Best video codec for Blender animations

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
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What are your recommendations for the highest quality animations as far as codecs are concerned? I’m rendering in 720p and having trouble finding a codec that works well for scenes with lots of bright particles against a dark background. The best I’ve found so far was H.264, but I have a problem with it. When I play back an animation encoded with H264 in Blender it looks great, but when I play the same animation in windows media player it’s choppy.

Anyway I figured I’d ask, the experts for their opinion.

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For rendering always go with PNG frames.

For encoding from the VSE, I always use H.264, with an Mp4 codec at as high a bitrate as you can go. i use 14000, but you may have to settle for something lower depending on how much RAM you have.

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For some reason it makes a difference in windows if your file is .avi or renamed to .m4v if you play back an h264 animation.

Renaming the extension to the later will often solve the choppy playback.
It won’t solve cases where it’s just too much data to handle though :wink:

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Excellent thanks for the advice guys. I’ll definitely tryout the m4v thing as soon as I figure out why H264 stopped working all together :(. I am 99.9% sure that I tried out the H264 codec yesterday, but today when trying that codec Blender spits out “Unable to initialize video stream.” Gah!

It’s probably not a Blender issue. My system has had trouble encoding videos with certain codecs for a while and I just haven’t gotten around to figuring it out. For instance when I try to encode a video using Super both ffmpeg and mencoder crash when trying to encode to an mp4 container.

At any rate thanks again!

Edit: Ah. I was trying to encode a different video today than what I was working with yesterday. I tried the video from yesterday and h264 works great, the .m4v thing worked out too thanks. The video from today has audio associated with it so perhaps that’s why I’m having trouble with it.

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Any mpeg based codec has aspect ratio and size requirements… can’t exactly remember the rules, but 1920x1080 or 1280x720 work… haven’t used another resolution except for stills in years :wink: (I pad with black bars)

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I am rendering in 1280x720, but it is good to know about the size requirements.

Here’s a bit of weirdness for ya. So I open up Blender 2.59, startup the sequencer and arrange a few rendered videos. Select an output file and h264 codec, hit render animation and nada, “Error initializing video stream.” Any other codec seems to work just fine.

So then I open up 2.49b, startup the sequencer, load in my videos and save the .blend. Then load up that blend file with 2.59, select h264 codec and bingo it works!