[tjogin]

That works just as well, and it certainly proves you're right.

What I'm wondering is if this was done on purpose or not. If it was on purpose they're lying bastards, and if it wasn't on purpose, it seems they know jack shit about encoding, just like me, and should leave the technical discussion to those who know what they're talking about.

[yuvi]

My guess is that the author wasn't the one who encoded either video, and the guy who did didn't know what hinting meant but enabled it anyway when exporting from QuickTime. (hinting is only ever used by Darwin Streaming Server, and only if you're doing live streaming from a pre-recorded file.)

The bad encoder comes from QuickTime having the lowest quality H.264 encoder out of any commercial encoder (and all of them being worse than x264.)