Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Blu-Ray (and HD-DVD) video codecs.

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Topic: Blu-Ray (and HD-DVD) video codecs.

Stephen Furley
Film God

Posts: 3059
From: Coulsdon, Croydon, England
Registered: May 2002

posted 08-06-2016 04:14 PM

Does either VC-1 or MGEG-4 AVC have any real advantage over the other? To be honest I can't see any difference, and I believe that all players can handle both.

All of my HD-DVDs, about 40, use VC-1, as do about 60-70% of my BDs, a slightly higher number. I can only produce MPEG-4 AVC. Is this really a problem?

BDs can also use MGEG-2, but is only for SD 'extras'? I've never seen it used for the main HD content.

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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."

Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001

posted 08-06-2016 06:17 PM

If I recall correctly, the VC-1 codec is owned by Microsoft and costs more in terms of licensing than MPEG-4 AVC. The MPEG-4 codec has more features on the high end for archival purposes. But it seems like both VC-1 and MP4 have similar performance on consumer media like Blu-ray discs.

MPEG-2 is effectively dead in terms of high definition use. It's really only good for making SD video material for DVD discs. Both VC-1 and MP4 are a lot more efficient in terms of compression capability than MPEG-2. Both DirecTV and Dish Network used to broadcast in MPEG-2, but they switched over to MPEG-4 several years ago. They had to replace or retool satellites and replace customer receivers across the board.

Now HEVC/H.265, the High Efficiency Video Coding format, is growing more popular. It's significantly more efficient at compression than MPEG-4 AVC. It's the standard video compression format on UltraHD Blu-ray. I kind of expect the satellite TV providers, cable companies and streaming companies like Netflix to all shift over to HEVC within the next couple or so years. I think the only thing that could stop that is another codec achieving similar levels of efficiency. The Internet is a little more wide open. MP4 is widely used, but the open source WebM format could get more popular.

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Joe Redifer
You need a beating today

Posts: 12859
From: Denver, Colorado
Registered: May 99

posted 08-08-2016 09:54 PM

MP4 is just a shell aka a container format. AVC is the codec and it's used on a lot more Blu-rays than VC1 to my knowledge. There are also a lot of Blu-rays that use MPEG-2 for HD, especially the early ones. There is nothing limiting it to SD and that really has nothing to do with anything. AVC can do standard definition as well. MPEG-2 is still in nationwide use as the broadcast standard for television. They will have to do another switchover in the future. I don't see that happening soon. They will need to keep doing these broadcast switchovers once every 15 years or so. But seriously who has time to watch TV?

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