H.264 vs MP4 vs XVID Which Is Best For AVI??

[DJboutit]

H.264 vs MP4 vs XVID Which is best for AVI??

[johns0]

You need to give more info,avi is just a container for certain codecs,are your files going to xvid avi?

[DJboutit]

I am using Freemake to convert videos to avi so they will play on my Philips dvd player

[johns0]

Mkv and mp4 usually are H.264 so as long as the original file has good quality video then that's the file type you want.

[Kakujitsu]

H.264 and XviD are both video codecs, H.264 tends to have much better quality/compression. AVI and MP4 are both container formats. They are not codecs. You can have MP4 and AVI files encoded with both XviD or H.264 video codecs.

Encoding and decoding complexity: H.264 encoding and decoding is more computationally complex than some other codecs such as MPEG-4 Part 2 (DivX, XviD). However, the compression performance of H.264 is significantly better than these so it depends on what is more important to you.

This is becoming less of a problem as more devices are including hardware support for H.264.

Error Resiliency: There are some things in H.264 to deal with bit errors, but often they are not used and a single bit error can still have a catastrophic effect. From what I have seen in my study of video codecs, error resiliency seems to being pushed to another layer in most systems. That is, the video codec is designed for maximum compression, and another layer is added on top of the video data to take care of bit errors. That way those who don't need the error resiliency don't pay for it with lower compression rates.

A common example of this is the DVB standard which uses MPEG-2 or H.264 coded video inside an MPEG-2 Transport Stream that contains a forward error correction scheme.

It all comes down to what devices you are going to be playing said media on... Do they support AVI container or MP4 container, Also do they support H.264 or Xvid?

Read about MP4 here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP4
Read about AVI here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_Video_Interleave

[johns0]

The op dvd player only supports xvid avi at 720x480/576 so his obvious choice is to encode mkv or mp4 which use H.264 to xvid avi.