Which video format is the highest quality?

[Ken90630]

Hey, All,

What is the highest-resolution computer video format currently available? MP4? AVI? Or ???

(Exclude high-def formats like 1080P & the others -- I'm just concerned with computer video for purposes of this discussion. )

I don't care about file sizes & how much space a given video file takes up on the hard drive. I'd just like to know which format yields the highest resolution.

TIA

 

[yacoub]

Curious: What's your source material? That will affect the recommendations.

 

[manko]

Formats, codecs and containers are generally resolution independent. 1080p (1920×1080) is the highest resolution of the consumer high definition format, but you could encode video at a higher resolution if you wanted to (and if you have to hardware power and a screen to play it back).

 

[BassBomb]

Wouldn't uncompressed be the "best" format as far as quality?

 

[Ken90630]

yacoub: The source material will be YouTube music videos. There is a way to download and save them to one's hard drive, and there are choices of which format to save them as: MP4, AVI, etc. Since hard drive space is not an issue, I'd like to save them in the highest quality format available.

I've also been shooting some home movies of my dog and some friends & stuff on MiniDV tape on my camcorder. I'm thinking I might like to save some of that material on my computer and edit it one of these days. Again, I'd like to choose the highest quality format.

Bassbomb mentioned "uncompressed," and I like the sound of that. Or "lossless" if possible. If that won't be possible, the format with the least compression/loss would prolly be what I'm shootin' for.

 

[taltamir]

generally in resolution higher = better, but it is not the ONLY determinent of quality... 1080p is a resolution ("1920x1080 progressive scan" to be specific)

AVI is a container... AVI, MKV, OGM are all containers, the affect the KIND of data that can be stored, and the overhead (in both space and CPU useage to decode)... they have NO AFFECT WHATSOEVER on quality, and you can convert between them in literally seconds (a process called remuxing... a remuxer tool can remux a 1gb file in under a minute with NO loss of quality... changing it from say, an AVI, to MKV.

A container (such as AVI) includes several streams, typically one video and one audio, which are COMPLETELY seperate... each one is encoded in a different codec which is based on a specification. for example... divx and xvid are both mpeg4, and typically can both be decoded by the same mpeg4 generic decoder.
The type of codec used has great effects on the quality and size of the movie.

 

[Sheninat0r]

You're getting videos off YouTube and you're worried about quality? Frankly, anything you get of YouTube will look liks a** no matter how it's encoded.

 

[Cogman]

Originally posted by: Ken90630
yacoub: The source material will be YouTube music videos. There is a way to download and save them to one's hard drive, and there are choices of which format to save them as: MP4, AVI, etc. Since hard drive space is not an issue, I'd like to save them in the highest quality format available.

I've also been shooting some home movies of my dog and some friends & stuff on MiniDV tape on my camcorder. I'm thinking I might like to save some of that material on my computer and edit it one of these days. Again, I'd like to choose the highest quality format.

Bassbomb mentioned "uncompressed," and I like the sound of that. Or "lossless" if possible. If that won't be possible, the format with the least compression/loss would prolly be what I'm shootin' for.

Getting it from youtube, your quality will be crap regardless. You should download all the options on one video, compare, and see which one looks the best to you.

As far as quality goes. I can through 20MB/sec at MPEG1 or 20MB/sec at MPEG4 for a SD video and there is no way any man on earth would be able to tell the difference between the two.

If you want the absolute best quality of video, just don't convert it at all and keep it like it is. You can never make more data then is available to you. (IE, a crap picture will never be more then a crap picture, despite what CSI tries to tell you). you can artificially change the quality, but nothing would be gained in the long run.

With that said, MPEG-4 AVC is generally considered the superior lossy compression format (IE each bit goes further) MP4, and MKV are where you will commonly find the MPEG-4 standard. Huffyuv, or blackman would be the best lossless compression (I believe).

 

[trOver]

Originally posted by: Sheninat0r
You're getting videos off YouTube and you're worried about quality? Frankly, anything you get of YouTube will look liks a** no matter how it's encoded.

QFT

 

[videopho]

GIGO = Garbage In Garbage Out

 

[postmortemIA]

Originally posted by: BassBomb
Wouldn't uncompressed be the "best" format as far as quality?

you won't find that anywhere anymore, it is simply waste of space.

 

[Ken90630]

I know most YouTube vids aren't great quality, but there are some now that offer a "high resolution" option and they do tend to look a little better. What I'm trying to do is just 'upgrade' my saving option from the .flv files I'm saving them as now. The quality isn't very good, and I was just wondering if MPEG4 or the other file types mentioned would be better than .flv. I'd particularly like to be able to enlarge the viewing window, but when I do that with the FLV player, the picture pixelates badly (gets blurry). So I was thinkin' maybe one of the other formats would be of better quality and enable the viewing window to be enlarged a bit without so much picture degradation.

I'm not expecting DVD or 1080p quality here or anything -- just the best I can get with a reasonable amount of effort.

By the way, what do I need in terms of a viewer to watch MPEG4 video? Just Windows Media Player or QuickTime, or ???

Sorry for the 'newbish' questions. This is all relatively new to me and I'm just tryin' to figure it out. Thanks for the replies and info. :beer:

 

[Sunrise089]

This is one of the funniest threads I've seen in a long time. I started reading and expected the OP to state he wanted to rip HD movies or record in-game cutscenes or the like. Then I see the actual target is YouTube As others have indicated, any available standard format is fine, but by way of analogy this is like posting a thread asking whether you should get a dual 9800GX2 system or a tri-8800 Ultra system and then revealing you want to run Doom on the system.

