in my portable player?" then work from there. the best codec and container to use are the ones supported by your player. and that doesn't just mean, oh the box says mp4. you should check the codec specs and bitrates and other settings.

the main difference between your h.263+ codecs and your h.264 codecs is h.264's ability to have relatively same quality at much higher compressibility. The caveat is that several advanced compression techniques in h.264 codecs break compatibility with portable players, or switch from hardware decoding to software decoding which quickly chews up battery life. if filesize is not a concern, high quality xvid video can be obtained from HD sources with fairly quick encode times using recent cpu.