[Daniel Low]

There’s a fair bit out there on the interweb already about Flash & H.264

A slightly complex but good starting point is:

https://www.kaourantin.net/2007/08/what-just-happened-to-video-on-web_20.html

Please come back here if that page doesn’t cover off all your questions.

[Daniel Low]

Of course I see the benefit of delivering better quality at low bitrates. Now that more and more of us have access to high quality HD (and above) source that job is easier than it ever was in the world of SD.
However I don’t see that as a space that Microsoft wants or indeed needs to lead in. To me it’s obvious that MS would rather have its content delivered over Broadband, IP, HD Disc and so on rather than over narrowband, CD-ROM or less. There’s much less money to be made in that area, the viewing public nowadays expect a rich media experience, and so do the advertisers.

[Daniel Low]

Still pretty vague, you’re missing frame size, data rate or quality level etc..

My first thought is that these are in fact fields of video, to get rid of them you or your friend will need to deinterlace.
Can you describe the horizontal lines?

Do the lines look like ‘combing’, as seen here:
https://www.100fps.com/

[Daniel Low]

Sorry William but your post is very vague.

What settings and methods have you tried to compress your video?

[Daniel Low]

What settings did you try?

Start with one of the 60min MPEG-2 presets and tweak it until you achieve the kind of quality you desire.

I can’t be any more specific than that as you haven’t supplied any details of your source media (format, content, quality, workflow and delivery method (Does it have to be on a DVD as MPEG-2 for example)

[Daniel Low]

As more and more people get access to broadband, and as broadband speeds are constantly increasing, the demand for low bitrate media is, and has been for some years, on the decline.

It’s pretty obvious that speeds everywhere are going up, not staying still or going down. As such I don’t see the point in Microsoft developing a new or updated version of WMV for that type of delivery bandwidth.

sub 250Kb/s video is very ‘last-year’!

[Daniel Low]

David,

I’m not sure what presets you tried but at best they are ‘starting points’ rather than the optimum setting for your source. The 1Mb VP6 preset does not include automatic keyframe insertion, for example.

Is your source HDV? HDV can be very noisy and may need some mild noise reduction.

Did you apply a deinterlace filter?
Did you apply any other filters, brightness, gamma or contrast?

It should be pretty easy to get even better quality than that trailer as, IMHO, it’s not that great, there are MUCH better quality examples of VP6 out there.

[Daniel Low]

Do you mean Sorenson Squeeze the application, or the Sorenson Spark the CODEC?

What’s the best quality source you can obtain, 1080p or better??

If you’re not outputting to Spark, do you want to use ON2-VP6 or H.264?

[Daniel Low]

How does this look:

https://www.inlethd.com/encoding/19/17/Semaphore/

[Daniel Low]

What are you using to do your transcodes?

What settings have you tried for H.264 and WMV?