Has anybody gotten good quality with MPEG4? I haven't.

[rharder]

I'm rather disappointed. I kinda assumed (you know what that means) that if MPEG4 was a successor to MPEG2 then I ought to be able to, with Best settings all around, get an MP4 file that looked as good as a DVD.

No luck.

In fact at the same bit-rates, I have a bunch of MPEG1 content that looks better than MP4 stuff I've compressed with QT6 Pro.

How very disillusioning.

Does anyone have any more encouraging news to report?

-Rob

 

[mindbend]

I haven't dug deep into this yet, but I just did a quick test using a DV source clip exported form QTPro 6. The default settings are not great, but upping the video slider to maximum produced a file that was about as good as anything I've seen. The end file size was 6% of the original and looked almost as good, though it was 320x240 instead of the original 720x480.

Using Final Cut Pro, I was able to export an MPEG4 at the best possible settings and 720x480 size which was indistinguishable from the original. Unfortunately, it was 70% of the original size (original size 18.9 MB, new size 13.3 MB).

From FCP at 320x240, Best settings gave me 4.1 MB file which was marginally better than what QTPro 6 could export.

Finally, exporting with IMA audio compression (above FCP exports were full stereo uncompressed 48 KHZ, so that adds a lot) and medium setting gave me a 548 kb file that looked quite nice at normal playback size and perfectly fine at 2x.

So, my take is that MPEG4s can look good to fantastic depending on your ability to compromise. FCP gives you more control than QT Player and Media Cleaner better give us even more control, and soon.

 

[j79]

Actually, I wouldn't say MPEG-4 is a successor to MPEG-2. They serve two different purposes...

I find the quality of mpeg4 files great, for their purpose.. A high-grade, low bitrate file to be viewed over the internet.

An mpeg1 movie, I re-encoded shrunk from 41MB to 16 MB, without much loss in quality. I exported the file at 450 kbits/sec.