Video Internet Compression

[Jonathan Ames]

Originally Posted by Paolo Ciccone

What is your target size/frame rate for that?
I exported a 15minute Vodcast at 640x360 (half resolution), 24fps and it turned out to be around 80Mb. Heavy to download even with a DSL line but still smaller than PhotoshopTV (between 90MB and 140MB per episode at 29.97fps) and they release a new episode every week and that is one of the most popular Vodcasts. I used H.264 from Apple's Compressor with QT wrapper. Both compression quality and temporal quality were 1/3 above "Medium". Sound was converted to mono at 44.1kHz.
If you stay on Medium quality you can save another 10%. Image degradation is visible but not horrible. Al lot depends on the content you have.

Hope this helps.

Is this Apple performance Paolo? The clips we're going to be doing are only 3 min in length and talking head and half at that.

[Warren Shultz]

Hey, that's a cool little program! And the author is frackin' hilarious! I dragged Stephen's m2t file over and it even does those.

[Nate Weaver]

As far as compatibility goes, there's a trend towards Flash video that I'm not totally against.

[Daniel Patton]

Originally Posted by Nate Weaver

As far as compatibility goes, there's a trend towards Flash video that I'm not totally against.

Nate, although I agree Flash is a great one stop player (meaning you can design an entire full motion site with video rich content, and do far more than any "single install option, video only codec" can do), it is however far worse in file size to quality ratio compared to both WMV and MOV formats. I speak from personal experience as an owner/developer of a video rich web content provider. Mostly, we found customers wanted only one update for an intire web experience on a new site, so going through the process of installing Flash AND an additional codec is almost never an option, so Flash it is. However, the funny thing... although every site we develop is strictly Flash 8 (never quicktime or Windows media), yet for showing off my personal video clips I prefer the windows media format (rarley Flash) for both SD & HD, even far more so over Quicktime due to quality to file size ratios. Believe me, I wish Flash did a better job at HD streaming. Divx however rocks. =)

And I don't agree Paolo, that "QT playback is smoother than WMV", when we tested WMV against MOV we had just as smooth of playback, smaller files and better qaulity using WMV. I think it's all in compression settings and how you tweak it. But then again, we are rare in that we use 95% PC's for development, one mac for testing cross-platform only. So it's not such a surprise that WMV might play better for us on XP Pro. This is just our experience, it's not about Mac vs. PC for us, it's about the market share that we develop for and knowing your tools.

Peace!

[Paolo Ciccone]

Originally Posted by Jonathan Ames

Is this Apple performance Paolo? The clips we're going to be doing are only 3 min in length and talking head and half at that.

Yes, all my measurements are done on a G4 1.67 Powerbook. I don't use QT Pro for compression, I use Compressor. I don't know what's available on PC but I bet that there is a good compression tool for it. 3 minute long should not present any problem.

[Warren Shultz]

Flash video has some wonderful interactive possibilities and looks great these days.

What I like about QuickTime is how controllable it is. I can scrub through it, stop on a frame of my choice, etc.

Windows Media looks great but I find it frustrating when I can't scrub through it or study the frame I want. I guess if they all didn't have advantages and disadvantages we wouldn't have so much competition between them.

[Paolo Ciccone]

Originally Posted by Daniel Patton

And I don't agree Paolo, that "QT playback is smoother than WMV", when we tested WMV against MOV we had just as smooth of playback, smaller files and better qaulity using WMV. I think it's all in compression settings and how you tweak it.

I didn't mean that observation as a confrontation, believe me I've been through too many "religious wars" to be wanting to start another one :)
I base my observations on tons of material that I see on the web and my experience is that the WM player always miscalculates the ratio between speed of buffering and speed of playback. There is also the frustrating, from my point of view, decision of WM to keep playing audio while the video freezes. I use both Mac and Windows machines so I'm testing this natively on XP and that's what happens whenever I watch a WM video.

