Best compression for WEB

[Daniel Low]

[Harold Ek] “This has probably been answered before”

Not less than 10,000,000,000 times before. 😉

[Harold Ek] “What is the most compatible format to use to upload a video for viewing on the Web?”

Probably .MP4[Harold Ek] “I have Edited AVI files and can encode them using Sorenson Squeeze 6 into almost any format. I had been advised that MP4 would be the best choice, Good Quality with minimum file size and compatible with most people who would have either QuickTime, Flash or Windows media players. “

[Harold Ek] “Is that good info?”

Sort of. MP4 can be wrapped in a Flash player that is assessable by 95% approx of the worlds web browsers. So that’s a web based Flash player, NOT Quicktime or Windows Media players.

They are mostly right, however Flash has been able to play MP4 files since the end of 2007 – with version 9.01 of the Flash player.

You have to ask yourself who your audience is. If there is a chance of them not updating their computer software in the last 2.5 years (this may include big, backward businesses), then you should either forget about them or encode to FLV

[Harold Ek] “The people handling the website say we should encode the files as flv in order to have them widely available.”

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Sent from my iPad Nano.

[Chris Blair]

A lot of web designers also custom design their flash players and many of them build bulky code that doesn’t handle mp4/H264 files very well. We constantly get requests from web developers to provide .flv files instead of mp4 for this reason. Poorly coded flash players can do all sorts of weird things when fed H264 files….things like taking forever to load, stuttering constantly on playback even though download speed stays well ahead of playback, sync problems and sometimes refusing to play at all to name a few.

Never mind that there are half a dozen commercial flash players out there that are proven and handle H264 files extremely well (JW Player and Flow Player come to mind).

Most of them also offer options to customize the look as well as control virtually everything about them via simple javascript, which is called separate from the Flash player. But many web designers refuse to use them, instead insisting on writing their own control code within the player itself. Which invites problems because there’s so much stuff written into the player itself.

There’s certainly nothing wrong with hand-coding, but when there are tools out there that cost next to nothing (JW Player and Flow Player are about $50 to license per website) and work great with all Flash compatible file types, it’s just silly to insist on building them from scratch when the results limit the file types you can use.

The only reason I’ve ever found they do it is because they can bill for it. But we stopped trying to convince them to take H264 and just give them flv files. That said, flv files can look darn good when encoded properly….especially if you have an encoder that can do 2-pass encoding like Flix Pro, which is affordable and produces compact, nice looking flv’s.

Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com

[Harold Ek]

Thanks Chris!
I think you have put your finger exactly on the problem.
Somehow I hate to, but I guess I’ll take the flv path.

We had been using wmv files but thought we could improve our quality by going to mp4. But we’re having difficulties during what I thought would be a simple mater of changing the links.

[Craig Seeman]

Something is wrong with this picture.
H.264 .mp4 or On2VP6 .flv work in a Flash (SWF player, etc). This has nothing to do with WMV which does not work in Flash.

You can’t simply change links (well you can but that would certainly cause some unexpected behavior). You’d need the proper embed tag.

I’d certainly recommend going from WMV to H.264 .mp4 which can be used in Flash, Silverlight, Quicktime, I believe WMP12, HTML5.

If you’re building a Flash player, except as noted under the odd situation Chris points out (and it is ODD IMHO), I’d recommend H.264 .mp4.

As long was your webpage builder knows what they’re doing they can use H.264 .mp4 any number of ways depending on the web player plugin they’re targeting.

[Chris Blair]

Craig Seeman: As long was your webpage builder knows what they’re doing they can use H.264 .mp4 any number of ways depending on the web player plugin they’re targeting.

That’s the problem, many web designers don’t understand video. At many corporations the IT department handles web administration…not web designers. Designers re-purpose Flash Players they built 3,4, 5 years ago and simply change the physical appearance for new clients. Many are also using older versions of Adobe Flash software to build their players. All of this adds up to deficient performance with H264 files.

Probably 8 out of 10 requests we get from web designers is for flv files because they all claim (or believe) they work better than H264/mp4 files. Spend 15 minutes on the JW Player or Flow Player forums and you’ll see even those well designed, proven players can experience all kinds of problems…usually due to javascript coding errors, but occasionally due to player programming issues.

