H.263 CODEC

[jmichaels]

I received the following message from BenQ Customer Service:

XVID, MPEG-4, and H.263 are video streaming CODEC.
So if the file extension is .avi, please make sure if the CODEC is XVID or H.263. Same as .mp4, please check if the CODEC is MPEG-4 or H.263.
If a video file with file extension.mp4 but the CODEC is H.264, it is not available for GS50.

You can check the CODEC with MediaInfo.

Can anyone help me to understand this message?

How do I convert videos from .avi (H.264) into .avi(H.263) that are still high-quality?

Thanks,

Jonathan

[eumagga0x2a]

Can anyone help me to understand this message?

BenQ probably was neigher willing to afford paying patent royalties for any actually usable patent-encumbered codec like H.264 or HEVC nor ready to integrate chipsets capable of decoding modern patent-free (until proven otherwise) codecs like VP9 and AV1. If possible, I'd recommend to supply video decoded by an external device via HDMI.

How do I convert videos from .avi (H.264) into .avi(H.263) that are still high-quality?

Every re-encoding using a lossy codec worsens the quality. If the source is of excellent quality, the result of re-encoding using a legacy codec like Xvid with default settings in Avidemux will be considerably worse than the source but still viewable.

By the way, you should avoid putting H.264 in AVI container as AVI doesn't support presentation timestamps (PTS) which are very important for codecs which use frame reordering and can use B-frames as reference. Avidemux will prompt for PTS reconstruction if an AVI with a H.264 video track is loaded and B-frames found.