Okay, those of you who are allowing stage6 to host and your own site to display the videos are any of you having the issue I am as stated above (or quoted below):

Okay, I figured out how to get the stage6 video sight to host the video while playing from my site. (if you are interested look at my code on those pages which are under (Complete Wedding Video) under the picture on the main page.

j razz

The only issue I had was that playback on Netscape would only start after a pause of about three minutes. I think that it was getting stuck on the part of the code where it checks to see if you have the plugin and codec installed and gives you the option to install them if you don't. Anyway, this problem was both on my page and directly from the Stage6 site. I installed the latest version of Netscape and the problem went away.

Here is my wife's site with the embedded video.

The video itself is streaming off the Stage6 site so there is no overhead on site hosting the webpage. I ordered the free registration as well. I'm not sure that I need the extra registration, but what the heck, it's free!

I've not tried IE7, so can't test that. Not used an IE browser for a long time actually, but yes, it would be worth testing.

One thing I am having problem with is encoding a 1080P movie. Firstly, Vegas won't render it. Whatever MP3 codec I try stops it from working. Uncompressed audio is ok.

The DivX converter only works up to HD 720P resolution, but doesn't give you any high quality encoding options.

Next there's Dr DivX. I haven't been able to get this to work at all.. It just stalls whilst trying to encode the audio. Figure it must be an MP3 issue like with Vegas.

Lastly, I tried the DivXMux. Rendered off a video only DivX from Vegas and an MP3 of the audio at 192kbps. The video for some reason could only be rendered in a single pass. Otherwise I'd end up with a black screen. Anyway, tried combining the 2 in DivXMux. It renders for a couple of seconds in a DOS window. I check the newly created video, but find it's just the audio with a colourful totally distorted image.

Losing my patience here..

I don't know why the mp3 audio portion buggers up the render. I can render the mp3 audio portion with the built in low bitrate mp3 encoder that comes with Windows, but when I try to use a better quality mp3 encoder like the Lame or Cyberlink ones, it fails every time.

I was trying to figure out if it was a DivX problem or a Vegas problem so I tried several other types of video compression and ran into the same thing. For instance if I try to make an AVI with WMV video and mp3 audio it doesn't work any better than when I try to do this with DivX and mp3. Because of this I suspect that it is a Vegas problem.

Strange the the DivXMux solution didn't work for you.

Another option is to convert the video to DivX, the audio to uncompressed, then run the rendered AVI through VirtualDub with the video in "direct stream copy" mode and the audio in "full processing mode" and set to mp3 compression. That works pretty well.

You can also convert a Cineform master into DivX if you use Virtualdub.

I can only do two pass DivX encoding in Dr. Divx. I can't do two pass DivX renders from either Vegas or Virtualdub either. Fortunately the single pass renders look pretty good.

Another way to do this of course is to render an uncompressed video and load that into Dr DivX or the regular DivX convertor. Boy does that go through a lot of disc space though.

One other thing about 1080 DivX that you have to remember is that with HD DivX, you want to render 1920 x 1080 rather than 1440 x 1080 so that you have square pixels.

Hi Laurence, and a big thanks for the suggestions. There's a couple there I might try.

Actually, you really need to be rendering at 1920 x 1088. Apparently DivX works in blocks of 16. It has something to do with how the video is compressed. Can't remember exactly. I've uprezzed my footage using Photozoom which took a while. Since the HDV footage is interlaced, I uprezzed it from a resolution of 1440 x 540. It worked well. I had to render an image sequence from Vegas, and then batch process the files.

Yes, I can get it to render from Vegas with with 56kbps MP3 encoding.. But dismissed that immediately. If the video's going to be the highest quality possible, the audio should be too!

Something else I tried is rendering the file with Ogg Vorbis compression which actually worked. Although I dismissed using that since I doubt many people would have the codec installed on their machines and figured it would probably complicate things for most people.

