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Video Formats for non-Windows Users?
ccdotnet asks: "I look after a small web site for a rising sports star. We have a small number of short videos in .WMV (9) format available for download. These .WMV files are typically 3-5 MB in size (we do a "low res" and a "hi res" version). Each video is typically 1-2 minutes and 320x240. The site gets maybe 100 visitors per day. Our outbound hosting bandwidth is _very_ limited, so although we are keen to cater for non-Windows users (around 7% of our visitors), I've struggled to find a suitable video format which doesn't blow the size of the file right out. Ideally I would like to keep these files at a similar size but at the same time want to maintain a reasonable video quality. Are users of other platforms just out of luck? What non-Windows/Mac video formats can people recommend so that I can deliver this content to people who can't play .WMV for one reason or another?"
A few years ago, playing .WMV files might have been problematic for users who didn't use either a Macintosh or a Windows-based operating system. Now, with MPlayer and its derivatives making strides, it's not as much of an issue. Of course, there are still .WMV files that don't play well in Mplayer, but what suggestions would you have for creating Mplayer-safe .WMVs as well as other, more cross-platform friendly formats?
Quicktime might be the best compromise. It's cross-platform, has reasonable file sizes, reasonable quality, etc.
I'm a big tall mofo.
Sounds like a porn site... =) I would think MPEG1 would be decent quality at a reasonable size.
"I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection." -- Sigmund Freud
Why don't you try what others have done: Istead of a straight download, provide a BitTorrent seed? There was a recent story about this on ./ IIRC...
Mpeg4 or divx would be good. Most players/platforms can handle them.
I have a fondness for Quicktime, though, because releasing something in QT just flat-out annoys both Microsoft and Real.
(Yeah, I'm bigoted. But at least my bigotry is based on honest hatred and distrust, not hypocrasy.)
TLR
A man no more knows his destiny than a tea leaf knows the history of the East India Company
I've never been able to get Quicktime files to play on Linux. Is there a secret I'm missing?
----- If communism is a system where the government owns business, what do you call a system where business owns govern
It's not a question of being "anti-BitTorrent", it just isn't the right tool for the job. I like BitTorrent, but it only works for files for which there is a sufficiently high demand that there will be enough users online that have the file. It's perfect for the latest Linux distributions, but rubbish for obscure video files.
In this case, anyone clicking the "Torrent" link is going to have to wait for hours or even days to get their file.
1. I use Flash as SWF (FLV is the other Flash container). Wildform (www.wildform.com) or Sorenson Squeeze (www.sorenson.com) work well. For the video you describe, you should get reasonable results at 10kb/s.
A major benefit of Flash is the large installed user-base. It's very friendly to end-users.
2. Do you need video, or would a sequence of clips/slides do the job? A nicely produced set of slides will save a lot of bandwidth.
3. Edit your videos tightly. Do you need 1-2 minutes? I'd suggest making 3 x 20-second clips. Despite claims, RealPlayer or QuickTime buffering are not as good as they say. Real users often still get breaks in streaming - so the shorter the better.
4. Flash also allows good integration of graphics.
This type of problem is exactly that for which Coral was created -- to help publishers who otherwise cannot handle their bandwidth requirements.
l s
As an example, you can find a partial list of sites which regularly use Coral at our Wiki:
http://wiki.coralcdn.org/wiki.php/Main/Testimonia
If you've watched tsunami videos in the past month, there's a good chance you've probably accessed Coral at one point without knowing it.
(Coral currently handles about 5-8 million requests a day for several TB of data.)
RivavX is just a frontend to ffmpeg, useful for win32 users. Combining this with some of the premade swf's from videospark makes for a nice progressive platform independent playback that works on almost all platforms, Flash v.7 is needed though.
Demo of a progressive flv player. Using that player it is even possible to create streaming webvideo without using Macromedias authoring enviroment.
I work with a small web-based company which distributes media files in audio and video formats, and we've decided to go with ogm (xvid video, ogg audio) video files and ogg audio for our audio/video content that doesn't require extremely high quality. If you're presently using WMV, quality is clearly not a concern.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
No! AMD64 has no flash support (at least for macromedia), and free flash support is quite poor (no movies and sound).
Pleeeeease avoid flash as much as poissible.