Blu Ray- MPEG2 or h.264???

[Paul Lee]

What are people preferring? We're coming straight from a Premiere sequence of r3d's.

[Manuel López Pérez]

For BR I use h.264 only.

[Paul Lee]

For what reason Manuel? Thanks!

[Matt Gerard]

We've been using high bitrate MPEG2 from self contained 1080p prores quicktimes, using Adobe Media Encoder, then authoring in Encore. Seems that the MPEG2's encode faster on our systems.

But test it. take a 1 min chunk of video, and run both formats and see which you like better. I'm a real stickler for testing encodes before jumping in on a long encode only to find out it didn't give me what I needed.

[Paul Lee]

Good wisdom there Matt. I cannot 'see' the difference between the two, but the h.264 takes longer to encode and feels like it's taxing the system in Encore a lot more. Hmm...

[Eric Santiago]

http://forums.adobe.com/thread/877682

[Manuel López Pérez]

For what reason Manuel? Thanks!

Well, I have readed that h.264 is a codec more efficient, more quality at the same bitrate, but I haven't checked it for myself.

[Häakon]

I have done a lot of Blu-Ray authoring, and to me, H.264 is vastly superior based on what Manuel stated above.

[Paul Lee]

Thanks all, I think I'll give h264 a run.

[Cory Petkovsek]

MPEG2 is old technology. h264 is far superior and is the standard for bluray and web video. The only case I have found where mpeg2 is a better choice is for playback on old computers without hardware accelerated decoding (pentium 4 era and older), or for authoring DVDs of course.

MPEG2 (aka MPEG-2 part 2) released 1996. Though it is a minor variation of MPEG1 released 1993.
h264 (aka MPEG-4 part 10) released 2003.