March, 2010

• 4 March

  Ogg vs. H.264 – a real world view

  Xiph, Ogg and Crossing the Chasm When comparing Ogg Theora to H.264, most reviewers have focused solely on video quality. But that’s only a small component of what it will take for Ogg to achieve mainstream success. I just finished my first foray into encoding Ogg Theora and I have to say that I was impressed by the technology; especially …

  Read More »
• 4 March

  Ogg, MPEG-LA and Submarine Patents

  A few weeks ago, I published an interview with MPEG LA CEO Larry Horn on the patent group’s decision not to charge for free content encoded with H.264. Then I got a note back from a reader who stated: I’m disappointed. The interview seemed to be pretty powder puff. Why not ask the harder questions, e.g., was your decision in …

  Read More »
• 3 March

  If you’re encoding in QuickTime/Compressor, you gotta checkout x264

  So, I was doing some consulting work for a client who’s currently encoding with the x264 codec. Part of the work involved benchmarking their current quality against other encoding tools I have around the office, so I downloaded the x264 QuickTime Codec (Mac) from Softonic, which was the tool used by the client. Briefly, after installing the codec, you access …

  Read More »

February, 2010

• 27 February

  Another Ogg to H.264 comparison

  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 …

  Read More »
• 26 February

  Shooting for Streaming – Five Key Tips

  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 …

  Read More »
• 26 February

  Flash Player: CPU Hog or Hot Tamale? It Depends.

  [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 …

  Read More »
• 24 February

  Streaming Production and Flash Delivery Workshop in Manhattan on March 23, 2010

  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 …

  Read More »
• 23 February

  Google Closes On2 acquision – Better check your wallet

  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 …

  Read More »
• 19 February

  Ogg vs H264 – Round One

  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 …

  Read More »
• 18 February

  Reclaim disc space from Premiere Pro

  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 …

  Read More »