Thread: Video playback epic fail: My N8 plays 1080p My N9 couldn't even play 720p
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Copernicus is offline Copernicus
2012-01-19 , 12:55
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#143
Originally Posted by mcdull View Post
You can't compare bitrate of DVD which uses MPEG2 and HD video which usually uses MPEG4, e.g. for the same 480p, MPEG2 will require higher bitrate to achieve the same quality as MPEG4 or H.264, to say the other way, at the same bit rate MPEG4 or H.264 gives much better quality than MPEG2.
Yes, if you use the more advanced compression features of MPEG4 or H.264, you can certainly get better results at a given bitrate than if you don't use those features. However, HD resolution video requires just a whole lot more data than SD resolution does; if you compare two videos using the same compression techniques, you'll need to have a much, much higher bitrate to get the same quality in the HD video as in the SD video. There's just so much more data to compress!

The advantages of, say, H.264 High Profile techniques over H.264 Baseline ones cannot by themselves make up for the sheer difference in quantity of bits between HD and SD data.