Encoding HD video: codec vs container

In a recent forum discussion some people claimed their videos were in the best possible quality because they were using mp4. MP4 is simply a container format, so saying that you're making "mp4" videos doesn't mean very much at all. There's a lot of different kinds of mp4's. It's what's inside that container that matters. Doom9 has some more detailed information. If you are selling video content and want to offer your clients (members) HQ video, I recommend you look into x264 for encoding H.264 into MP4 files, which should help your file sizes and allow for easy streaming and/or downloading for playback on any modern PC. If you want to use ffmpeg to encode your videos, you'll need to build ffmpeg with the x264 and AVC libraries.