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Apple's docs seem to indicate these are different, e.g.

http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/Miscellaneous/Conceptual/iPhoneOSTechOverview/MediaLayer/MediaLayer.html

But which produces smaller file sizes and which will produce better video quality for a fixed video size?

Snowcrash
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In general H.264 will be better than MPEG4.This is not true in all conditions and depends on toolsets being employed but if you are encoding for iOS with standard encoding requirements and conditions h.264 is much better.

av501
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  • Any info to support this and help make an informed decision? – Snowcrash Oct 11 '12 at 17:34
  • A google on mpeg4 vs H.264 can throw up lot of good white papers on this topic. I suggest you try that path. Also H.264 was written with the aim of improving compression over MPEG4 by 50% which it does at highest complexity levels. Go read wikipedia on H.264. It also explains quite a bit. Another way to confirm something like this is choose your bitrate and encode using mpeg4 and h.264. See the output. Do it for a few files. You will have your answer. Ah, also I'd generally consider myself an informed decision helper in field of multimedia but then I don't expect you to believe that :) :) – av501 Oct 11 '12 at 17:46