H.264 versus MP4

[kungfueats]

As I travel a fair bit and enjoy watching movies on my iPhone I generally rip my DVD's using Handbrake to regular old MP4.

I know H.264 is generally more efficient at compression, higher quality, lower size, etc, but I was wondering is H.264 more energy efficient than MP4, or is it the other way around?

So which format will be better for my iPhone battery?

[Galley]

H.264 is MPEG-4.

[kungfueats]

Dope, my bad, haven't been sleeping so good lately. The iPhone supports two separate movie file formats correct? Is there one that will give me better battery life?

[Yuiichi]

It's actually a special kind of MP4. If you check out the MP4 wiki page, you'll notice it's MPEG-4 Part 14, whereas H.264 is MPEG-4 Part 10 or MPEG-4 AVC.

I can't speak to the battery issue. Why don't you run a test where you have the same movie compressed in both formats and see how long the battery lasts for either?

[baseballboy828]

H.264 is more processor intensive to encode, so I should assume it is more to decode as well. However, H.264 encoding also makes smaller files, so it might put a little less strain on the device. In the end, a regular .mp4 is probably better for the battery, but how much, I don't know. Only a test will be able to tell you.