I recently posted an H.264 vs. Ogg comparison, which you can see here. Ogg vs H264 – Round One I got lots of good feedback and am in the process of reworking my tests, primarily (I hope) to use a more recent codebase that wasn’t shipping when I did my testing. In the meantime, another comparison was released on February …

Five best practices for producing high-quality video. Anyone who’s ever picked up a camcorder and tried to tap into their inner- Spielberg knows that there’s a lot more to creating a high-quality, impactful movie than turning on the camcorder and pressing the red record button. The same is true with producing video for streaming. Corporate meetings are often recorded and …

[Author’s note: In early May, Apple opened the API for Adobe to access the GPU for H.264 acceleration from within Flash. Click here to view details and some early test results.]In part, Steve Jobs stated that the iPad didn’t support Flash because it was a “CPU Hog,” so Apple used a technology called HTML5 instead. Since the comparative efficiency of …

Lisa Larson-Kelly and Jan Ozer will host the Streaming Production and Flash Delivery Workshop on March 23, 2010, at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. The workshop will feature two tracks, Streaming Production and Flash Delivery, each comprised of two ½ day courses. The workshop courses detail the complete streaming production and delivery workflow, from set design …

Late last week, Google closed the On2 acquisition that they started in 2009, and now owns the VP4 – VP8 video codecs. At the time, there was much debate about Google’s intent, now most analysts assume that Google bought On2 to open source the codec and let it serve as the basis for the video tag in HTML5. For a …

Summary: This article is presented in reverse order, newest on top, oldest on the bottom. I’ve briefly summarized the goal and procedure, but you can read from the bottom up to get the background. Briefly, the goal of the exercise was to compare the quality of Ogg Theora with H.264 using two test files — one SD, the other HD …

I do a lot of production work and testing on my HP Z800 workstation. Though it’s got a 250 GB C: drive, with a 1 TB video drive where I store all projects and associated video, I started getting messages that I was running out of space on my C: drive. I couldn’t imagine why since I store all the …

Ever since the iPad announcement, the inter-relationships between HTML5, Flash, H.264 and Ogg Theora have been intriguing me, so I spent last week trying to figure it all out. The result is The Future of Web Video, Part 1; HTML5? Someday. Ogg? Probably not, over at the Digital Content Producer web site. It’s an article that’s bound to irritate lots …

Interesting line of questions on the Advanced Streaming List recently. One producer shared that he was encoding using the following parameters: 768kbps512×288H.264 Main Profile Level 3.1 Microsoft’s Ben Waggoner, author of Compression for Great Video and Audio, who has an encyclopedic knowledge of compression related matters, responded: “High Profile instead of Main Profile; decode complexity is the same, and you …

This is not an earthshaking post, but I thought I would share it anyway. I’ve never been a fan of Apple’s decision to use FireWire 800 adapters on their most recent lines of computers since it meant that I couldn’t connect my camcorders to them without an adapter. I’ve resisted purchasing a FireWire 800 to 400 adapter because I have …