h.264 Anyone?

Here’s the goal: you want to use the H.264 codec to distribute video content via Amazon S3, used inside a Flash player, and playable on any iPod/iPhone. Sounds simple enough right? Wrong!

The question is what kind of wrapper you want to encase the H.264 in, mov, mp4, or the arbitrary Apple standard of m4v (to distinguish it from m4a). We have adopted a .mp4 standard at our studio. So there’s 2 ways to go about producing a .mp4 video either QuickTime Pro or stand alone encoding software (Cleaner, Squeeze, Episode, etc.)

“Not so fast,”you say! Just use Compressor. It comes with every version of Final Cut Studio…you’ll be good to go. The problem is that Compressor only creates .m4v or .mov using the H.264 codec. If you create a .mp4 you get stuck with the generic mp4 codec

“O.K. Well just change the extension when it comes out,” you say. Well the problem is that the mp4/m4v/mov gets data written into the header of the file to specify what format it is. If it gets changed QT Pro cannot recognize it

We use Sorenson Squeeze (version 4.5.7) at our production studio to encode video. Squeeze only does the H.264 codec in a mp4 wrapper. So no .m4v (Apple’s iWhatever approved format) or .mov. Plus version 4.5 of Squeeze takes about 1.5-2 hours to encode one twenty minute file on a four-core machine (that’s too many numbers for one sentence). Now consider this: we have almost 2000 videos to encode. Not the fastest solution

So we could change our format from .mp4 (what we currently use) to .m4v and just use Compressor. The trouble with Compressor is that the settings in Compressor only go down to 1000kbps. That’s almost 4 times our current data rate (275kbps). What’s a boy to do

No solution has of yet, revealed itself. I continue to research how to make a H.264 .mp4 file with speed and efficiency (Sorenson is the best option so far). Oh and in case you were wondering….QT Pro can create mp4 files with the H.264 codec, but they aren’t compatible with the iPod/iPhone. In fact there’s a specific setting inside of QT Pro for the iPod or the iPhone (it creates a .m4v file)

Bottom line: too many formats within just this one standard. This doesn’t even begin to delve into the .wmv, .mov, .flv race. It’s a jungle out there. Can we please simplify this….and soon?!!