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.)<p>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.)