Video Formats.

  • Thread starter DQuaN
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DQuaN

DQuaN

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Hi all,

I'm doing a bit of research into different video formats, and I was wondering if any of you knew off the top of your head...

Which format has the best compression, and which has the best quality?

I am looking at mpeg, mov, rm, swf, and avi.

Thanks.
 
I think you need a little bit of background information first. SWF is a vector file format, AVI and MOV are container formats (that is they are a generic container for a video, and some sound), leaving MPEG and RM (RealVideo) as the video formats left.

SWF is a wierd one. It stores data to draw shapes (for example position and colour), and optionally a timeline. These can be combined to make cartoon like images/movies.

The container formats; AVI, MOV (generally limited to Quicktime codecs), MPEG-TS (the TS stands for Transport Stream); can best be described as a package, containing compressed video, and compressed audio (seperately). The audio can be compressed with a wide range of codecs, such as MP3, Ogg Vorbis, etc, or even as uncompressed WAV. Similarly, theres a range of codecs to compress the video part, such as WMV, DivX and H.263. Any two formats (one for audio, one for video) can be used and placed in the container, as long as the container has support for it.

This is why sometimes when you try to play a video file, your software tries to download a codec to play it, because although it can read the container file, it does not have one or both of the codecs needed for the audio and video parts.

Wikipedia is your friend here: Containers, Video Codecs
 
I'm looking more for compression. I need a comparison on them and have not yet been able to find any.

If I have a 3 min video in all those formats, what will the difference be in file size?
 
Well I was trying to point out that some of the file formats you pointed out ar not actually video compression formats at all (the containers). SWF is not really concerned with video at all, and so basically you want a comparison of the different video codecs.

Thats not a simple thing to do though, as some have a multitude of different options, which can result in different levels of compression and differing quality output. You can't just simply compare the codecs on a like for like basis due to the massive difference some of those options make.

Generally speaking though, they are all roughly as good as each other. Some are better at lower bitrates, whilst others excel at higher bitrates. Overall though, the quality to filesize remains the same amongst them as they all use similar approaches.

Just use whichever you have available. :)
 
I have all available. I'm not sure which one to use on a web page though.
 
Best quality codec: XviD [proof]

As for best compression, I dunno.

If you want to stream it from a webpage though, you're probably better off going with ASF as the majority of people have WMP and the appropriate codecs installed.
 
I have found WMV to give the smallest filesize, but there is a fair bit of quality loss in the compression.
 

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