What is the most efficient video format (MPEG, WMV, Quicktime, Real, etc)? More specifically, for videos that are 340x240.
I want the videos to be of fairly high quality, but file size is also a factor. So which format is the best?
IMHO…the smallest with great video quality is Mpeg4.
Which is played best by the newest version of Quicktime.
Others have it by the addition of the codecs I’m sure.
Reeder is right, mpeg4-compliant codecs are the current top-of-the-line (by contrast, DVD encoding is a version of mpeg2), and give the best results for a given compression ratio. It’s not that simple though, as mpeg4 is actually sort of an umbrella standard (collection of standards, actually), rather than a codec itself. The following are all mpeg4 codecs:
DivX
XviD
3ivX
WMV
RealVideo 10 (I think)
and there are a bunch of others I can’t remember offhand. Each has its pluses and minuses, and the simple answer is that it probably depends what you’re encoding as to which is best. Some codecs are designed to work better at low bit-rates, others at high-quality rates, so for varying compression ratios there will likely be different winners on quality. www.doom9.org does occasional codec comparisons (most recent one linked from this page). These are always a bit subjective, though, and the variation within the class of mpeg4 codecs is a lot less than most people will notice by inspection, whereas the difference between a video in mpeg2 and a more modern codec like XviD is pretty obvious, I find.
Can I ask what source you’re encoding from, and how small you want the resulting files? I suspect the available tools will likely be more of a concern than which codec, since the difference between most of the modern options is so small. The other thing is that if you’re publishing the files, people’s ability to play them back is going to be an issue; you can’t generally assume that everyone has XviD or DivX installed, so WMV or quicktime might be safer bets.
I want to appeal to as large an audience as possible, so I guess Mpeg4 is out. And to answer your other question, I want the final file size to be 320x240.
Between WMV, Quicktime and MPEG1, which would you recommend (virtually everyone can play MPEG1s, right)?
Isn’t QT just an encapsulation method, like AVI or WAV? You need a seperate CODEC.
I get very good results with DivX… I use DivX pro though, which allows better compression than the free version.
What I do is I use a program called “Gordian Knot”, have DivX pro installed, set the audio to 96 kb/sec variable/average bitrate (not constant bitrate) - and this gives excellent results, even for music videos. The program has a cropping tool which you can use to get rid of any black bars, etc. The program lets you deinterlace things to, but use the preview to see if the deinterlace method worked properly. I set the “Bits/(Pixel*Frame)” to about 0.1 (by adjusting the resolution and/or the total file size) even though Gordian Knot recommends at least 0.19. The value there depends on how many scene changes and how complex the video is. If it is mostly people talking with the camera not moving then that value can be very low.
Then I encode it with 4 passes and performance set to slow (which gives the maximum compression) and “psychovisual enhancements” set to slow… this makes sure that the compression artifacts are not very visible. e.g. it would put them where rough textures are rather than on the edges that separate person from the background.
MPEG1 also has the worst compression. It is used on VCD’s, and it has about 70 minutes or something at about 320x240 taking up 700 Mb, with pretty bad compression artifacts.
The thing about WMV and Quicktime is that there are many versions… many people might have an older version of Windows Media Player or Quicktime and so they’d have to download the program again in order to see videos compressed with recent versions of that software. And wmv and mov use MPEG4 I think, at least recently they do.
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/
BTW, it looks like the latest Quicktime player is only available for Windows 98 upwards and MacOS 8.6 upwards. There mightn’t be a version 6.5 player for Linux - and there’s not one for Windows 95, etc.
Info about Quicktime and Linux:
http://www.infoanarchy.org/wiki/index.php/Quicktime/Linux
It looks like Linux, Windows 95, Mac OS9, and Mac OS8 only support Realplayer 8, even though the latest version is 10.
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/design7/info.html
It looks like WMV9 is support for Linux if you download that above program.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/download/default.asp?displang=en
It looks like MacOSX supports WMV9, but MacOS8 and MacOS9 only supports WMV7.
Anyway, WMV9 would offer much better compression than WMV7. But taking into support for MacOS8 and MacOS9 I think the Realplayer 8 format is best since it probably has better compression than WMV7 and definitely would have better compression than mpeg1.
BTW, as far as compressing stuff goes, you should use the slowest most high-quality method available, and also make the filesize as big as you can (bigger filesizes allow more quality to show through).
On second thoughts, realplayer’s installation program can be pretty annoying… but if that support for lots of people is most important, then that wouldn’t matter.
Support for Quicktime 6.5 is quite widespread for people on the internet (those with Windows 95 probably would have mostly upgraded due to all the internet programs that don’t work on windows 95). As far as Linux goes, they usually can dual boot into windows if they can’t get quicktime 6.5 to work.
Thanks for all the help.
Anyways, file size is a slight issue. I want to make the files as small as I can, while retaining fairly high quality.