Video In Webpages
I need to include video in webpages. The general question is "Which format is best?" (for me). In previous discussions you guys have been brutal on RealPlayer, as if you had pitchforks, torches, and a rope noose. But I must start this new discussion by stating that this format is going into this debate as the favorite choice.
I know that any file that can be played by Windows Media Player has a distinct and unignorable advantage of reach. And I will state that Quicktime has the best quality. But after a great deal of experimenting, only Real Player can deliver very good quality video with unbelievably small files size. Testing with a 30 second video at 320x240, I couldn't get a descent video output from avi, mgeg, or qt with less than 3 megs file size. With Real Player I got 30 seconds of better than average video quality with a file size under 500K! 6 times smaller file size! That is unbelievable and despite my dislike of the RealPlayer company, I can't ignore the efficiency of that kind of quality/size ratio.
For me:
** quality needs to be at least 'descent' because clients don't want their videos to look like crap on their websites
** file size needs to be very small, small enough to not wait too long to view a 30 sec over dial-up
* greatly prefer free. RealProducer Basic can't resize but it is totally free. (I resize before encoding)
* even though Real Player does have far less reach than WMP, it is still a popular enough choice that Major League Baseball, the NFL, and many other big-boys decided it's good enough for them.
And yet after all of that I'm still here asking all of you to debate my viewpoint. Perhaps you can say something that will change my mind.
So can anybody convince me to consider another choice?
*edit*
I should add that I never experimented with Flash video. How small can a 30 get on that and still look good? And can I do it for free?
Greg K posted this at 21:27 — 25th January 2005.
He has: 2,145 posts
Joined: Nov 2003
One thing I'd like to know is what are the popular formats/cleints for NON windows OS's.
Now, my $.02 on my preferences:
Over the years, I have disliked Quicktime for one main reason, their user interface. Now I admit I haven't tried it in a year or so, but gave up on it as when veiwing a 300xsomething video on a screen at 1280x1024, that is pretty tiny. I wanna be able to zoom the sucker
Real player I didn't care for for all the crap that they crammed in with it, however Windows media player is just as bloated anymore IMO. I did switch back to real player mainly becasue, well that is what they stream the Big Brother live video streams with. Plus also the site i use for Bible resouces uses that for audio versions of the verses.
Whenever possible, I prefer WinAmp to play my audio/video. I now use that for listening to online radio/video broadcasts. (I had never used their "media" listing before recently to see what all streams were available, FREE).
I have played a little with displaying video via flash, and found it generally was overall just a little larger than whatever format I imported. I will say I have never played around much with the encoding video, so I may have missed how to make them smaller.
-Greg
CptAwesome posted this at 22:10 — 25th January 2005.
He has: 370 posts
Joined: Dec 2004
I'd go with Quicktime, because it offers you a decent range of quality, and is probably the most widely supported format, without incurring the hate of RealPlayer.
Embedding the video in Flash is also a really good idea.
fifeclub posted this at 17:13 — 26th January 2005.
He has: 688 posts
Joined: Feb 2001
I've been experimenting with some flash video. Nicer than I thought but the file is still 1.7 meg (twice the .rm file) and I can't figure out how to get my test .flv file into a webpage.
Anyway, I can't vouch for the accuracy of this statement but I came across this statement:
To me the WMP numbers seem WAY too low. RP seems about right but I doubt QT is over half the general public.
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