Streaming SD Video - What Do You Do? Also, anybody have some Compressor settings droplets?

Im no good on encoding presets, but if you encode in .mov you can still stream as h.264 mp4 by using wowza as your streaming server... If the number of vids is important you will get a massive reduction in drive space by using mov

Thanks for the input...btw, your name comes up often when I ask people who is a guru on techie issues.

Several people have told me to stick with .mp4:

I have nothing against .mov - when I was only offering progressive downloads, I used .mov most of the time (since I am a Mac-head myself). In fact, I export all of my videos as self-contained Quicktime (.mov) movies, for import into Compressor for encoding, and also for archival purposes for when the next new big thing comes along (which is about every 2-4 years these days).

There was some other big reason why I opted awhile back to go with .mp4, but I can't recall what it is at the moment (been up working all night so I'm kind of fuzzy around the edges right now).

Here are a few examples of what I have come up with so far:

http://beta.asiandivagirls.com

Don't worry too much about the quality of the videos - these samples were deliberately chosen because one is lowlight (underexposed), and the other has blown out backlighting (overexposed), plus there are lots of transitions, to test how well the video comes back together after being disrupted by transitions (which cause the video encoder to have to re-draw every pixel in every single frame over the transition).

If I can come up with a decent set of codecs for adaptive bitrate streaming on both PC's and the most popular mobile devices with that type of content, then content that was shot under better conditions should look pristine (or at least pretty damn good).

ADG

Did you get that email I sent you? Replied to your big one.

My big one?!?



Yes, I did, thanks!

Sent you a big reply...

ADG

ADG

I could let you know the h264 settings I use through compressor if you want to hit me up on ICQ. As for mixing SD and HD footage, if you want to go with an eventual HD output, I'd probably size up the SD using compressor's format conversions (assuming the SD is in 16x9?). Compressor 3 has much improved resizing and retiming algorithms so you'll get good quality, then just edit the stuff in FCP. I don't think I'd encode SD footage in HD though for the websites. For my sites if I have SD footage I keep the high quality version in SD. Its going to be no different when they fullscreen it than if you offer it to them as an HD file (quality will probably be lower actually as it'll have more pixels of information to deal with for the same bitrate). Good luck! Messing around with compressor settings is always such a headache.

It's a good idea to sleep in confinement

I don't use ICQ, so please e-mail me and I will send you the details:

webmaster (AT) asiandivagirls (dot) com

Thanks,

ADG

Bump for the evening shift...

If anyone reading this could please check out the sample videos posted on the link below, and give me your feedback, I would really appreciate it.

The top video is short (only 27 seconds), and while the bottom video is over 9 minutes, I made it that long so that I could test skipping ahead on the playbar, check the video at full screen resolution, etc.

http://beta.asiandivagirls.com/

Thanks,

ADG

i would absolutely go with the MP4 container and h.264

you choices will be limited to begin with as the High profile doesnt work for SD, so you will be stuck with baseline or main. use cabac on main. go for a bitrate around 2mbps for decent quality and dont upscale it to HD unless its shot in 16:9 format....then try the upscale and see if you like it but remember most people will do that anyway by making it full screen....its better to keep it SD and raise the bit rate than to up res it to hd and get much larger files.

hope this helps

Thanks Mike!

That sounds like a good strategy for my older SD content...

ADG

happy to help did you get the email i sent ya?

Nah, I do agree that h.264 id the way forward, for a multitude of reasons but mainly quality, less load on wowza (as no on-the-fly conversion is needed), direct html5 support so no need to pass thru flash.

I liked the picture quality of the second one the best (if they are all identical quality to start with), but I know jack about encoding!

In any case, lock those streams down bud - they are wide open. I was able to easily download the vids, but worse that that I could run up your bandwidth... example of html5:
http://borkedcoder.com/adg/
(bandwidth courtesy of ADG)
(note, Mozilla-based browsers don't support .mp4 for html5, only .ogv, so use Safari or IE).