The VideoLAN Forums

Hi there,

I am about to deploy some music video content that is likely to be quite popular. We had been using Real's Helix server, but I am considering taking the plunge and supporting an OSS server/viewer platform instead. What would be the most widely installed video codec these days for Windows/Mac/Linux users?

Cheers,

You might be a year or two ahead of the curve. It's a real mess out there. Everybody is trying th make their mark with something.

Microsoft with wmv HD. Mac with h.264 and ACC. Peer to peers with DivX and XviD and Lord only knows what audio. Anime people with Matroska, XviD and ac3.

Most of this is not standard on all systems. Even MPEG-2 is an add on.

I think the real sleeper out of all this is H.264 video and AAC audio with up to 5.1 channels. The quality of both the Video and Audio is the best I have experienced, it's streamable to a PC or handheld and has been ratified as the codecs of choice for the Blue Ray Disks. This is supported on a Mac and Windows with QuickTime and iTunes. Nero 7 is also supporting H.264 and AAC. It is also compatible with VLC.

There is probably still going to be a bit of a fight over containers though. Logically it seems that mp4 would be a natural but subtitles have always been a bit of an issue. Many are moving to Matroska (MKV & MKA) But I'm not sure that this will ever gain commercial acceptance. QuickTime is using mp4 and mov for streaming. There is a German company called Main Concepts that believes that H.264 & AAC are just a subset of MPEG and that no change in the MPEG container is necessary. This is very appealing to the professionals as no retooling would be necessary. Unfortunately I have not been able to prove compatibility between their H.264 and the rest. So until some of this settles it is anyones best guess.

DJ

I think x264 has a great future! Once it will become more public and more people have PCs with enough CPU power, we will see DivX and XviD disappear. Of course this won't happen suddenly, but I think stand-alone players with H.264 support will give x264 a great boost. We already have support for H.264 on all platforms via VLC or MPlayer today.

The only reason why people use a crappy codec like WMV with it's nasty "no, we won't let you open this in non-M$ software" container, is because Windows Media Player and Movie Maker come with Windows. Most people are just to lazy to test other codecs/encoders. Same for QuickTime under MacOS. Really sad...

I think Theora is the more open source video codec , Theora has ported to the most of OS and also has decoders ported to some programing languages , but there is no widely using ...