Best quality space saving video format?

[drakorex]

My 2TB HDD is fast approaching its max capacity, and has got me thinking of ways that I can further delay the inevitable. So what is the smallest video format that I can have and still look the best on a Wii?

 

[trumpet-205]

Wii only plays 480p video, so at best it is 8-bit H264 with 4 reference frames.

Just use Handbrake.

 

[PityOnU]

I had some pretty extreme difficulty getting my Wii to play any videos with decently watchable quality.

Related, though, according to a session I attended at Google I/O, the VP8/9 codec gives the best quality per byte compared to everything else out there right now. It's usually used in .webm files (you may have encountered them before). Don't know if the Wii plays those, though.

 

[trumpet-205]

I had some pretty extreme difficulty getting my Wii to play any videos with decently watchable quality.

Related, though, according to a session I attended at Google I/O, the VP8/9 codec gives the best quality per byte compared to everything else out there right now. It's usually used in .webm files (you may have encountered them before). Don't know if the Wii plays those, though.

Not really. VP8 is really limited on features, which in turn, hurts compression.

Consider this, if I were to encode an anime/cartoon. With H264 I can set reference frame all the way up to 16 (I use 10), but on VP8 I can only go up to 3. Higher reference frame are especially beneficial in animation/cartoon since they have a lot of redundant frames, and reference frame helps compressing redundant frames.

Not to mention VP8 receives no hardware support, so every encoding is done software basis. VP8 also doesn't support B-frame, so it can only generate a frame based on previous frame, not upcoming frame.

Read more: https://gist.github.com/Hupotronic/4645784

I don't know about VP9, but I don't expect it to replace upcoming H265 either.

 

[PityOnU]

Not really. VP8 is really limited on features, which in turn, hurts compression.

Consider this, if I were to encode an anime/cartoon. With H264 I can set reference frame all the way up to 16 (I use 10), but on VP8 I can only go up to 3. Higher reference frame are especially beneficial in animation/cartoon since they have a lot of redundant frames, and reference frame helps compressing redundant frames.

Not to mention VP8 receives no hardware support, so every encoding is done software basis.

Read more: https://gist.github.com/Hupotronic/4645784

I don't know about VP9, but I don't expect it to replace upcoming H265 either.

I'm not an A/V guru or anything so I honestly don't really know what that means... I'm just forwarding what I was told by Google engineers and a handful of articles I had read on the subject. I think engadget had one or two (can't find it now).

Although it probably does lack features, it stands to reason that a codec designed expressly for web use would really emphasize maintaining quality with high compression.

FWIW - The engineers did acknowledge that the encode process of VP8/9 is not the greatest, but again it's a codec meant for consumption on the web. Most people who watch videos don't really care too much about how long it takes to encode them.

 

[trumpet-205]

Even at streaming H264 beats VP8. Google even picked H264 with AAC for YouTube flash or H264 with Vorbis for HTML5.

Main selling point about VP8 is that it is patent free, so one don't need to be worry about getting lawsuit from MPEG-LA (patent holder for H264).

I don't think WIiMC supports VP8 anyway.