That settles it: Mpeg4 VS H.264 experiment

That's weird, I haven't had any such problems. I had problems at first working out the encoder settings, but if you have the right settings it works.

Sounds like a possible problem could be your bitrate. If you use an encoder that gives an average bitrate, then setting it at 768 would mean that itunes would load it onto your ipod but the ipod wouldn't be able to play it because it would vary in bit depth over and under 768kbps, so if you have to use a variable bitrate try setting it to 650 or 600 - still yeilds very good quality video (considering the size of course). The best way to do it is with quicktime export to ipod but you have to pay $30 for that, OR you could set your encoder to a fixed bitrate at which 768 should work fine, (or even try 760 to be safe).

I found that is probably because you need to set your encoder to *single pass* otherwise it won't load into the ipod. Also, you need a fixed bitrate of 768 or lower, NOT an average, and 320X240 max resolution (of course you probably know that part). But the single pass was a tricky one I had to work out by experimentation I thought it wouldn't matter because it seems to be an encoder stage thing but apparently it does make a difference. It's worth persevering with because 264 really is much better than mpeg4 IMO and you can put double the movies on the ipod at twice the quality.

Hmm, well that is strange. I mean H264 is supposed to be 4X better than DVD anyway. It does look pixelated and bad if you play within itunes either that little window or in a seperate screen but if you play the videos within quicktime they are crystal clear that that bitrate as good as DVD (relevant to their smaller resolution or 320). 520resolution won't play in an ipod incidentally. When you view the h264 vids in quicktime, on the ipod, or from the ipod to TV they look great I had heaps of big and very distracting artifacs with mpeg4 at 2500kbps. The reason I post this again if I sound like I'm repeating myself is that I wondering what we are doing different to get these different results. Maybe I did something wrong with mpeg 4.What should the keyframe be in mpeg4 within quicktime- that seems to be automatic in handbrake. Maybe I should encode directly from handbrake. I did encode the mpeg4 from a h264 file (ie I made two smaller files from one big one - the first was 720 resolution and then make one 480 res mpeg4 and one 320 res h264 from that the mpeg was 2500 kbps and the h264 was 768. Maybe I should re do it from the original source material.

Just to update that last post. I have tried encoding the same files directly from the source into two files of both h264 and mpeg4 and the h264 is of far superior quality even with mpeg4 at double the bitrate of H264 file.
Don't know how you guys are saying that mpeg4 is better than H24.