Throwing up the idea for a new section concerning h264 encoding/decoding and GUI's, maybe located in the "Digital video discussion" area. We have "DivX / XviD" and "MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 encoding (AVI to DVD)", but no place specific for the latest MPEG-4. Your thoughts?
hey guys, I know this is an old post, but I started this thread and would like to run this question back through one more time.
h.264.. proprietary and dying as the x.264 teams have well and truly got the jump on them with a proper free open standard.
We have plans to revamp the entire forum divide into "it makes more sense this way" type of structure, something I actually drafted almost a year ago. This _will_ happen sometime in next couple of months, but at the moment, the v4 development is the priority and things like forum re-org wont happen until the new site is live, bugs fixed and everything stabilized. But ye, MPEG-4/AVC (aka H.264 aka AVC) encoding is nowadays the most common video encoding method and it makes sense to accommodate to that. x264 is just an H.264 encoder, nothing more. Thus, while free software, it encodes videos into proprietary format (subset of MPEG-4, known as H.264 or AVC). If you want to use completely open source solution (i.e. where also the resulting format is open), use Theora.
Thanks dRD. A very good explanation and makes perfect sense. Now, looking forward to the new afterdawn.