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H.264/AVC/MPEG-4

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I haven't seen a lot of discussion on this around here so I thought I'd start this to get some of your opinions on using these codecs and playing them on your computers and home theater systems.

First of all, a little background on my experiences. As you may or may not know, I have been in film school for about a year now and have edited a dozen or so short films. In addition to authoring these films to DVD, I've also encoded my HD projects in H.264 using Final Cut Studio 2's Compressor application. Other than my own films, I've accumulated a lot of MPEG-4 HD programming from my DVR that has been transfered to my HTPC.

I've recently set up Vista's Media Center on my HTPC along with FFDShow/Haali Splitter/etc. to optimize video playback of any and all formats that are on my PC. What I've noticed though, is that playback of HD MPEG-4 content seems to be a lot more stressful on my system than a comparable HD MPEG-2 file. In fact, I haven't really gotten it to play back correctly on my system yet. Episodes of The Office that I've transfered over from my DVR (.TS files) play back perfectly in PowerDVD, but don't play right in Media Player Classic, Media Center, and VLC, if at all.

Has anyone else run into problems like this? I'm guessing that the problem has to do with FFDShow, but I could be wrong.

Regardless, I'm planning on converting all my MPEG-2 programming to H.264 to save on precious disk space. Is anyone else doing anything similar, or planning on releasing their stuff in H.264?

My Projects:
[Holiday Special Hybrid DVD v2]
[X0 Project]
[Backstroke of the West DVD]
[ROTS Theatrical DVD]

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Decoding H.264 is much more intensive than MPEG-2. I've heard that CoreAVC is the fastest H.264 decoder, might be worth giving it a try to see how it compares with ffdshow.

I can play 720p x264 files with no problem on my PC (Athlon X2 4200+) with Media Player Classic Home Cinema Edition, although to be honest I'm not really sure whether it's using ffdshow or the Cyberlink decoder.

I've just got a DVI to HDMI cable so will be testing out some HD files in the near future - although time is a bit sparse at the moment!

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I use H264 on occasion but mainly for low-bitrate stuff. I use regular MPEG-4 for just about everything else.

"Right now the coffees are doing their final work." (Airi, Masked Rider Den-o episode 1)

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I thought MPEG-4 is a broad open standard (and AVC/H.264 is just one MPEG-4 codec) so what do you mean by "regular MPEG-4"?
Fez: I am so excited about Star Whores.
Hyde: Fezzy, man, it's Star Wars.
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MPEG-4 Part 2 (divx/xvid), rather than Part 10 (H.264)

"Right now the coffees are doing their final work." (Airi, Masked Rider Den-o episode 1)

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I may still have an H.264 transport stream sample from BBC HD on my hard drive somewhere. But if you look around you should be able to find some more to download (try here, for example).

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The download link on that page isn't working for me. Though I did find a thread over at Doom9 with some good samples. It looks as though the sample files I tried out played OK in Media Player Classic, with a little choppiness. They played flawlessly in PowerDVD though. I'll have to check, but I'm guessing right now that either the files from my DVR are too high in bitrate for MPC to handle, or there's something actually wrong with them.

My Projects:
[Holiday Special Hybrid DVD v2]
[X0 Project]
[Backstroke of the West DVD]
[ROTS Theatrical DVD]