But each of those players are constantly updated to fix problems and improve performance and they’ve improved immensely since H264 was first supported in Flash back in 2007. So the player and the coding can make a big difference in playback performance.

Just as an aside, On2 uses the JW Player for all the video samples on it’s website (which are flv), so even large companies realize the benefit of using a well written commercial player over building it yourself. We’ve had web designers complain about our Carbon Coder generated H264 files (often using Carbon Coder presets)…only for us to place them on a sample webpage using JW Player and they work perfectly from our slow web FTP. But the designers REFUSE to test JW Player or any other commercial player (in place of their player) because they KNOW it will expose problems in their own custom designed players, which is what they’re charging their client to build.

We’ve also had corporate clients pay through the nose for video delivery using companies like Playstream and others, many of whom don’t even accept H264 files!

https://www.playstream.com/support/started/files.aspx

In fact, we’ve dealt directly with at least 3 large video streaming companies that don’t accept H264 (Playstream is just one example). When we asked why, the response on every occasion has been that they don’t work well with their players. When pressed further…the answer always comes back that the players were written several years ago and either don’t support H264, or perform poorly with it. I’m not sure about the “don’t support” answer as I thought the browser side flash plug-in determined whether it could play H264, but these companies either think a custom designed player can’t play H264, or they’ve tested H264 files with their player and had numerous playback and performance problems with them, despite the files using markedly smaller file sizes and data rates than the same video encoded as an flv file.

Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com

[Craig Seeman]

[Chris Blair] “That’s the problem, many web designers don’t understand video. At many corporations the IT department handles web administration…not web designers. Designers re-purpose Flash Players they built 3,4, 5 years ago and simply change the physical appearance for new clients. Many are also using older versions of Adobe Flash software to build their players. All of this adds up to deficient performance with H264 files. “

Note specifically that the poster says he’d been using WMV so that is not the case in this instance. He stated that someone was considering or actually changing the links to WMV files to MP4 files.

Since one can’t direct link to FLV without building a player, that in and of itself would be a problem. MP4 would probably be the simplest to implement outside of WMV with replacement of links and tags. He can always go with MPEG4 Part 2 instead of MPEG4 Part10 (H.264) if the latter codec presented an issue. Given the tests I’ve seen Jan Ozer do, I don’t think there’s an issue with H.264 playback on modern computers but the older Part 2 is an option.

The issue concerning the site and the files are not at all related to Flash based on my understanding of his posts.

See this excerpt

[Harold Ek] “We had been using wmv files but thought we could improve our quality by going to mp4. But we’re having difficulties during what I thought would be a simple mater of changing the links.”

[Chris Blair]

Understand…but I took his comment about:

The people handling the website say we should encode the files as flv in order to have them widely available.

…as an indication that his website people must’ve been using a Flash Player since that’s the only thing that would play an flv file.

Guess he needs to clarify to get a handle on which answers are valid.

Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com

[Craig Seeman]

This may mean they are moving to Flash. In that case I’d strongly recommend H.264 over On2VP6 unless they specifically needed alpha channel support. Given that H.264 can be used in Silverlight as well as HTML5 additionally it would give them maximum flexibility going forward.

VP6 has very little market share advantage over H.264 and, if you look at Jan Ozer’s tests, H.264 can be as easy or easier to decode on modern computers. With Flash 10.1 around the corner with improved hardware acceleration, H.264’s advantage may widen.

If HTML5 H.264 begins to spread further, they’ll be no need to re-encode.

[Daniel Low]

[Craig Seeman] “If HTML5 H.264 begins to spread further,”

I think that should be ‘When’, not ‘If’. IMO.

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Sent from my iPad Nano.

[Craig Seeman]

[Daniel Low] “[Craig Seeman] “If HTML5 H.264 begins to spread further,”

I think that should be ‘When’, not ‘If’. IMO. “

And of course that would aver to belief that H.264 would be the better choice than VP6 for any encoding going forward.

An H.264 encode that works in Silverlight, Flash, Quicktime, WMP12 today will work in HTML5 “tomorrow.”