Re: which bit rate do you use for 720p HD?

I second that.. I've been playing around with the improved Main Concept AVC, and it's very good. Plus, it does VBR, which is sometimes what you want.

I have typically used the ~8Mb/s AVC for uploading of 720p material to YouTube and other online sites. They'll naturally transcode it to something lesser, but I haven't found I get better results on most material going higher.

It's also kind of interesting to see the kind of bitrates consumers are not typically viewing on the various services. Netflix HD, for example, is VC-1 720p24 or 720p30 at up to 3.6Mb/s. Apple's newly launched 1080p24 option (which is chewing though the $50/month LTE accounts on the iPad "3" in 3 hours) is somewhere in the 3.8-4.0 Mb/s range, AVC of course... and I've read a few accounts (by Apple fans, no doubt) comparing this encoding of films to the same BD favorably enough (eg, they'll give the nod to the BD, but clearly, the HD edition is far superior to DVD or 720p versions).

So, in short, for most consumer viewing purposes, doubling that for half the resolution (eg, 720p at 8Mb/s) is probably just dandy for online stuff. 720p24 or 720p30 may also be a "safer" format to just hand to a consumer, since this ought to play well on most modern PCs. 1080p is going to stress a 2-core laptop if you don't have GPU acceleration (which Windows 7's built-in AVC CODEC will use... though most laptops don't have a capable enough GPU to offer such help). And forget it on most tablets... if you know it's destined for one, choosing an iPod/iPhone/iPad is a pretty safe bet (iOS is a popular platform, sure, but most Android devices have similar or better video playback chops, at least those not running Cyangen(mod) or other "community" builds of Android).

-Dave