Ideal Video Encoding For Compatability

[DJ_Izumi]

In looking at all the consoles and hand-held gadgets, I thought I'd propose a discussion on the ideal formats to distribute AMVs at that can ensure ease of playback on the PC and other devices.

Naturally, the PC is probably the easiest platform since it's the most adaptable and most problems can be solved with the answer 'Install CCCP'.

The MKV container is popular in the fansub and DVD ripping circles because it supports h.264, AAC, and of course quite a few subtitle formats and subtitles are where the ego boosts come from. The main issue with MKV as a container is that it's actually pretty obscure, outside of fansubs and piracy, MKV is a useless piece of open source software that no aspect of the A/V industry want's to touch with long stick.

MP4 of course is the container that was actually MADE for MPEG-4 video, from DivX to h.264 and all the other little variations. When it comes to personal devices that arn't PCs, if it's gonna support a, h.264 capable container it's goign to be MP4. In my opinion MP4 is probably ideal to achive compatability and it can do everything that MKV can do for our uses (Really, almost ALL of MKV's features are unused by even the circles that use the container) since AMVs tend not to have subs... Though they sometimes do.

Of course, now we have a slew of video game consoles that support multimedia without hacking them to bits first. Xbox 360, PS3, PSP, and Wii all have media support these days and let's of course not forget the popular iPod and other handheld media players around the world.

The system I have the most experiance with is the Sony PlayStation Portable, you give a video geek a handheld video machine and he's gonna figure out what it can do quite eagerly.

To sum up the PSP's abilities, h.265 Main Profile (Not high profile) 720x480, up to 2mbps and AAC-LC for audio. It's pretty straight forward and a 2mbps 720x480 h.264 MP encode would certianly look great in most all cases.

The PS3 which a roommate of mine I've tinkered with a bit as well. Obviously, it'll playback anything the PSP does and then some. Up to 1920x1080, like 15mbps or so, h.264 high profile, and, well, basicly the sky's the limit.

The Xbox 360 is rougly similar to the PS3 in terms of h.264 support but limited to 10mbps and of course, it will playback all your WMV files too.

The Nintendo Wii... FLV or MJPEG... Yeah... That's it. Well, there goes our winning streak and hell it won't even play DVD-VIdeo. At least it has Mario Galaxy and SSB Melee, so we'll forgive it, won't we?

Apple's family of multi-media toys. One of the more popular handheld video goodies on the market.

First off the Apple TV. These things are sorta cute in a way but the design has it's flaws. h.264 is supported but only up to Main Profile level 3.1, 1280x720 and AAC-LC audio. Standard stuff, it's sorta like the PSP with higher resolution support but it lacks the high profile features of the PS3 or 360.

iPod video capable iPods are capable of 640x480, h.264 baseline profile, yeah, baseline, that's one notch below main profile. So any main profile encodes won't work and up to about 1.5mbps and standard AAC-LC audio. The features vary slightly between the iPods and the iPhone but it's all basicly the same.

In my opinion, h.264, main profile, 1.5-2mbps, 720x480 with AAC-LC will allow an encode of the highest compatability between most video game consoles. This should also work fairly well on many stand alone blu-ray and HD-DVD players that support video playback over the data CD/DVD. However if you want to make something compatable with the iPods/iPhones, you're boned unless you do a baseline profile encode, do a second encode that's baseline, or leave those device owners to their own transcoding skills.

[Zarxrax]

The thing is, I doubt most users will be watching amvs on their game console.