One last question about compatibility with the wmv-8 codec.

Fred93 wrote on 9/2/2004, 6:48 AM
Yes, I've been trying to find some information about the compatibility of the wmv-8 format on the Internet. But I haven't found anything conclusive.
Could you guys perhaps help me by telling me what you experience with the wmv-8 format? Does it work with older PC OS? Windows 95, 98, 2000?
I'm talking the "from scratch install" of the operative systems here with no updating.
Would a movie with the wmv-8 compression for instance work with a newly installed windows 95 PC on it's media player?

Thanks!

/Fred.

Comments

Spot|DSE wrote on 9/2/2004, 6:53 AM
Only up to 6.4 will play on Win 95 machines. 7.0 plays on 98se/newer only, etc...
I did see a workaround where someone had Win 8 playing on 95, but I don't remember where I saw it. Was quite a long time ago.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/mp10/previousversions.aspx
NickHope wrote on 9/2/2004, 7:22 AM
Windows Media 8 is almost certainly not supported by any releases of Windows 95 or 98 out of the box. Probably not even Windows 2000 either. I don't know at what point it was brought into shipped versions of Windows XP as standard but the XP that came with my 2-year-old Sony laptop didn't even have WMPlayer 7 so presumably not the WMV7 codec either. However you may find that many users have downloaded the update to WMV8 or even 9 at some point. I don't know if older versions of WMPlayer such as those in Win95 have the default setting to download codecs as required.

In my experience WMV9 is far superior to WMV8 so i encode in that and provide a link to Microsoft's download page for the update. They support Mac too now so I'm going to take my Quicktime versions offline as they're inferior to WMV9 at the same file size.

If compatability across all OS's is critical for you you'd have to look at something like MPEG1. If you're going to encode in WMV8 you may as well use WMV9.
Fred93 wrote on 9/2/2004, 8:45 AM
Thanks for the intel. Now I can make a descision regarding which format to use.

/Fred.
riredale wrote on 9/2/2004, 8:45 AM
You can play wmv9 stuff on w95. Just provide your users this link and their w95 system will get the necessary codecs to play wmv9, even if they are using the 6.4 version of the windows player. Scroll down to the bottom of the page.

A few months back I uploaded a couple of short video clips to the Chienworks site. If you go here and download the riredale_intro_split you can see what you can do in wmv9 with just 500Kb/sec.

WMV9 represents very close to the state-of-the-art in codec efficiency, and is 2x better than MPEG2 and 10x better than MPEG1.
BJ_M wrote on 9/2/2004, 4:39 PM
"2x better than MPEG2" if you like macroblocks all over the place...

it is a pretty good codec, though not near the quality of some open source, proprietary or near open source codecs with the same or better compression ..

download and look at the HD samples @ microsoft and play them back frame by frame (you will need a better media player than windows media player to do this - like zoom or media player classic) .. not very good at all if you look at each frame - and those are at 6meg-8meg data rate . 1/2 the data rate of mpeg2 @ 19meg/s ..

various wavelet and other type codecs offer the same or near same compression and vastly superior picture quality to slightly better quality.

wmv9 is good in that DRM can be used - as well as it is not that slow in encoding or decoding ... even in software (i dont know if there hardware assisted decoding of wmv yet on a large scale - as there is with other codecs) .
NickHope wrote on 9/3/2004, 12:23 AM
BJ_M, surely it doesn't really matter what the individual frames look like. It's how the movie looks when it's playing. In my tests against WM8, Realplayer and Quicktime, WM9 was fantastic. DivX was great too but I thought the WM9 codec would be more widely used and less "scarey" for some users to download.

Going back to Windows 95, last month it was responsible for only 0.2% of the hits on my website. That's almost not worth considering, especially as I believe most dinosaur Win95 users probably EXPECT a lot of web stuff not to work on their comupters these days. Windows XP is by far heading my list, followed by Windows 2000 then Win98. Those 3 OS's made 85% of my hits between them.