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What are the big guys using?
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Is money the only issue though?
What about supported codecs, quality, and file size?
Of course the main issue for large batch encoding that large companies might be doing is speed which in the case of hardware solutions is where they excel.
What hardware solutions do you consider the best options that support vp6s, vp6e, h.264 and will be progressive enough to quickly adopt future versions of the on2 codec?
My own experience is researching and testing software solutions for small companies and web publishers and though I have seen some more affordable hardware solutions that could appeal to this market the earliest versions of these devices relied heavily on presets and did not provide vp6 encoding.
I am interested in any you might recommend that you have experience with though if you’d like to share?
Josh Anderson
CEO, Internet Business Ideas Inc.
https://nanacast.com
https://transparentplayer.com
https://triggerplayers.com
https://totalwebvideo.com
https://totalwebaudio.com -
dumb question perhaps, but why vp6 and not vp7 or vp8? enquiring minds and all that.
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That is what I was referring to when I mentioned future on2 codecs.
Do you know of any applications using VP7 that have a license that is not restricted by the non commercial license which is the only one that on2 has released to the public on their own site?
Since the press in September I have not seen any… ON2 has not even updated their own software to encode with vp7 or vp8.
What solutions currently offer encoding with vp8 to the public?
Josh Anderson
CEO, Internet Business Ideas Inc.
https://nanacast.com
https://transparentplayer.com
https://triggerplayers.com
https://totalwebvideo.com
https://totalwebaudio.com -
Now that Flash video can use H.264, one would expect to see the demise of On2 and VP6x series of codecs over the next couple of years at the most.
Look at YouTube for example, who missed out on On2 completely and went from Spark to x264.
Another nail in the coffin for On2 (much as I love what the company has done over the years) is the acceptance of H.264 into Silverlight.
Let’s face it, H.264 is going to be the dominant format, for many years to come, across many different platforms, even Microsoft have had to concede, and that’s probably a first!
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Hardware based solutions are not the answer for file based transcoding or encoding.
Scaleable software that can take advantage of multiple processors AND multiple cores is the way forward. Being able to split long jobs over different servers AND cores over fast networks is where this stuff is already being done, and at relatively low cost.Even very small companies are making use of this technology. Take a few nicely spec’d Mac Pros and compressor with Qmaster and you have a pretty serious gridded encoding farm.
Squeeze is for amateur wedding video producers and the like, no offense, but I consider it to be what I call ‘Mickey Mouse’. That said, it’s an extremely popular piece of software, but so is Windows! Go figure!
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I would not write off on2 codecs so fast.
h.264 cannot handle alpha channel transparency.
Also according to ON2’s press vp8 can compress file size more and produce better image quality than h.264
Also youtube’s choice was not made for quality sake…
I would think that youtube made the choice because of licensing and because iphone and ipod does not support flash and since the HQ format was initially conceived for the apple syndication partnership.
Josh Anderson
CEO, Internet Business Ideas Inc.
https://nanacast.com
https://transparentplayer.com
https://triggerplayers.com
https://totalwebvideo.com
https://totalwebaudio.com -
I’m not writing them off so fast – I gave them a couple of years and in this industry that is a LONG time.
h.264 cannot handle alpha channel transparency.
Who really cares, it’s such a little used feature of VP6. (Yes I know, The Greatest Web Video Effect Ever, totally relies on it!)
Also according to ON2’s press vp8 can compress file size more and produce better image quality than h.264
Do you know how many companies make a claim like this every year? They can never ever back it up in a series of real-world tests.
There is a reason why H.264 is where it is, it because 100’s if not 1000’s of experts from 100’s of different organisations have spent years perfecting what they know to a point where they can call a group of technologies ‘H.264’ and make it an international standard.
Do you really think that a handful of experts at On2 can do that much better, and make a difference, and if they could, don’t you think the ITU-T/ISO/IEC JVT or whoever would have snapped them up long ago??
I would think that youtube made the choice because of licensing and because iphone and ipod does not support flash and since the HQ format was initially conceived for the apple syndication partnership.
Huh?
Do you know anything about the MPEG-LA?
Did you know that Facebook are using H.264?
Flickr, who are owned by Yahoo use H.264..
Microsoft lets H.264 work in Silverlight.
Are they all members of this ‘secret’ “apple syndication partnership”?
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Daniel,
In case you did not notice I was not talking to you.
Merry Christmas and…
Lighten up.
Josh Anderson
CEO, Internet Business Ideas Inc.
https://nanacast.com
https://transparentplayer.com
https://triggerplayers.com
https://totalwebvideo.com
https://totalwebaudio.com -
Josh, that’s so funny, you had just replied to one of my posts before!
If you knew me you’d know I don’t need to ‘lighten up’, I just hate BS’ers
Happy crimbo mate.
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I would guess, based on problems I’ve run into, that Daniel’s statement of “develop in house solutions” is probably about right for whatever software they’re using. Not necessarily scripted solutions, but different tools for different parts of the process.
“Compression”, on the software side, isn’t just a one-tool job if you are die-hard in getting the absolute best quality. There could be better solutions than this, but where I’m at now is: if I need to de-interlace it first, then I use FieldsKit or Magic Bullet Frames. If I need to resize it from rectangular pixels to square, then I use VirtualDub resizing with lanczos3. If my target is FLV then I use FlixPro. If my target is H.264 then I use Procoder (I’ve tested against MainConcept Reference- and for my test footage I did not see much of a difference, but I’m sure the opposite is true sometimes. I’m satisfied enough to use Procoder though). It’s a slow workflow, but it’s using what I find to be the best tool for each stage of the process.
If you’re looking for a “swiss-army-knife” solution from source to H.264 or MPEG-2 on PC, and don’t want to deal with avisynth and virtualdub, then Procoder is your best option in my opinion- much better than Squeeze in my tests. Though that was a while back and against an older version…
We’re moving to Apple though, and can’t budget for Episode at the moment, so I really hope Compressor 3 will do all the jobs pretty well (I’m trying to convince the director to move over to progressive so we won’t have to deal with deinterlacing)!
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