If you need video encoding help/have questions post here!
 

First off let me start out by saying i am no expert when it comes to video encoding but i have noticed a lot of people needing help and i thought i might as well give something back for the spamming i do on the board ;)


Let me see if i can help you guys out a little bit.



I encode everythingn with Mpeg4 in a quicktime wrapper file, this means that at the heart of the video it is all mpeg4 but it is stored to look like a quicktime mov file for playback on quicktime enabled computers.

To get to the above step you will need to rip your video. While using mpeg4/quicktime as my target output file i rip my DVDS (you can rip your DV Tapes) into 5 minute clips.

i do the encoding of each DVD (DV Tape) 3 different times, once for 5.6KB/sec (dialup), 100KB/sec (DSL/CABLE), and 200KB/sec T1+ speeds.

If you guys use quicktime great if not then you will need to play with the bitrate.

When it comes to the audio and video streams, at 56k i streamed the audop in compressed mpeg4 format at 1.6KB/sec and at the higher speeds i use 5.6KB/Sec. As for the video, at 5.6K i use a 4K/sec video stream and a 160x120 screen size to keep the 4:3 ratio off the DVDS. 100K Stream, the video is streamed at 90K/sec and has a screen size of 320x240, as for the 200K/sec stream, i use a 180KB/sec video stream in the 320x240 format.

File Size (per 5 min clip) which depends on how much panning is going on in the video:

5.6K 2MB-3MB,
100K - 25MB-30MB
200K - 50MB-60MB

If you guys have any questions/commemts feel free to ask me and i will help you out to the best i can!

If you're planning on offer this as a plugin you might want to support different formats altough i never did because the rest are not as platform friendly as Quicktime is.

If you're selling this as content i would suggest putting it all into mpeg format since it is probably by far the most bought type of video for members area to be hosted on the paysite owners own servers. You might also want to take the clips down to about 2-3 mins so that you can get more clips, offer more (what appears to be more because of the amount of clips) to clients/customers

Joe