Re: H.264 vs x264

x264 is Open source, where as H.264 is commercially licensed by the MPEG LA.

No commercial software can use x264 without itself becoming Open source.

x264 is considered the best out there but you have to be something of an expert in the coding parameters to get the best out of it, despite there being a number of decent front end GUIs for it.

Unless you are pushing the extremes of low bitrates with complex material, you find there's not much in it between x264 and the better codecs from the likes of Main Concept and Dicas.

Remember there's more to encoding/transcoding than the codec, there's also scaling, deinterlacing, colour space conversion and so on. Those are handled by the rest of the compression software

There is also of course Ateme, which although of great visual quality, is stupidly expensive and the software was clearly designed by blind alligator (or similar)

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