Video File Types
Posted by: pjl2 on 23 July 2011
I hope somebody can help with this - I'm totally confused!
What I want to do is to download some video from Youtube and burn it to a DVD. No problem as such, I have two bits of freeware to do the job - aTube Catcher and DVD Styler. The problem is that I don't understand the various video file types. aTube catcher will save downloaded videos in a wide choice of file types, but which one is best to achieve maximum quality on a DVD to be played back on a stand-alone player? DVD styler, which burns the disc, can likewise handle a variety of file types. My understanding, as far as it goes, is that Youtube videos are in MPEG-4 quality. Therefore is there any point in converting downloaded videos into a "better" file type than MPEG-4? For example, if they were dowloaded and converted to MPEG-2, which I understand is less compressed and therefore better, would this give a better image quality than MPEG-4, if the original files on Youtube were MPEG-4?
This is driving me mad trying to figure it out - I've done lots of searches on the net but can't find any clear-cut simple answer. All I want to know is what file type to convert the downloaded video to.
Thanks,
Peter
AFAIC the simple answer is to download it as MPEG4 if that is the original file type. That's assuming you can play back MPEG4. If you want a bog standard transfer to play on any DVD player, then convert to MPEG2 for compatibility. It won't, however, improve the quality. 