With HTML5 to incorporate native video support, the growth in H.264 video content on the web has begun growing at a serious pace. Latest reports suggest that it has rizen from 10% in January 2010 to 26% now.

That’s all well and good if you want to see the end of Adobe Flash but there’s a bigger question that needs asking here – is H.264 the best option for portable devices?

Our friends at Lifehacker Australia carried out a test based on information we found out through testing – that H.264 takes considerably longer to encode and create than MPEG-4.

H.264 is a complex video codec that takes much more CPU horsepower to process. Not only that, it also takes more CPU horsepower to decode too – and that raises several issues.

Portable devices such as smartphones, notebooks and the like need to run their CPUs faster and use up more battery decoding H.264 video than other video codecs. So that directly impacts battery life.

Basically, you can get better battery life using MPEG-4 instead of H.264.

The other issue is video quality. If you’re watching video on a small screen, any noticeable difference in video quality between MPEG-4 and H.264 will be so small that it just won’t be worth it. What you lose in battery life is not made up for in video quality.

And as for H.264 creating smaller video files, that’s a furphy. It all depends on how you set the video bit rate when encoding the file and what you set it to. You can create the same file sizes with MPEG-4 as you can with H.264. It’s all in the video bit rate.

Part of the problem has been user reliance on template options in most encoding software. It may allow you to set the encoding process parameters in one hit but you’re locked into a specific bit rate, which may suit larger frame-size video rather than be suited for portable devices.

H.264 might be the latest buzzword in video encoding but that doesn’t mean its ideally suited to every application.

Similar Posts: