“Flash Video “just works”, and it’s never more than one click away from 98% of the web browsers on the planet. It’ll never win any quality awards, but it’s still recognizable as video. Therefore it wins by default.”
I think it’s just a coincidence, but the first thing that came to mind when I read this was Windows. Ha ha.
Well, I really stopped caring about the codec hell since I discovered mplayer.
Actually, what would really interest me is why the ‘standards’ have fragmented? I mean, Quicktime and WMV are proprietry (and therefore remain separated for commercial reasons), but is MPEG not like JPEG - a community standard?
If by “community standard” you mean free and/or open, the answer is a resounding no. Implementations of MPEG encoders and decoders potentially owe royalties to MPEG LA, although there are also stipulations for distributed media in a number of forms. The royalties are also quite steep–it is substantially cheaper to licence WMV than it is to licence MPEG.
JPEG is “free,” but that doesn’t stop companies from attempting to assert patent rights on portions of the JPEG process (as Forgent Networks did in 2002). Simply put: image compression formats are too complicated to not have multiple patent claims. Video codecs are even worse. Even open source video codecs like Theora are fraught with difficulty, because patent holders can review the codebase, and assert patent rights against companies using Theora.
In short, no free beer here. Move along.
It would probably be easy enough to compare these formats using a video file of the same size. That would better indicate the relative quality.
Have a look to this article:
http://www.digital-web.com/articles/the_rise_of_flash_video_part_2/
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Why Flash video stinks
Some folks take issue with Flash video, and they do have a point. There is a lot out there that makes watching Flash video a painful experience. They talk about pixelated and jerky video, and point to poorly re-compressed YouTube content as evidence that Flash video sucks. These shrill claims are misguided, but many people hear them and blindly agree that Flash video stinks.
“It’ll never win any quality awards, but it’s still recognizable as video.”
As one highly appreciated Macromedia exec. put it, “It’s all in the art of the encoding”. If you don’t think Macromedia did their homework and felt they could encode video with VP6 and make it comparable to anything else on the web then you have to be bias or ignorant.
no it was macromedia (back in the days…)
if you want to be 99% free of that codec hell try use VLC only once found file format that it can’t play http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
With your YouTube example, as with all YouTube vids, the quality can be much improved (still not good) by clicking the small mystery-meat button on the bottom right (the left one, just to the right of the volume) to show the vid in it’s “original” (not quite) format.
Might as well give Youtube the best of what you have; a near 100mb file at 30fps, 320x240, and with reasonable aspect ratio, even for clips that are a few minutes long. You can also play with the -crop option of ffmpeg before you do the conversion because in many cases you can have a pixel per pixel retension and avoid any sheering and stretching from an aspect ratio conversion process.
So for example, your DV example of 720x480 can benefit from a 40pixel crop left and right, then when its resized to 320x240 it is really coming from source material of 640x480.
Like any other video codec, compressing to FLV requires a person to know what they are doing. There are many settings that, with some tweaking, can produce both a really bad and a really good result. FLV8 in particular is a highly-optimized video codec. Things like blocking, keyframes, bitrate, framerate, and many other things can be adjusted to produce a very high quality FLV. The quality of the encoded video also depends on the quality of the source, and unless the same source video and similar encoding settings have been used to encode into different formats, end-result comparisons aren’t reasonable.
Anyone have a command-line way on Linux
Mencoder and ffmpeg should handle standard Spark (v7) video in flv fine, and you can convert to avi or your choice of format simply enough. Bleeding-edge versions now have VP6 (v8) support as well.
Also, DefilerPak kicks your butt, codec-wise… Usually…
It also has the wonderful quality of kicking your system’s butt, causing instability, video crashes, and installing all kinds of outdated and a few quasi-legal codecs. Thanks, no. Most codec packs simply perpetuate the problem they set out to solve or create new ones.
ffdshow is a great way of circumventing codec hell on windows, without being at the mercy of VLC’s and mplayer/mpui’s… less than fantastic guis, though its own configuration could use a cleanup. (Fair disclosure, I help develop it.) I’m all for the flash-in-browser revolution, though, I think it’s the best thing to happen to truly open streaming video ever. Youtube’s extremely sub-VHS perversion of it doesn’t mean other services can’t build out their own, and google video’s is rather decent quality. Flash is everything Java once promised it’d be.
In comparison, Quicktime is hideous on anything but a Mac and is very picky about what it plays back, WMV is windows-only unless you can work magic with Wine, Real is dead, and VLC (which can also stream in-browser) doesn’t have much market penetration.
