Which is a Better Choice, WebM or MP4? Here are Best Tips You Should Know

Which is a better choice? When you need to export a video file from Premiere Pro or After Effects, will you choose WebM or MP4? Can you download a video to your Android phone with WebM? Here are the answers you should know from the article.

Part 1: Detailed Comparison between WebM and MP4

H.264/AAC MP4 and VP8/Vorbis WebM are two major compression settings for HTML5. What are the differences between MP4 and WebM, if you need to decide a better choice, check the information as below.

WebM V.S. MP4 Video Size

When you need to upload the video files to your media library, will you choose WebM or MP4? Since the WebM is specially designed for Internet streaming, the WebM is much smaller compared with MP4. If you need to download the video online within a quick time, you can also choose the WebM format to get the files easily.

WebM V.S. MP4 Video Quality

It is difficult to compare the differences between WebM and MP4 in video quality. Since WebM is specially designed for Internet, H.264 of MP4 offers slightly higher video quality than the VP8 codec used by WebM because of the compression ratio. But the GPU and hardware acceleration for H.264 decoding is much more efficient than VP8 of WebM, it takes less CPU to play back a MP4 file than a WebM one. But because of the frequent updates of the WebM of Google, the WebM might be better in video quality in a short time later. (Find method to improve video quality)

MP4 V.S. WebM Comparison Chart

Specification	WebM	MP4
Video Codec	VP8 or VP9 video codec, audio streams compressed with the Vorbis or Opus audio codecs, and WebVTT text tracks.	AVC MPEG-4 and H.264 video codecs.
Support Streaming	WebM is a video format designed for Internet Streaming.	MP4 is compatible with most of the devices and online streaming sites.
Compatible with Web Browsers	Firefox 4 or later, Opera 10.60 or later, Chrome 6 and later, IE 9 and later and other limited players.	Most of the media player and web browsers.
Compatible with Portable Devices	Does not compatible with mobile devices.	All the portable devices, iPhone, Android phone, Sony and Microsoft devices.

Part 2: Best Method to Convert Between WebM and MP4

Is there a method to convert WebM to MP4 files, or vice versa as a profession? When you download a WebM file to an Android phone, or need to upload a smaller video to social media with WebM, Tipard Video Converter Ultimate is the desired WebM to MP4 converter that enable you to convert more than 500 file formats with ease. Moreover, you can edit the videos, apply different filters, edit video metadata, and even turn the video into a GIF.

• 1. Convert WebM to MP4, AVI, MKV, MP3, WAV and other files, or vice versa.
• 2. Support 4K MP4, MP4 1080P, and more other video, audio and presets.
• 3. Tweak the video codec, bitrate, frame rate, sample rate, audio channel, etc.
• 4. GPU hardware acceleration to convert WebM to MP4 with 60x fast speed.

Part 3: Simple Tips about WebM and MP4 Files

What are the Pros and Cons of WebM?

MP4 is a frequently used video format for most of the devices and platforms. Will you choose the WebM file? Here is the information you should know.

Pros:

• 1. It is an open source video file for online streaming sites.
• 2. Play video with a higher quality with better performance.
• 3. Implement on more and more popular online streaming sites.

Cons:

• 1. Cannot playback on the web browsers without WebM codec.
• 2. WebM video cannot play on most of the portable devices.

Which is a Better Choice to Upload Video Online, WebM or MP4?

As for a large video that you want to upload, WebM is a better choice that is more for Internet streaming. It will encode a video with a smaller size

How to Play WebM File on Smartphones?

If you want to play the WebM files on your iPhone or Android phone, you can download the VLC Media Player or MX Player to playback the videos. Of course, you can also download a WebM codec to play the video on Chrome, Safari and other browsers. Converting WebM to MP4 is another convenient method to play the videos on smartphone with ease.

Conclusion

When you have to decide a right choice to upload the videos to online streaming sites, you can have an idea about how to choose from WebM and MP4 from the article. Besides the detailed comparison between WebM and MP4, you can also learn more about the FAQs and the conversion about the two file formats from the article.