which is better quality mpeg1 or mpeg2?

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which is better quality mpeg1 or mpeg2 and which one has a better chance on playin on my dvd player? and does one take up more memory than the other?

-- stephen a. garcia (garciastephen@hotmail.com), March 21, 2002

Answers

Actually the answer depends on the bit-rate of the movie file. The higher bit-rate the file uses, the higher quality it'll have. But as for a standard Video CD (MPEG1) and a DVD (MPEG2), DVD has the better quality than VCD since it uses about 2~9Mkbps bit-rate, and VCD's only 1.1Mbps. On the other hand, for exmaple, if you encode your movie to "6Mbps-MPEG1/720*480" and "2Mbps-MPEG2/720*480", you'll get a better quality on MPEG1. So it really depends unless you're creating standard VCDs or DVDs.

-- Frederic (frederic@eltw.nec.com.tw), March 21, 2002.

i am gonna answer according to vcd mpegs..mpeg 2 is way better quality..mpeg 1 might be more compatible....try a cd/rw disc first..sometimes dvd players will play cd/rw and not cdr. also on cdr mpeg1 vcd will fit however many minutes the disc is but mpeg2(svcd) will only fit about 1/2 hour on that same disc.

-- john boy (johnbmx4christ@yahoo.com), March 22, 2002.

Frederick's answer is correct, but he is comparing apples and oranges. Of course MPEG-1 video at 6 Mbps is better than MPEG-2 at 2 Mbps. However, generally speaking, MPEG-2 is considered a higher quality video codec than MPEG-1, which why DVDs use it. If you compared MPEG-1 video and MPEG-2 at bitrates above 2 Mbps, I would expect the MPEG-2 to be superior at the same bitrate and resolution.

-- Jason (Jason.Shumate@equant.com), March 22, 2002.

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