Re: [Avid-L2] AVI Conversion to Avid Friendly Codec on Mac?

Ah, that's a listing from Internet Archive. Your problem isn't really about codecs. Internet Archive does not create files. It's an accumulator. Any given listing may have multiple options and codec is not the primary attribute. It's simply what uploaders have uploaded. Some of these files may be standard definition, and some HD, and who knows what else. The codec does not define the quality. 

But you can infer. h.264 files are likely to be newer and more "standard" than other files. Some formats are obviously not video (ABBYY, PDF, SUBRIP). Looking at that listing, I'd download the h.264 files and the MPEG4 files which may or may not be h.264. My guess is the h.264 files will be newer and possibley better, but not necessarily. The "MPEG4" files are large enough that they may be higher quality even if they are older. You might also want to check the various text files because they may contain useful information about the video, such as transcripts, captions, provenance, etc...

And another consideration. If the original source is standard definition interlaced, the MPEG4 files have probably been deinterlaced, and probably badly. The MPEG2 is the only one of these formats likely to retain interlacing, which you may want in order to do your own deinterlacing. I always want to do my own deinterlacing. And if it's a film source that once had 3/2 pulldown and has now been deinterlaced, it's totally f-ed. 

The JP2 files are a shot in the dark. Could be anything. The biggest frustration with Internet archive is they they don't describe the download options in any detail. You simply have to grab them and see.

And by the way, most materials from Internet Archive are not high quality. It's gathered from the four corners of the Internet and it's mostly heavily compressed. It's best used as a research tool and last resort, not a primary source.

Cheers,

                Tod

Hoptod LLC

Hoptod.com

On Feb 10, 2023, at 6:00 PM, John Moore <bigfish@pacbell.net> wrote:

So here are the download options. The main choices and then a few of the individual tabs.  It's interesting to me how the H.264 file is 170M ish and the MPEG4 File is 1G.  My limited understanding is that the .mp4 video essence is in an H.264 codec whereas the MPEG4 is a container and not a description of the actual codec or is there an actual mpeg4 codec as well.  In my googling I seem to recall something like that mentioned. 

Main Download Menu:

<dummyfile.0.part>


CinePak Submenu:

<dummyfile.1.part>

H.264 sub menu:

<dummyfile.2.part>

MPEG4 Files sub menu:

<dummyfile.3.part>