reel-exchange

Digital Content Producer magazine contributor Jan Ozer recently wrote a two-part series on the best practices for encoding video which was highlighted in the "HDV@Work" newsletter (see the newsletter archives at: http://digitalcontentproducer.com/newsletters/hdv_archives/. Below are portions of the two-part series.

Encoding Best Practices: Part 1
By Jan Ozer

In this first installment, I’ll share the results of a survey I recently completed that details the best practices of high-profile broadcast and corporate streaming producers, examining options such as codec choice, video resolution, audio and video data rates, and frame rate. In the next issue, we’ll compare the quality of the big three codecs—H.264, VC-1, and VP6—using SD, HD, and screencam videos.

About a year ago, I was speaking at a seminar on codec usage and decided to mix a bit of practice in with my theory. That is, I could talk my heart out about codec quality or the optimal encoding parameters for streaming, but actual market usage seemed much more compelling than my own unsupported theory.

So I grabbed a couple of programs that shall remain nameless and started capturing and analyzing streams of video from well known broadcast and corporate sites. I’ve updated the statistics twice since then, and I will present my most recent statistics, captured in May 2008, in this article. For the record, note that I only reported on files that I could actually download and analyze, which excluded multiple sites.

Nonetheless, the broadcast sites that I reviewed included ABC News, Accuweather, ABC, BusinessWeek, The Weather Channel, The New York Times, Forbes, Sports Illustrated, ESPN, CNET, ETonline, The Golf Channel, DL.TV, CBS (show replay), The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Fortune, MSNBC, and CBS (show preview). On the corporate side, I looked at PricewaterhouseCoopers, infoDev, PI Worldwide, Deloitte, EMC, Accenture, E&Y, Chevron, HP (case study), Cisco, Intel, HP (corporate TV), EDS, Microsoft, and and GE.

Read on at http://digitalcontentproducer.com/hdhdv/depth/encoding_best_practices_0609/

Encoding Best Practices: Part 2
By Jan Ozer

Now you’ll see the results of some quality comparisons that I presented at Streaming Media East in New York last month. I compared the quality of H.264, Microsoft’s VC-1, and On2’s VP6 codec using both SD and HD test clips, which I describe further below.

As you may know, H.264 is a standard, and many companies have produced their own standards-compliant H.264 codecs. For this reason, H.264 quality varies depending upon who created the codec and the even the encoding tool. As part of my presentation, I compared the output of three H.264 codecs—MainConcept, Apple, and Dicas—and found that MainConcept as rendered by Rhozet’s Carbon Coder produced the best quality, so I used this output to compare against VC-1 and VP6.

Regarding VC-1, note that it’s the same codec as in Microsoft’s more familiar Windows Media Video 9 codec. It's just a rebranding to reflect SMPTE’s designating VC-1 a standard—primarily for HD playback devices such as the Samsung Blu-ray BD-P1000 that sits in my living room. For the record, I produced all VC-1 comparisons using Microsoft’s Expression Encoder 2.

VP6 is On2’s most famous of all Flash codecs, which I produce using On2’s flagship encoding tool, Flix Pro. There are now two versions of the VP6: VP6-S is recommended for high-definition production, and VP6-E is best for SD production.

Read on at http://digitalcontentproducer.com/hdhdv/depth/encoding_best_practices_0623/