H.264 Vs. X.264

[This article was first published in the December, 2010, issue of
Larry’s Monthly Final Cut Studio Newsletter. Click here to subscribe.]

 

Douglas Steick asks:

What’s the difference between the H.264 and X.264 codecs?

 

I’m working on a Blu-ray project and trying to decide which to use.

Larry replies: H.264 and X.264 are two different development projects that result in two different codecs that both do the same thing: create H.264-compliant files.

In some situations, you may be more pleased with the results of one codec vs. the other. I have found that H.264 tends to remove chroma from an image, which X.264 does not do. Also, X.264 may be faster.

My guess is that Encore is prepping your files for inclusion on the Blu-ray Disc, which may not be the same thing as transcoding. This also could mean that your compression settings were wrong, and not necessarily that you were using the wrong codec.

I use both codecs, depending upon the job.

By the way, I’m conducting a webinar next Wednesday on how to create a Blu-ray Disc using Adobe Encore.

UPDATE – Jan. 3, 2011

Mira Zimet adds:

Here’s something that you may or may not know regarding your H.264 VS. X.264 item in the newsletter. I compressed hundreds of files using DV Kitchen and the x.264 codec. When our web editor decided to set up our Web site so it worked on apple mobile devices, none of the videos compressed for x.264 worked. Meaning I had to recompress everything using h.264. I did talk to DV Kitchen about this (I think I might even have written to you about it). But once I recompressed (everything) to h.264, videos worked on smartphones and apple devices.

Larry replies: Mira, thanks for this update. I was not aware of this problem.

 

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