AVI or MPEG? Which one is better to see movies on TV ?

That' question doesn't have a clear answer. To start with, AVI is not a video format, rather it is a container for holding various types of Video & Audio formats. MPEG is an organisation (the Moving Picture Experts Group). They have devloped a number of containers (mpg, mp4), and a set of video and audio codecs (i.e. MPEG1, MPEG2, MPEG 1 Layer 3 = MP3, MPEG4, etc.).

The AVI container has of late, been commonly used to store MPEG4 video (i.e. DivX, XviD, 3ivX, etc.) with MP3 audio. This can produce very good quality if done correctly, and when compared to the size of DVD Video, at reasonably small file sizes. To play this backon a TV, you will either have to have a DivX player, or have your computer hooked up to the TV.

MPEG1 and MPEG2 files if encoded correctly can burnt to CD/DVD and played back through most DVD players. This has the advantage of being easy to use, but the quality in general is nowhere that of MPEG4 for equivalent file sizes.

yes,as kl33per said:conatiner doesn't really matter....a codec does...(for example,it is possible to have .avi(mpeg4video) encoding which looks much worse than .mpeg(mpeg2video) \codecs in brackets\ ...i have presented one such example here
http://virtualdub.everwicked.com/index.php?act=ST&f=3&t=6391
see my last post...after this,i believe that extremely optimised mpeg2 encoder can come REAL close to mpeg4....but(bad news) no such encoders exist to the my knowledge...)

there is one more problem usually when stacking these two codecs agains each-other;people usually use lower resolutions for mpeg4,and then they claim "10x better than mpeg2" (that,actually,is a divx5(dxn's) hoax!it is silly marekting number!)
this is not correct,offcourse!
if you're using excellent mpeg4 encoder and excellent mpeg2 encoder on same resolution,differences tends to get as small as 10-30%(this is small compared to dxn's claim)

as my tests proved;
http://i4004.0catch.com/
(see points 10,12,13(especially),14..........i recommend usage of mozilla based web-browser(or something that can block the junk) for this site,as it has pop-ups)

there are even some users that say mpeg4 can never look as sharp as mpeg2,but i think this is because such particular user was trying the wrong mpeg4 codecs for the purpose!

both codecs come from the same bag,so to speak.....it is mpeg,same as h264 will be ,and same as mpeg's 'fathers' h.261/263 were based on same principles....

so you will find your answer in the practicality of use and image quality of both systems;for example,if you have dvd-player and a burner,and you don't have nice tv-out on your video(aka graphics)-card and you don't own mpeg4 capable dvd-player,you may toy with mpeg2 and have excellent results (as kl33per said,at this time usually mpeg4 will look somewhat better on lower bitrates,ie it's more eficient...but no one said you are required to use lobitratte on dvdr's!in fact you're ot!)

on the other hand,if you already have nice tv-out,or mpeg4 capable dvd-player,you can take advantage of packing more stuff per MB with mpeg4....
(i dunno what amounts of stuff you intend to watch/encode(or so),but if you want to store 1 film per week, those dvdr's won't be stacking that fast even with mpeg2)

i have a nice tv-out and i'm not even considering buying a dvd-player(with or without mpeg4 support) and most of my stuff is .avi....
does it look good?
yeap....looks just fine.....(hell,better than DVB )

btw. dvd-authoring/burning process is much more complicated than simply burning .avi files to media.....
this stems from a need to respect dvd-standard......(you also need to use onyl predefined resolutions etc.)
avi+tv-out is flexible enough so you can do ultra-low bitrate for talk show(lower res. etc.) and ultra high bitrate if you want sports or such....
mpeg's(mpeg1 or 2) bitrate is always relatively high(or you're doing 352x576/480,which in turn looks worse than vhs....this may sound weird at first,but a bunck of us is writing capping guide for doom9(yeap,i'm expelled from doom9 and still i'm writing for it...am i not crazy?) so we tested few things,and that's not a false claim....alongside those lines it can also be said that vhs looks beter than svcd's(there,the 480 res. is en-par with vhs,but you have 2,5Mbit limit,and rare mpeg2 encoders will do good on such lo bitrates!))

in the end,best suggestion is always,to try 'em both(if possible) ,and see what suits you best....(and if you have poor tv-out quality,you'll just hate mpeg4....but be aware it's just your tv-out... )

/ivo

The answer can be different, depending on usage.

AVI is a container file format, it is widely used to store video encoded with MPEG-4 codec, so the question should be: "Which MPEG version to use?"

For low bitrates (about 1 - 1.5 Mbps) MPEG-4 is the only reasonable choise (AFAIK).
But for higher bitrates(more than 4 Mbps) MPEG-2 is much better, especially for TV-originated material as it supports interlaced video.

I don't think that's true, at equivalent bitrates mpeg-4 should always be better due to its more advanced algorithms. And mpeg-4 can handle interlacing as good or even better than mpeg-2.

It might be true that the most popular mpeg-4 codecs are not as highly tuned for high bitrates than for example CCE, but it's not the standard's fault.

Well, I was talking about existing "popular" implementations.
Let's be more practical. I haven't seen any MPEG-4 codec that can produce higher quality video than MPEG-2 at high bitrates. And MPEG-4 standard itself with all of its algorithms was originally designed for low bitrates.

i'm leaning towards tommy's standpoint
http://kotisivu.mtv3.fi/ii00i/5Mbit/5mbit.html

the interlacing in mpeg4 is also well sorted out by now,as my tests proved...

i also liked tommy's last sentence;let us say that we have nice hi-bitrate codec and we have nice intermediate codec.....
we don't need the intermed. codec to do the hi-bitrates,or viceversa (although as i suggested mpeg2 can be very efficient too)

i think microsoft was governed by simillar thought when it made wmv9;on higher and intermedate bitrates it doesn't really bring anything new (quite the opposite),but on very low bitrates it's best codec at the moment...(h264 is not yet ready for use,constant quantizer is not enough...)
this quality of wmv9 will come very handy for hdtv purposes!
ie why would they wanna make mpeg4 or mpeg2 style codecs if such already exist and they cannot be used for hdtv-storage.......

same as tommy said,i think mpeg4 can be tuned in a way to perfectly replicate mpeg2....it has better motion estimation techniques(than usually used in mpeg2) so nudging the DCT up a bit shouldn't be an issue....(because todays mpeg4 codecs refuse to go that high with bitrate-they simply don't need it...)


that is the essence!
same as mpeg2 is not tuned to lo-bitrates,mpeg4 is not tuned for hi-bitrates....
it would be silly to have 2 codecs doing exactly the same thing....

btw. i think tmpgenc is better encoder than cce....slowest too...