How do output formats rank?

[ungawa]

What's the best format to encode movies into, for highest quality and reasonable size, to burn onto a 4.7GB single-layer DVD and play on a standalone DVD player connected to a TV set, or to save on hard drive and play over a wireless home network?

Some format choices that I see are:
XViD
H.264
AC3 5 1
DivX
AVI
MPEG-1
MPEG-2
MPEG-4
MP4
MOV
WMV

probably more.

How do these various formats rank in comparison to each other?

Thank you.

[unskinnyboy]

You are comparing the wrong things to each other. In your list you have containers, video codecs, an audio compression format & a video compression standard. What you need to do is to do some Googling or go to Wikipedia or something and read up on what each of the ones you listed is. You can also use the search function here. You shouldn't expect to get spoon-fed here.

A standalone DVD player would only play MPEG-1 & MPEG-2, so it's not like you have a lot of choices there. Of the two, MPEG-2 is what you should use assuming your source is a DVD or something such.

To play from a hard drive, you have a lot of options - I'd recommend Xvid or x264 in an MKV container.

[fibbingbear]

Unskinnyboy is right. Some other things to keep in mind:

"Mainstream" Containers are typically:
MP4
AVI
MKV


"Mainstream" Video Codecs are typically:
MPEG1
MPEG2
DIVX / XVID
H.264
VC-1 (WMV)

"Mainstream" Sound codecs are typically:
AC3
MP3
AAC


You need to choose one of each, in essence (VC-1 / WMV may be less flexible... not 100% positive).

The most important factors to consider are 1.) what does your hardware play, and 2.) what's the lifetime expectancy of the format/codec/etc.

Some DVD players will also play DivX as long as it is encoded in a certain way (look up info about "profiles"). Most won't, though.

As Unskinnyboy says, your computer should be able to play any of them, although if you have a slow computer, DivX will be less resource intensive.

I personally like the MP4 container format and AAC audio with the H.264 video algorithm.

[ungawa]

unskinnyboy & fibbingbear

Thank you both for replying.

Does anyone know of a good up-to-date briefing 101 where a newbie can get a good orientation to all this (in adition to what you guys have already explained)?

The results I'm plowing up by google searching mostly seem outdated.

[KoD]

Haven't been there in a while, but since nothing has changed lately in what concerns video/audio coding standards: Video file (http://www.cccp-project.net/wiki/index.php?title=Video_file). Check the link to the "updated version". (it did not have this nice image, that's why I gave you this link to see first)