As far as a good player, VLC plays just about everything and is free.

 

[Martimus]

Originally posted by: taltamir
AVI is a container... AVI, MKV, OGM are all containers, the affect the KIND of data that can be stored, and the overhead (in both space and CPU useage to decode)... they have NO AFFECT WHATSOEVER on quality, and you can convert between them in literally seconds (a process called remuxing... a remuxer tool can remux a 1gb file in under a minute with NO loss of quality... changing it from say, an AVI, to MKV.

That is only true if both forms use lossless or no compression. When the data is lost, you won't get it back by converting it to another format, but you may lose more data if the other format also uses a lossy compression.

 

[TheOtherRizzo]

To answer your question about youtube: http://blog.jimmyr.com/High_Qu...on_Youtube_11_2008.php

If you want to understand more you need to find out the difference between containers, codecs and resolution as you seem quite confused.

 

[Ken90630]

This is one of the funniest threads I've seen in a long time. I started reading and expected the OP to state he wanted to rip HD movies or record in-game cutscenes or the like. Then I see the actual target is YouTube

Well, what can I say? I'm new at this. We all have to start somewhere.

But your comment about ripping HD movies is interesting, 'cuz I've had that in the back of my mind as something else I'd like to know how to do one of these days. Care to give me a few tips, or link me to a particularly good tutorial or something?

 

[Ken90630]

Thanks, TheOtherRizzo, particularly for that link -- that is great info. :beer:

I would like to understand this stuff better. Do you by any chance have a recommendation of a good link/source to educate myself with, preferably starting with the basics?

 

[SunSamurai]

1. You think AVI is a codec
2. Youre talking about youtube

The hell is wrong with you? Youre one of those retards back in the day that that keps spouting that moronic selling phrase "DIGITAL QUALITY". Anyone that know what that actually meant would laugh at it. Becuse anyone that said it thinking they knew something, instantly marked themselves as a tool.

Youre like someone putting on shoes when youre born without feet.

www.doom9.org

Troll the forums there, and try not to assume you know what things means so you dont ask ridiculous questions.

There's no need to be name-calling.
Considering the OP is attempting to learn, i don't see the need for the level of rudeness in this post.

n7
Video Mod

 

[BassBomb]

Originally posted by: postmortemIA

Originally posted by: BassBomb
Wouldn't uncompressed be the "best" format as far as quality?

you won't find that anywhere anymore, it is simply waste of space.

I never said he could find it, but I answered the question with the right answer.

 

[Ken90630]

Originally posted by: aeternitas
1. You think AVI is a codec
2. Youre talking about youtube

The hell is wrong with you? Youre one of those retards back in the day that that keps spouting that moronic selling phrase "DIGITAL QUALITY". Anyone that know what that actually meant would laugh at it. Becuse anyone that said it thinking they knew something, instantly marked themselves as a tool.

Youre like someone putting on shoes when youre born without feet.

www.doom9.org

Troll the forums there, and try not to assume you know what things means so you dont ask ridiculous questions.

There's no need to be name-calling.
Considering the OP is attempting to learn, i don't see the need for the level of rudeness in this post.

n7
Video Mod

In all the time I've been on this site, and all the threads I've participated in, helping others and being helped by others, that is probably the most bizarre attack I've ever been subjected to.

As the expression goes, give some people enough rope and they'll hang themselves. Keep it up, and my guess is you'll be the one trolling other sites in lieu of this one.

 

[kmmatney]

Originally posted by: aeternitas
1. You think AVI is a codec
2. Youre talking about youtube

The hell is wrong with you? Youre one of those retards back in the day that that keps spouting that moronic selling phrase "DIGITAL QUALITY". Anyone that know what that actually meant would laugh at it. Becuse anyone that said it thinking they knew something, instantly marked themselves as a tool.

Youre like someone putting on shoes when youre born without feet.

www.doom9.org

Troll the forums there, and try not to assume you know what things means so you dont ask ridiculous questions.

Chill out dude...

Besides www.doom9.org, a good site is www.afterdawn.com. However these sites will have a dizzying array of information. For ripping DVD movies, the best, easiest programs are:

For "ripping" the movie to your hard disk: ripit4me (which also requires DVDDecryptor)

For changing the size of the movie to fit on a single layer DVD (and also allow you to remove unwanted items from the DVD, such as other languages): DVDShrink

I've never actually ripped "HD" movies such as Blue-ray...

As for your original question, a good high quality format is AVI, using DivX or XVid as the video codec, and MP3 as the audio codec. The aFLV is a flash video format. To convert it you can use this tool:

http://www.pazera-software.com.../flv-to-avi-converter/
or
http://www.onlyfreewares.com/A...V-to-AVI-Converter.php

This program supports XVid and DivX codecs. Just remember that you will never get the video qwuality to be better than your starting material, so it won't look any better than your original FLV files.

A great all around video player is VideoLAN or VLC. It will play just about every video or sound file ever made.

 

[konakona]

heh, doesnt this thread belong in the software forum?

sorry to threadjack, but what about high quality stuff? I am talking 1280x720 material in divx 6.8x vs xvid 1.1 (and sometimes wmv at the same rez)
I get a a feeling some of you are going to swear by h. 264... I am not the one encoding these though.

 

[ViRGE]

DivX and XviD are both MPEG-4 ASP codecs, the quality is practically the same between the two at any give bitrate. H.264 at the same bitrate would blow MPEG-4 ASP out of the water.

 

[Throckmorton]

Leave the videos as FLV and play them with VLC, rather than decrease quality by recompressing