Thread: Video Formats/Codecs

AVI doesn't support soft-subs
(ie. text files with a timestamp & subtitle text)
hard-subs only
meaning the subtitles are rendered in some font, and imprinted directly into the video
(this takes a long time, and means re-encoding the video - losing a lot of quality)

it also means you can't turn off the subtitles

what formats & containers can your Archos 404 read?

M-PEG 4 ASP (IPB)
AVI file container with MP4 file format
Microsoft WMV9 Main Profile Medium Level
Protected WM DRM
Optional H.264
Optional MPEG2

Hopefully that made more sense to you than me.

H.264 is the industry standard and in my experience is always the best quality to size ration. It also has a wide range of subtitle and multi-language support. Another benefit of it is that it's the only one of the mentioned codecs that will also work on your iPod without further conversion. It's a really complicated codec, so if you're on a really slow computer it might skip frames and encoding takes a long time.

So you're basically saying H.264 is the way to go. Okay, so how do I convert my files?

[EDIT] Apparently H.264 is just a form of MPEG4.

No, it's not. MPEG4 is just the container, if you look at the algorithm it's very much more complex.

Originally Posted by Goldney

Okay, so how do I convert my files?

for burning in subtitles
http://www.raymond.cc/blog/archives/...i-permanently/
From step 5 onwards

Actually the version of Vobsub I downloaded has a neat lossless program that does exactly what I needed. Thanks Ynot and Ninja.

Merging video files, im not to sure about, but converting them, there is a program called 'Super' and it converts just about anything to anything. It's free to. Unfortunately i can't find a link for you, but a google search should work!