May, 2010

• 20 May

  First Look: H.264 and VP8 Compared

  VP8 is now free, but if the quality is substandard, who cares? Well, it turns out that the quality isn’t substandard, so that’s not an issue, but neither is it twice the quality of H.264 at half the bandwidth. See for yourself, below. To set the table, Sorenson Media was kind enough to encode these comparison files for me to …

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• 19 May

  Google Open Sources VP8 Codec

  As expected, Google open sourced the VP8 codec today at their IO conference in San Francisco. You can read my overview article for StreamingMedia.com here, or check out www.webmproject.org, a site that details the announcement. Briefly, as you may recall, Google acquired the VP8 codec when they purchased codec developer On2, in a deal that closed early this year. Today, …

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• 13 May

  Audio Production Gone Bad

  You can learn how to shoot video in one of two ways. You can apprentice under the direction of an experienced videographer who’s done it all and seen it all, and leverage the lessons he or she has learned over the years. Or, you can book the jobs, buy the gear, do your research, and shoot the shoot. Though the …

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• 11 May

  Improve Your Video Quality

  Includes the handout from my session at StreamingMedia East

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• 9 May

  Wi-Fi on US Air Flights –

  OK, I have a presentation to finalize for at StreamingMedia East, but my US Air flight bound for LaGuardia offered a free trial of inflight Wi-Fi (via Gogo, a service of Aircell), so how could I resist (particularly with the Players Championship coming to a close, and the Celts playing the Cavs)? I haven’t been flying a lot recently, but …

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• 7 May

  The Moving Picture: Here Comes HTML5—Should We Care?

  MIX10 is the annual Microsoft event for web developers and designers, and the big news from this year’s conference was expanded HTML5 support in Internet Explorer 9 (IE9), including support for the audio and video tags. Basically, this means that when IE9 ships (Microsoft didn’t announce a ship date), it will play video without a plug-in such as Flash or …

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• 7 May

  Create an iPad-Compatible Video Site in 30 Seconds or Less

  iPad compatibility has been top of mind for the last couple of months or so, and like all web producers, I’d like the ability to deliver video to the million plus iPads that have sold in the first few weeks since launch. Well here’s how in thirty seconds or less. By way of background, I was chatting with the Sorenson …

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• 3 May

  Time to Switch from VP6 to H.264

  Got an email today from a colleague today that triggered the headline thought (time to switch from VP6 to H.264). His rationale was that now that MPEG-LA has extended the royalty-free period for free H.264 Internet video, it was time to change over to H.264. He was wondering whether H.264 could maintain the same quality as VP6 at 75% of …

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• 3 May

  Microsoft Sends Ogg Down for the Count; What’s Mozilla to Do?

  In a recent blog post, Microsoft stated “We think H.264 is an excellent format. In its HTML5 support, IE9 will support playback of H.264 video only.”  Though Mozilla currently enjoys (by far) the largest HTML5-compatible installed base of any browser, they don’t currently support H.264; just Ogg Theora, which is supported by Google Chrome and Opera, but not Safari or …

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April, 2010

• 29 April

  Case Study – Producing Video Case Studies

  Firewall vendor WatchGuard Technologies uses video aggressively in their marketing efforts, and produces some of the most focused and highest quality case studies that I’ve seen, though the presentation of these videos on their web site could definitely be improved. In this “peer review” video, I review their case study of the Burlington Public Library, which you can watch here …

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