which H264 codec do the pros use?

[deadrats]

as the title suggests, anyone know which H264 codec is used to encode commercial blu-ray and hd dvd disk? i know it's not x264 and i know it's not main concept's H264, using KMPlayer i have been able to determine that most high def movie trailers use apple's H264 and i have found a few that use intel's H264, but since i don't have a blu-ray reader for my pc i can't load one of my blu-rays and see what they were encoded with.

the reason i want to find out is because i'm not that happy with main concept's H264 codec, i don't think x264 is much better and while i really like apple's H264 at high bitrates, there aren't any programs on the windows side, and nothing anywhere near affordable on the OS X side, that even come close to using that codec to it's full potential.

so, any ideas?

[yoda313]

Here is the BLURAY official spec:

https://www.videohelp.com/hd

Video codecs MPEG2 - MP@HL and MP@ML
AVC/H264 - MPEG-4 AVC: HP@4.1/4.0 and MP@4.1/4.0/3.2/3.1/3.0
VC-1 - AP@L3 and AP@L2

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[guns1inger]

So what you are really asking isn't which codec, but which encoder.

Apple's H264 is actually pretty knobbled and not that great because all of Apples hardware is limited to basic spec AVC.

As with most encoders, the quality comes from a) Having high source, and b) the user knowing how to exploit it to get the best quality from it.

If you have the cash though, you could look into this : http://pro.sony.com/bbsc/ssr/cat-editing/cat-encodingandauthoring/product-BAEVX1000/

[videopoo]

This thing's fantastic but its also $70,000!

http://www.omnidvdmedia.com/products_cinemacrafthde.shtml

[guns1inger]

But if you are going to make a few million or more from the release, what's $40 or $70k between friends ?