H.264 Overview
The dominant video codec today for web and mobile video is H.264. Its compression quality ranks among the best of the modern codecs along with HEVC and VP9.
H.264 can be played in 99.9% of web browsers, on many mobile devices (including the iPhone/iPad, Android), as well as many connected television and streaming devices. It is also an excellent codec for desktop video.
Zencoder encodes H.264 content using a variety of software, but our core encoder is the excellent x264, the best H.264 encoder available, and one of the best video encoding implementations for any codec. H.264 is the dominant video codec today for web and mobile video.
H.264 is typically deployed in the MP4 file container. Valid extensions include .mp4, .m4v (mp4 video), .f4v (mp4 video for Flash) and .ts. Note that .flv is not a recommended file extension for H.264 Flash video — .f4v is preferred.
AAC and MP3 audio codecs are valid alongside H.264.
H.264 and general options
crf: CRF is a bitrate-control setting, and sets a constant ratefactor. This is closely related to constant quantizer encoding, though CRF mode generally achieves better compression than constant Q encoding by reducing the quantizer quality on "less important" frames. Read more about crf.
The Zencoder Quality setting determines an appropriate CRF for a given video. So if you set both Quality and CRF, the CRF setting will override Quality.
Valid values are 0-51, with lower values being better quality. Generally speaking, you shouldn't have to go below 16; 16 is nearly lossless for most files. Around 24 usually looks pretty good. Around 35 looks pretty compressed.
video_codec_profile: The supported H.264 profiles are: baseline, main, high, high10, high422, high444. Lower levels are easier to decode, but higher levels offer better compression and extended features. For example, some older phones only supports the Baseline profile, which we use by default. The Main and High profiles are a definite step up in compression, and work fine for web playback. Try High for the best quality, and Baseline for mobile device support. Default: "baseline".
video_codec_level: constrains the bitrate and macroblocks. Primarily used for device compatibility. For example, the iPhone supports H.264 Level 3, which means that a video's peak bitrate can't exceed 10,000kbps. Only use this setting if you're targeting a specific device that requires it. List of valid values. Default: 3.
speed: Zencoder supports speed as a range from 1-5 for H.264. A lower speed results in slightly better compression, while a higher speed results in slightly worse compression.