In fact that there are so many ways to capture and share videos in the world today, means that there are now so many different and confusing ways to encode them and convert them just so they can be viewed by others or even ourselves. So in this video, I’m going to show you what you need to know about converting and encoding videos.
The first thing I’m going to cover are all the different types of video containers. Video containers are like a box that contains everything the video needs to play, such as video data, audio tracks, DVD chapters, subtitles, and things like that.
Most video types are known by their container, while there’s many different types of containers, here are the most popular. AVI was created by Microsoft in 1992 and it can contain most types of video codec’s except for the more recent ones but it does not to meta data, chapters, subtitles, except when you use it with third party programs such as VLC.
Mp4 is the most commonly used video format. It’s the fourth compression standard from the mpeg group which was developed by the international standards organization. It can store most any type of video data including most any type of video format, meta data, chapters, DVD, menus, and subtitles and that can also easily be streamed over the internet.
Mov is the container that’s owned by Apple’s QuickTime department. It was released in 1991 almost a year before Microsoft released their AVI container. And in 2001 both mp4 and mov began using the same format specifications.
If you look inside the video container, you’ll see all the different kinds of data that makes the video run. One of those specific types of data being the codec’s, codec’s stands for coder decoder and what ever codec you choose will determine the video size, speed and quality. Again, while there are tons out there, here are the most common types of codec’s.
The first type is Dvix and Xvid. Dvix is the codec that’s created by the Dvix corporation and Xvid which is Dvix spelled backwards is its freeware competitor. These codec’s are preferred for compressing movies for computer playback due to their size quality ratio. Generally, being able to compress an entire movie down to about seven hundred megabytes of the two, however Xvid is more preferred, not only because it’s the only the one of the two that can be used in the Unix environment, but also because it has slightly better quality.
Ffmpeg is the most widely used codec used within Linux distributions but it’s also compatible with Mac and Windows. It was mainly created as a combination of a free and an open source encoding and decoding libraries that are out there. So this makes it kind of one stop shop for encoding and decoding pretty much any type of video.
X264 is a codec that encodes most videos into h.264 which is the preferred codec when it comes to streaming video due to its quality. This is what YouTube videos are encoded in. So if you’re uploading a video to YouTube using x264 is the format, will give you the best results.
As far as containers go, the mp4 container is generally known for being able to display x264 the best.
Now when it comes to multimedia, a video’s bit rate tells you how much data and bits are compressed into one second. So as far as what you need to know, here’s a break down of the more popular types of bit rates.
2056 kilobits a second is the bit rate for streaming videos in video conferencing. 1375 kilobits a second is a round which is used for video CDs it could be a little bit more, it could be a little bit less, five megabits a second is what’s considered DVD quality and what’s used in most DVDs. Ten megabits per second is for HD TV and 40 megabits a second is the maximum for Blue ray videos.
So now that you know all about the codec’s and containers, have you used them? Well, there are several different free programs out there that give you these options is converting videos.
The first one is called Handbrake and this is the best when it comes to operating on different operating systems, because it’s available for Linux, Mac, and Windows. Now some other videos converting programs as far as I know they’re only available on Windows, but they are definitely worth mentioning.
One is called format factory, which is very simple to use. Another one is called super which has a lot more different options that format factory does and the last one is called Media Coder.
So I hope this helps you guys out and if you have any questions, feel free to post them on my website forum or just leave them in the comment below.
All right that’s it for this tutorial for more, go to Tinkernet.com
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