H264 Profiles?

[dalihrp]

What is the benefit for choosing High Profile compare with main or baseline profile?

Which profile most compatible for now and future, especially for hardware player?

Nero Standard AVC equal to which profile on x264?

Is baseline profile offer XVID quality?

thanx

[Manao]

Each profiles defines a set of tools that you can use. Most of these tools improve the efficiency of the encoder ( i.e, the more those tools, the better the quality should be ), however, some of them have other uses ( error resilience for example ).

If you consider only the tools that improve the efficiency, the three profiles are inclusive : main is strictly better than baseline, and high is strictly better than main.

High profile should be mandatory for hardware player, since it seems it's part of HD DVD / Blueray. However, it's hard right now to tell whether all of it will be supported. It seems right now that the 8x8 transform at least will be supported.

Nero, at the moment, is main profile only. It'll soon get high profile too.

Baseline can offer XviD quality if the encoder is good enough. Theorically, it should be able to offer a better quality than mpeg4 asp.

[dalihrp]

Thank you manao.