[FFmpeg-user] What video formats to support?

[Dotan Cohen]

On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 14:53, Andrew Berg <bahamutzero8825 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2011.06.01 06:39 AM, Dotan Cohen wrote:
>> The problem is that some players on Ebay say that they support MPEG4,
>> but mention that they don't support h264. That seems to contract the
>> statement that supporting a codec means supporting all implementations
>> of the codec. Is there a fine manual that I should be reading to
>> explain all this?
> AVC/H.264 and MPEG-4 Part 2 (which many call MPEG-4 video, even though
> that can easily be confused with the MP4 container, which often holds
> AVC video) are two completely different standards. Wikipedia is pretty
> helpful.
>> Then h264 isn't a codec? Wikipedia implies that it is:
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H264
> It's a standard. There are several implementations of this standard
> (e.g. x264), which would be considered codecs.
> See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codec.
>

Thanks, I see, the point being:
"A codec (the program) should not be confused with a coding or
compression format or standard – a format is a document (the
standard), a way of storing data, while a codec is a program (an
implementation) which can read or write such files. In practice
"codec" is sometimes used loosely to refer to formats, however."

With that in mind I'll go back over all the material that I've read so
far. Thank you!

-- 
Dotan Cohen

http://gibberish.co.il
http://what-is-what.com