Which is better, streaming 480p H.264 with very good internet, or DVD 480i MPEG-2?

[Fiffy]

Originally Posted by Vilya

Does an MPEG2 encoded DVD with a far greater bitrate look better than a SD stream encoded with H.264 and its much heavier compression? I believe in general that the DVD does look better because compression artifacts suck no matter the codec.

It depends a lot on the content. Modern digitally shot movies are generally easy to compress and can look pretty good even at moderate bitrates. Older movies with lots of grain or other noise are more difficult and will suck in both formats. Some content is problematic for historical reasons (e.g. the above mentioned Babylon 5).

To some extent it also depends on the skills of the compressionist and the quality of the encoder. Generally speaking, H.264 has more "tools" that an encoder can leverage for optimization. In particular it deals far better with motion than MPEG-2.

One potential advantage of streaming is that your content may improve over time as streaming providers up their specs. They can do that because adaptive streaming allows them to select the best version of a stream for a specific device at playback time. So if, for example, Amazon tomorrow decides to encode SD content using H.265 at 10 Mbit/s, they can do that, while serving a lower-spec stream to devices that are not capable of playing the new format. A disc, on the other hand, will never improve and has to be authored to the lowest common denominator (i.e. it has to play even on the least capable players).