EyeHome Encoding and FFmpegX perfection for it?

[major]

They are all mpeg-4. DivX is a brand used to indicate a flavor of mpeg-4 made by a commercial company. XviD is the name of another flavor of mpeg-4 made by an open-source project. There are a lot more which usually use the name "DivX" even if they are not, just because it has became a popular name. They are mostly compatible formats. The future, however, will probably adopt h.264 which is incompatible with all the aboves.

[davemchine]

Hmm, looks like the eyehome supports "MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4" so the h.264 doesn't work for me at the present. But I will keep that nugget of info in the back of my mind.

So if a device advertises mpeg4 or divx playback it "should" playback all of the variants or is it a shoot and miss type of event? What do you feel is the best choice for going into the future and maintaining long term compatibility? The xvid again?

Dave

[davemchine]

Maybe I should ask a different question. Will ffmpegx convert from mpeg4 to xvid and still look good or will I have problems?

[major]

There is no real standardization over mpeg-4 players, so you have to test with your player to be sure about what it plays. Generally all these flavors of mpeg-4 should be supported by a mpeg-4 player, unless the manufacturer failed to ensure that. XviD is a very good format and if your device plays it, then go for it without doubts.

[major]

Any encoding will imply losing a slight part of quality from the original video, but apart from this philosophical remark, you may convert mpeg4 to xvid and it will still look good.

[davemchine]

I'm doing a conversion now. High quality, two pass, trellis quantization, bicubic spline, and it is running pretty quickly. I will post back as to the quality and if there are any glitches tonight. Now I'm REALLY wishing for a ffmpegx batch feature as I have 110+ episodes of magnum pi to convert!!!

[dscottbuch]

You might look here at http://www.xvid.org

Scott

[davemchine]

The conversion seems to have worked pretty well. The video is still sharp and easy to watch. The only problem I encountered was in high motion scenes. There was a bit of jerkiness to it that is not present in the mpeg4 file. So I inspected the file and it was 2/3 the size of the original even though the bitrate was set to the same setting. So I cranked it up to 1300 which ALMOST matched the file size of the original and now the motion seems fine. So this seems like a good solution. Thanks for all the helpl

Dave