I don’t know why this hasn’t become available 20 years ago. Blender can do it out of the box. Autodesk hasn’t touched 3dsMax for decades, all their plugins are super old. Only VRayBitmap can save the day.
I also heard that Vantage could do this, but I couldn’t make it work.
The Final Render company made a plugin that requires some extra subscription for this really basic function, called MaxMP4. But I think this should be a basic function inside VRay.
Come on guys!
Cause image sequence is the way to go.
The idea has already been logged in the Portal. Vote for it.
Thank you for your reply. In my current work, 300 frames of img seq is 8Gb, but 4400 frames of MP4 is only 400Mb. Image sequence is NOT the way to go.
I had to produce a lengthy animation with multiple thousands of frames of animation and simply had to output in sections between
RAM flushing - LOL that was NOT fun. It admittedly was using Vantage in its beta stage, so add that to the buggy mix.
Whilst the ability to use movies would be great, without it there is simply no other option than an ifl 
Exactly! Please go vote on this feature in the portal in the #3 comment.