While QT has its own "quirks", the playback is usually smoother, meaning that it buffers at the beginning and then plays the video at normal speed with very few, if any, interruptions. Video and audio stay in sync. I didn't compare file size, it could be that WM files are smaller but my main concern is to distribute videos that are viewable by the majority of people and QT works. Keep in mind also, that the popularity of iTunes as a distribution vehicle for network TV is likely to make this even more a reality as people have iTunes for their iPod and to watch TV shows like Lost, Desp.Wives, TikibarTv etc.
And that means that they have a great MPEG4 and H264 player.

Cheers!

[John Mitchell]

I have Quicktime 7 for windows installed but I've notice a number of clips on this site that I cannot view with the message about codec not being available on the Quicktime server. I'm wondering if these were H264 encoded clips and if so why?

[Paolo Ciccone]

Originally Posted by John Mitchell

I have Quicktime 7 for windows installed but I've notice a number of clips on this site that I cannot view with the message about codec not being available on the Quicktime server. I'm wondering if these were H264 encoded clips and if so why?

I doubt it, H.264 is *the* new feature of QT 7. If you can give me a link to one of the files that you cannot play I can find out what codec you're missing. If they are m2t files then you need another player like VLC as .m2t are not yet supported by QT.

[Tim Gray]

Originally Posted by Daniel Patton

And I don't agree Paolo, that "QT playback is smoother than WMV", when we tested WMV against MOV we had just as smooth of playback, smaller files and better qaulity using WMV.

Also not trying to start a religious war, but I think the idea was that QT tends to play back fine on PCs but WMV can have quite a bear on macs. So if you want one or the other and want to be most compatible with both macs and PCs, then QT might be a better bet. Flash is even better still.

h.264 looks great but takes a while to compress.

[Daniel Patton]

Originally Posted by Tim Gray

Also not trying to start a religious war, but I think the idea was that QT tends to play back fine on PCs but WMV can have quite a bear on macs. So if you want one or the other and want to be most compatible with both macs and PCs, then QT might be a better bet. Flash is even better still.

h.264 looks great but takes a while to compress.

All good points and well taken, can't argue with that. :)

And yes we can all agree to our prefrences in codecs / players without the "wars".

No confrontation or offense was ever taken Paolo, none at all. And I hope that my observations did not sound as such either.

[Paolo Ciccone]

Originally Posted by Daniel Patton

No confrontation or offense was ever taken Paolo, none at all. And I hope that my observations did not sound as such either.

Absolutely not :)

[Daniel Patton]

Originally Posted by John Mitchell

I have Quicktime 7 for windows installed but I've notice a number of clips on this site that I cannot view with the message about codec not being available on the Quicktime server. I'm wondering if these were H264 encoded clips and if so why?

I have also had the same issues recently, I get audio only and no video even with the most recent install from the QuickTime site. I'll try and find some clips when I have a few extra minutes, and maybe Paolo can figure out whats going on for the both of us.

Going back to Flash for a minute... I think Adobe did a good job with the Flash encoder directly out of PRo2 native, it saves us an extra step with SWF and FLV encoding. Very cool for web development, anyone using PPro2 tried it yet?

[Mark Silva]

I do a lot of web videos mainly for approvals of TV spots or to be played back on websites for public consumption.

The most successful/compatible and least problematic format, is a 320x240x15fps quicktime with sorensen 3 codec and IMA 4:1 audio. The spatial quality slider for sorenson is around 50-60, the IMA 4:1 setting is at 16.000 or possibly 22.000 (most web approval spots are needed to be emailed and thus kept under 5mb each) This has the added benefit of not taking forever to start loading for folks still on dial up. I always have the "fast start" header option checked as well so that the video starts playing the moment enough content has been loaded (psuedo-streaming)

H.264 and these other codecs are fine and they work quite well, but the fact is MANY other folks out there don't run the latest greatest software for whatever reason dictated by their I.T. departments or themselves.

What would you rather have? that it works with no problems? Or getting a bunch of phone calls with "I see a white screen but I hear sound" or "Its a white screen and says I need an update but I'm computer illiterate"

You get the picture. :)

[Joe Carney]

Mark has pointed out one of the more important issues, try rendering out at 15fps, no matter which codec you use. You might be surprised at the quality.
Most people don't have the bandwidth to play 24 to 30fps video, sd or hd.
full fps+full resoluton would be great for download only video.