Re: Help...
- From: websnarf@xxxxxxxxx
- Date: 8 May 2005 20:52:57 -0700
aman_s1...@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> Basically I want to set up a website pretty soon based around
> steaming videos... these videos will be around 4-6mins in length.
>
> I was wondering if someone could advise me on the type of file that I
> should be using, I mean would mpeg be better than quicktime? Or can
> a video be converted into swf to make it as short as possible and
> with the best possible sound quality? So that its downloaded as
> quick as possible and that the quality is good too.
In terms of compatibility, mpeg and swf are your best bets. There are
officially supported flash players even for Solaris, OS/2 and IRIX.
And if your OS doesn't come with a tool the play back MPEGs, I would
hardly consider it a serious OS. The problem with mpeg is that its
compression just isn't up to where the state of the art is. I'm not
sure how flash does it -- the impression I have is that basically,
flash is able to playback videos authored in a few select formats (I'd
be suprised if mpeg wasn't one of them.) .swf also has a lot of other
features, of course.
If you are concerned about the best quality for a given level of
compression (or equivalently if you want the most compression for a
given level of quality), then you basically want to go with "Xvid".
Unfortunately, its only manifestation is as a codec for .AVI/.WMV
files. I think there is "sort of" support for AVI files in some
grassroots Linux players, but you are otherwise going to be shutting
out a lot of your audience if you go with the Windows formats.
The only reason you might want to use .MOV files is because of the
stability of the player. In my experience Quicktime is, in fact, the
most stable player for even older Windows machines, with the best
"pre-buffering" algorithm of any of the players (Real and Windows media
player invariably underestimate the time required to pre-buffer.)
Neither Quicktime, nor Flash is installed by default on Windows boxes,
however, there is a higher probability that Flash gets installed on
end-user machines. Macromedia claims they have 98% market penetration
(that seems unusually high -- its even higher than Windows!)
Of course this really isn't a programming question, but this is as much
as I know, and I have no idea what other newsgroup to redirect you to.
--
Paul Hsieh
http://www.pobox.com/~qed/
http://bstring.sf.net/
.
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