Streaming Learning Center

Just finished watching an interesting video entitled Video Case Studies - Top 10 Tips, which was produced by UK video producer Aspect Film and Video. You can watch it here, though you may need to sign in first.

Click over to the main article to see the top ten tips and my short peer review of the video produced by Aspect.

As part of my First Looks review of VP8 and WebM for StreamingMedia.com, ran a bunch of VP8 and H.264 comparisons, initially using the MainConcept H.264 codec, since that's the codec included with Sorenson Squeeze, which I used to produce the VP8 files. Then, I added some comparison files produced using the x264 codec, encoding via the QuickTime-based x264Encoder version 1.2.13 (dated 6/27/2010). 

You can read the StreamingMedia article here. In this article, I present the frame comparisons that were too big to fit in the StreamingMedia article, plus present URLs for the streaming files that I created and compared. 

Download the PDF handout for the H.264 Production seminar that I taught at StreamingMedia East. Here's the agenda.

One of the tricks to speedy encoding with Sorenson Squeeze is to open multiple instances of the program and encode in parallel, which you could do on the Mac and in Windows through version 5.x. When I tested this with version 6, however, it no longer worked on the Mac. I pinged Sorenson months ago about the issue and only recently heard back with a fix for the problem. Click over to the main article to learn the secret.

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.

Updated findings below.

Ogg Theora and HTML5 have been top of mind for me over the last few weeks, and one consistent question was how Ogg compared to H.264 in terms of quality. So, I spent a few hours this past weekend encoding and comparing. Click through to the main article to see what I found.