H.264 Tastes Like Chicken

H.264 is a codec used to shrink down high resolution video for storing, viewing or delivery. Think of the codec as the cookbook and H.264 as the chicken section. In a cookbook, there are many ways to prepare chicken. You can fry it, bake it, broil it, make soup from it, the list goes on. The same is true for video. Once you prepare it, you can burn it on a DVD, broadcast it, stream it on the internet, make quicktime movies for iPods etc. You take the same ingredient (chicken or video) and cook it into something that can be consumed in different meals or in the case of video, different media applications.

H.264 is a cooked (finished) format like fried chicken is cooked from raw chicken. The fried chicken is finished and ready for consumption. You might be able to watch uncompressed video on the web if you have huge bandwidth and time on your hands just like you can eat raw chicken if you want to, but there are better options.

The H.264 video format has a very broad application range that covers all forms of digital compressed video from low bit-rate Internet streaming applications to HDTV broadcast and Digital Cinema applications with nearly lossless coding. With the use of H.264 you can achieve bit rate savings of 50% or more. The typical H.264 compression level for distribution is 10x but the formula (or recipe) coming out of Canon video DSLRs is 30x. This is the reason that when you try to drop the files into an editing program without transcoding, everything grinds to a halt. The video frames have to be uncompressed before they can be rendered. This causes crashes and skipping in even the most powerful desktop computers and is akin to trying to deep fry a frozen chicken. You might get the job done, but it will be messy.

In the digital realm there are lots of loose standards or recipes. For instance TIFF is a series of standards managed by Adobe with varying levels of compression (multiple recipes). There are probably as many TIFF implementations as there are variants of H.264. This is one reason Phase Digital backs produce a TIFF file as their raw. It is just a wrapper for the data that loosely fits into the TIFF standard (save rant about stupid and confusing file naming for another article). I realize that since this is a photographer/filmmaker blog that TIFF correlations probably play better than cooking analogies but “tastes like TIFF” isn’t as catchy of a title.

H.264 definition on Wikipedia