What Is The Difference Between H.264 Video And MPEG-4 Video?

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Learn more about Labs What is the difference between H.264 video and MPEG-4 video? [closed] Ask Question Asked 12 years, 7 months ago Modified 4 years ago Viewed 266k times 72 Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.

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Are these both the same? Is H.264 codec of MPEG-4? What if I need to convert flv to high definition H.264 video format? I want make online tv streaming and want to use PHP or Python.

• video
• h.264
• video-encoding
• mpeg-4

Share Improve this question Follow edited Nov 28, 2020 at 20:30 Jonas 128k100100 gold badges326326 silver badges405405 bronze badges asked May 7, 2012 at 6:07 Ravi SharmaRavi Sharma 1,18233 gold badges1111 silver badges2020 bronze badges 2

• 3 reelseo.com/encoding-formats-mpeg4-vs-h264 – Ashwini Chaudhary Commented May 7, 2012 at 6:12
• I suggest to ask this question in StackOverflow for Multimedia Systems – Hamed Commented Sep 19, 2015 at 10:06

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2 Answers 2

Sorted by: Reset to default Highest score (default) Trending (recent votes count more) Date modified (newest first) Date created (oldest first) 87

H.264 is a new standard for video compression which has more advanced compression methods than the basic MPEG-4 compression. One of the advantages of H.264 is the high compression rate. It is about 1.5 to 2 times more efficient than MPEG-4 encoding. This high compression rate makes it possible to record more information on the same hard disk. The image quality is also better and playback is more fluent than with basic MPEG-4 compression. The most interesting feature however is the lower bit-rate required for network transmission. So the 3 main advantages of H.264 over MPEG-4 compression are: ‐ Small file size for longer recording time and better network transmission. ‐ Fluent and better video quality for real time playback ‐ More efficient mobile surveillance application

H264 is now enshrined in MPEG4 as part 10 also known as AVC

Refer to: http://www.velleman.eu/downloads/3/h264_vs_mpeg4_en.pdf

Hope this helps.

Share Improve this answer Follow edited Jun 20, 2020 at 9:12 CommunityBot 111 silver badge answered May 7, 2012 at 6:17 talha2ktalha2k 25.6k44 gold badges6464 silver badges8282 bronze badges 2

• 12 h.264 is a codec. Video streams in the h.264 codec generally sit in an mpeg-4 container; often these files have the extension mp4. dreamincode.net/forums/topic/118544-convert-swf-to-h264 – Ravi Sharma Commented May 7, 2012 at 6:31
• 2 thanks alphaMale your pdf is helpful. – Ravi Sharma Commented May 7, 2012 at 6:35

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They are names for the same standard from two different industries with different naming methods, the guys who make & sell movies and the guys who transfer the movies over the internet. Since 2003: "MPEG 4 Part 10" = "H.264" = "AVC". Before that the relationship was a little looser in that they are not equal but an "MPEG 4 Part 2" decoder can render a stream that's "H.263". The Next standard is "MPEG H Part 2" = "H.265" = "HEVC"

Share Improve this answer Follow edited Apr 8, 2015 at 16:47 Johnny Bones 8,41277 gold badges5858 silver badges127127 bronze badges answered Apr 13, 2014 at 0:39 JorgenJorgen 23722 silver badges22 bronze badges Add a comment |

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4 How do I convert an h.264 stream to MP4 using ffmpeg and pipe the result to the client?

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