Furtopia | Family Friendly Furry Forum and IRC Chat!

the basement => the archives => web design support => Topic started by: Yip on March 16, 2007, 06:59:59 pm

Title: video compression?
Post by: Yip on March 16, 2007, 06:59:59 pm

I am trying to find out what is the best compression to use for posting a quicktime movie on a website. I want something that is clear, yet relatively small, and very important: it must be something that the vast majority of users could view easily within thier brower window. (in other words, the codec must be in common use.)

I used one called H.264 (I think), and that compressed the file impressively small (2.5 mb) while retaining the quality, however, I tried showing it to a friend and it wouldn't play for him.

Uncompressed of course is universally viewable to all who have Quicktime, but the file size ended up over 40 mb's. Way too big for a simple short clip, thus obviously unacceptable.

Any suggestions on what I should use?

Title: video compression?
Post by: BrownLeopard on March 16, 2007, 08:16:30 pm

Give this a try:

http://quicktime.wikia.com/wiki/Tutorial:High_quality_at_low_bit_rates

Title: video compression?
Post by: Yip on March 16, 2007, 11:22:33 pm

So the short answer from that site is, Sorenson Video 3 for greater compatability, H.264 for greater quality.

Thanks.

Title: video compression?
Post by: zeb anderson on March 17, 2007, 12:59:30 am

I'm not a videographer, but I work with one. I work for a large e-commerce company as a digital art director and we post a fair number of videos on our site. We decided to make our standard video format FLV and use a Flash player to view the video. Simply for the reason of Flash's ubiquity rate versus Quicktime or Windows Media Player. I don't have the numbers to support this argument right in front of me, but it might be worth investigating. Flash 6, video compatible version, is a +90% ubiquity rate. At the time we made our decision, MOV and WMV  was not as high.

Another advantage of using FLV and a Flash player, is you can brand your player with what ever your site look-n-feel is. You have total control over how your player looks. Your movie player will look like your site as opposed to looking like Microsoft or Apple.

Anyway, we practice the use of FLVs to preview the videos online and offer MOV and WMV as full frame downloads if someone wanted the video at a nice quality. That's how we use it. Not sure if that helps you or not. Hope it did.

Title: video compression?
Post by: nido on March 19, 2007, 06:27:19 am

For true high compatibility go for standard MPEG 1 VCD compatible files. I have yet to see an OS which doesn't support it. I'm a big fan of (dvd compliant) MPEG2 though. It's ancient technology but still works. If file size is important, I like MPEG4 in an avi container. I don't like "web video" anyway; I usually download it from the net and view locally.

Title: video compression?
Post by: Wtcher on July 22, 2007, 02:31:19 am

You may wish to consider offering downloads in a variety of formats.

Newer formats tend to give you files that are smaller, or higher quality (or both), but then you do run into those compatibility issues as you'd mentioned.

I think anyone with a relatively recent Quicktime (last few years) can view mpeg4.