Virtualdub I've tried aswell. It was a Cineform avi I loaded in there at the time. Got it to render out perfectly! The video was in sync with the audio and all seemed fine. I then changed the extension to .divx and tried opened the file using the DivX player which worked perfectly. But when it came time to upload the video to Stage 6, I received a message telling me the format was incompatible! Pretty much the reason why I gave up using Virtualdub from then on. But I may give the direct stream copy method a try. That was a 720P version. I then just rerendered that through the converter to make it compatible. That's the version that's up now. It could be better I'm sure.

As for rendering an uncompressed version, I was worried about the file size so used the Huffy codec instead. Probably the next best thing with it's lossless compression. That's the file I can't get to work using Dr DivX. Although as I said it locks up on the audio which is uncompressed in that file. So I'm not sure what the problem is.

Uninstalling and reinstalling all 3rd party codecs hasn't made any difference either. Or even just attempting to encode with no other codecs apart from DivX installed after a reboot and registry cleaned.

I guess I haven't tried uploading a DivX file rendered from Vdub to Stage6 yet.

I didn't have any success uploading videos from the DivX player utility to the Stage6 site. Doing it from the web-page has worked well though. In an email I got from their tech support, they said that the DivX player upload needs to be in a directory structure without spaces or long names. This is strange since when you install their software, it defaults to a naming structure that breaks their own rules! Anyway, the webpage upload works great from anywhere on your hard-drive.

Recent versions of VirtualDub have a Lancos 3 resizing algorithm on their resizing filter that works well. Photozoom Pro resizes look wonderful but boy is it a pain to do resize video that way. I think the VDub Lancos 3 resize is pretty close anyway.

One other thing that isn't immediately obvious is that you can use AC3 compression instead of mp3 for DivX audio. I sometimes do this when I work from VOBs to avoid the extra compression generation of audio by simply using a direct stream copy on the audio while compressing the video with DivX from the mpeg version of Virtualdub.

I don't think the Stage6 site is fast enough to stream 1080. 720p works well here though. I'm really curious as to whether or not 720p streams smoothly worldwide. It works wonderfully well here.

There is a guide to using DivX with VirtualDub here:

http://www.divx.com/divx/windows/codec/guides/

I am trying a 2 pass VDub render from Cineform to DivX right now.

Yes, and I think uploading from the player only lets you use the Home Theatre profile.

Oh, so that's what Lancos 3 does. I've never actually done much research into Virtualdub filters. I might have to give that a try and compare the results. One filter I did try is the deshaker. Doesn't work too well with HC1 footage most probably due to the rolling shutter I just mentioned here in the other thread.

You're right, AC3 works aswell. I remember trying that once aswell.

I've been able to stream 720P footage from Stage 6 here in Australia, but not with all their videos, only a few. I'm on a fast cable connection with a download speed close to 1200k a second. Not sure what would work out in kbps. Anyway, 720P or 1080P videos are probably best downloaded. Elephants Dream at 1080P is 570mb, so I don't think I'd like to be streaming that each time I wanted to watch it!

Which reminds me, I need to update my computer specs in my profile.

Great, I hadn't noticed that one their website before, thanks.

I was looking at the classical guitar video again (which is about as good looking a video as is on the Stage6 site) and noticed that it wasn't actually HD, but actually slightly smaller. It got me thinking about DivX, compression and interpolation.

I just set up a two pass DivX render of a project that was shot in 1080i. What I'm doing is rendering it 960 x 540. That way one interlaced field will be dropped completely and the resolution will be the best I can get out of the remaining field. I'm compressing this at 1500kbps which is the same as what that classical guitar video is compressed at and I'm using "insane quality" and a two pass render.

My theory is that this will be a "sweet spot" as far as Stage6 playback goes from a standard 1080i HDV camera: no interpolation, no blending fields, an easy image to compress and a high but consistantly streamable bitrate. What I'm after is video that can stream in real time and look really good full screen if you double click on the window. If it looks as good as I hope I will post it.