VP6, like Sorensen Video 3, is based on drafts of h.264, and it competes well compared to xvid divx, however it does tax the system for HD playback. Sorensen Spark, which Youtube converts everything to, is much simpler than divx and much lower quality. Just by Youtube switching codec and paying a little more in fees we could get at least roughly VHS quality, like your wmv version, at the same bitrates. =\
Then again, a lot of what gets posted has pretty atrocious source quality anyway, so maybe it doesn’t matter at all.
I think the google-video approach is better, there flash-video quality seems just a little better , but the major thing is that they provide a download option, so you can view movieclips off-line and on your iPod, which is very handy. So the have both, the flash-player that just work for the people that dan’t care about codec/quality and just want to see the clip, and they have a downloadable MP4 version that is better quality and better for portable video-devices to play.
Well I agree with the premise of this article. I just spent at least a hundred hours trying to figure out what codec to use for digitizing my home movies. Each one had their problems. Some wouldn’t sync the audio correctly and others were just crappy unless you spent hours and hours tweaking settings.
I eventually decided that I would use WMV. Even though the quality wasn’t quite as good as a DV-2 video, it was about 1/15th the size and I am guaranteed of being able to find a computer to play them back on 20 years from now. None of the other options came close to producing the same quality and peace of mind.
So in the end I settled for slightly lower quality but gained the ability to play them pretty much anywhere I needed to. But the pain of coming to the decision is what is the crux of this article. It just shouldn’t be that darn hard.
What WMP skin is that and where can I get it?
For most consumers, convenience wins over quality.
Take a look at the last thirty years of electronic gadgets.
8-tracks and then cassettes significantly reduced the market share of LPs, because they were convenient even though they represented a backward step in quality.
CDs replaced LPs and cassettes: CDs beat LPs on simplicity and convenience, even though some audiophiles still prefer LP quality. CDs replaced cassettes on quality and convenience - no rewind, the ability to skip directly to tracks, durability.
Cable TV supplanted broadcast because people were sick and tired of adjusting their antenna every time they changed the channel. How many people have just basic packages?
DVDs replaced VCRs because of superior quality and convenience - no rewind, easier to store, etc.
Digital cameras have replaced film for their convenience, even though only recently have digital cameras approached the quality of 35mm film.
MP3 players (including the iPod family) represent a step backwards in audio quality, but consumers are choosing the convenience of carrying their entire record collection in their hand over quality.
This, of course, is dangerous to both the consumer electronics industry and the movie studios. HDTV does not offer any particular convenience advantages. The videophiles will of course purchase HD theater systems, but it will take much longer for HD to supplant standard TV. And HD DVD is in even worse shape. Blu-Ray plus HDTV is not compelling to most consumers. Most people are satisfied with their conventional DVD and conventional TV experience, and the HD options are much more expensive without offering the one feature that they will pay for - additional convenience.
LOL. Flash ubiquitous? Keep drinking that Adobemedia propaganda Kool-Aid. Yes, some version of Flash is installed on computers, but it’s rarely 8, or even 7.
I used to work for a company that provided a streaming video based application, and absolutely zero percent of our corporate customers had a version of Flash installed higher than 6. Zero. Whee!! Corporate machines these days are locked down so tight users can’t even change the desktop background, let alone upgrade their Flash version.
Also, third-party Flash based hosting is expensive (and no, YouTube is not a host). I suspect it has to with the ridiculous software prices for the Flash server software (starting at US$4500). Not to mention even the damned encoding software costs money.
Digital cameras have replaced film for their convenience, even though only recently have digital cameras approached the quality of 35mm film.
Even the best digital cameras are not even close to the best 35mm film. I’d say it’s about 10% there. A Hasselblad, for instance, which although not 35mm, will completely destroy any digital camera’s picture quality. It’s not even a contest.
MP3 players (including the iPod family) represent a step backwards in audio quality, but consumers are choosing the convenience of carrying their entire record collection in their hand over quality.
A properly encoded MP3 will sound the same, even to the pretentious audiophiles at the Home Theater Forum.
A properly encoded MP3 will sound the same, even to the pretentious audiophiles at the Home Theater Forum.
When played back on which equipment? Inferior speakers, headphones, earbuds, DSP’s, etc. can drastically change the listening experience. How well does your iPod play back MP3’s encoded in VBR at extremely high bit rates?
Interestingly, a superior set of headphones can be a worse listening experience. For example, where the source is old vinyl, and the capture and conversion equipment is “consumer quality”, will sound better on a cheap set of headphone because the much narrower dynamic range will muffle out a large amount of the artifacts in the recording.
-Ed
A Hasselblad, for instance, which although not 35mm, will completely destroy any digital camera’s picture quality. It’s not even a contest.
Can you cite recent sources to support this? I’ve read a number of articles from photographers who no longer use film because the quality is equivalent, and in some cases, better with current digital cameras.