x264 QuickTime Codec

✎ Published: 2006-01-03 10:30:30

H264, Apple's AVC codec, produces high-quality video files with reduced sizes. x264, an open-source variant, recently outperformed other codecs in a competition. It has been compiled as a QuickTime extension for Mac OS X, offering more detailed encoding options, potentially surpassing the quality of H264.

x264 QuickTime Codec

Most of us know about h264, Apple's implementation of a so-called 'AVC' codec in Quicktime7. H264 creates video files of very good quality while still being able to greatly reduce the file-size.

H264 is actually only an implementation of a standard and thus several other AVC codecs are available, for example Ateme or VT7.
In addition to that, there's x264, an open source implementation of h264 by the nice guys who also brought us the VideoLan Player (VLC).

x264 just recently won a competition against other impressive codecs like "DivX 6.1", "XviD 1.1" or "Ateme 1.4.0.3".

Now someone managed to compile x264 as a Quicktime extension, so one can use it for encodings and decodings under Mac OS X.
x264 offers more detailed encoding options compared with h264, and I read that the quality should surpass h264 though I'm not really sure about that and didn't test that either.

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