What is the best MPEG-4 codec?

[doctorjellybean]

I have a bunch of music videos which I want to convert. The playing field seems to be made up with Xvid and Divx. The main requirement is picture quality (although it can only be as good as the souce).

Any recommendations will be greatly appreciated

[deets]

this site avoids using phrases like best as its so subjective :)

personally i prefer xvid as its open source and all that, you probably cant go wrong with either though.

if you truly want quality, go for x264 as that should give you a perceptible quality improvement over a given file size compared to mpeg4 asp (xvid and divx etc.)

[Sharktooth]

:readrule:

[weaver4]

One of the questions that you need to ask is if you want to play these videos on a Stand-Alone-Player. If the answer is Yes then I would recommend that you use DivX, home-theater-profile. The quality difference between DivX and XviD is now so tight that you would be very hard pressed to see a difference, particularly at modest or higher bitrates. A very good second choice is to use XviD with a program like avi.net which encoded XviD so that it will play on all DivX certified players.

[Tagert]

I would go for x264.
It may be abit tricky to setup for the first time, but woah how good video quality it delivers though :)

Second after that I would recommend XviD for you.
It's pretty good as well in my opinion.

[setarip_old]

Hi!I have a bunch of music videos which I want to convert.What format(s) are these source videos?