Hiyah Patrick! I haven't heard it mentioned here? Have I? Any examples? - G

Go to the Mainconcept site and download their trial version. Impressive!

Links to two tutorials on how to encode to it were posted here recently.
Search for Recode, they're on the VASST site.
Bob.

It's an MPEG-4 standard. Most modern MPEG-4 codecs follow the .H264 standard.

Marco

I lost track of the development process about a year ago, but for several years it was called H.26L and represented the ultimate in compression efficiency. Back then I read that, for a given level of video quality, wmv (from Microsoft) could compress about twice as well as MPEG2, and H.26L could compress about twice as well as wmv, or four times as well as MPEG2. So a video quality represented by an MPEG2 bitrate of 8Mb/sec could be delivered by the H.26L process at just 2Mb/sec! The downside of the codec back then was that it took a huge amount of processing on the encoding side, and a slightly less but still substantial amount on the decode side. Still, it represented the state of the art.

Since then I understand it's been folded in to the MPEG4 family, and is recognized as one of several official HDTV compression formats (including Microsoft's wmv). From what I read on this site and elsewhere, a Nero implementation does a pretty good job with it. Current DVD players don't read it yet.

MPEG2 is less than a decade old and many people were amazed that it was able to compress video to the extent that it did; now this new format comes along and I just have to wonder how much further a video image can be compressed. Amazing stuff.

Thanks for that . . . really puts me in the picture . . ! G

One thing to keep in mind is that where all of these compression systems shine is at lower bitrates. For the ultimate quality mpeg-2 at high bitrates is still the winner or even mpeg-1.
Bob.

MarcoB

no - not true