Comments

Cheesehole wrote on 11/2/2001, 3:04 AM
i've had excellent results with wmv video quality. what is your bandwidth limit? i haven't worked with anything less than 150kbps but i might still be able to help you out. also what is your final resolution? and what kind of audio? music? narration? stereo? is your video full of action, or is it just a talking head, or is it a technical demonstration?
fosko wrote on 11/6/2001, 2:23 PM
I'm trying to do similar and having a hard time finding a decent compression.
I'm trying to take an hour video and put it online (I know this may be ambitious becasue of the size). There's not a lot of movement(it's a church sermon) but there is some very minimal walking around. There is also a music tag at the beginning and end of about a minute a piece. Idealy I'd like to keep the quality of the audio high for that reason, but if necessary I'll sacrafice that for some better video quality.

My thought was offering files on the web in MediaPlayer and/or Real media formats since those seem to be the most widely used
Cheesehole wrote on 11/7/2001, 2:29 AM
if you plan on serving files to dial-up users, then the quality will have to be quite low. Real seems to handle the really really low stuff better than Windows Media. i really only know WM though.

- if you want maximum compatibility then choose to compress to an ASF file (rather than WMV)

- reduce the resolution of your final video as much as possible. that is the biggest factor right there.

customize a compression template for asf:
- use single bit rate video
- Internet 56 Modem
- uncheck resample (change project settings instead... you want Vegas to resample your audio, not the windows media encoder)
- choose Windows Media Audio V2 - 10kbps 11khz is a good place to start. the audio will sound poor, but this is for dial-up. you can experiment. make sure your project settings match your final audio sample rate.
- use video - MS MPEG-4 video codec V3
- Advanced
- custom size
- 15fps
- 8 Seconds/IFrame (you can turn this up to gain a little bit of quality, but not worth it)
- 3 delay buffer (i'd try turning this down to 1... experiment)
- choose '0' quality (smoothest)

try rendering a small portion at those settings and then tweak to your satisfaction. remember, resolution is the key factor. it shouldn't be any more than 200x150. 180x88 is more reasonable.

good luck...
fosko wrote on 11/8/2001, 11:07 AM
Thanks much I'll givethat a shotthis weekend
fosko wrote on 11/10/2001, 11:06 PM
OK,
I dont see an ASF setting to render to

?????
SonyEPM wrote on 11/10/2001, 11:16 PM
.asf has been discontinued, by Microsoft.
Cheesehole wrote on 11/11/2001, 12:16 AM
ASF may have been discontinued by microsoft but in the real world asf is the way to go in many situations.

You probably want your files to play on as many platforms as possible, with as little annoyance to the end user. here are some facts to consider:

1. Win2k comes with Media Player 6.4 pre-installed.
2. Media Player 6.4 can play ASF files with the compression settings I specified earlier without downloading any additional codecs.
3. All Media Player versions since 6.4 (7 and 8) can play ASF files without downloading addl codecs.
4. WMV files will play in Media Player 6.4, but the player must download additional codecs over the internet, and (this is what annoys me a lot) the seek-bar will be very sluggish and unresponsive when repositioning playback. this is important to me, since one of the biggest features of digital media is random access. also because a responsive interface is much nicer to work with than one that can take up to 4 seconds to catch up with me.

So... ASF files play perfectly in both 6.4 players and more recent versions. This cannot be said for WMV files.

If you want to compress to ASF directly from Vegas, you should install Vegas 2.0b and then upgrade it to 2.0h. i guess SF took out ASF fuctionality because Microsoft made them. there are many more reasons that ASF is still an important format, but they are more important for CDROM delivery rather than internet delivery. so i can't believe they had a choice in the matter, otherwise they would have left it in.

There is one more bonus to using ASF... if you can find the Fraunhofer MP3 compressor, you can encode your audio with it (shows up under audio compression options in the encoder after installing) and get results that are superior even to Windows Media 8 audio. And the files will STILL play on a 6.4 player without downloading anything. (6.4 the only player that installs on EVERY relevant windows platform. That means Win95, Win98, WinMe (pre-installed i think), WinNT4, Win2k (pre-installed), WinXP (pre-installed).

if you don't care about any of these issues, then WMV 7 and 8 especially are fine ways to go. The best windows media encoder out right now is the command line version of the WM8 encoder (wm8enc) which you can download from Microsoft. to use it, you'll have to render your video as something else like AVI Indeo RAW (install the Indeo dev pack first) and then recompress it using the command line encoder. you'll get the best quality/bitrate with WM8, but actually most of the benefits of WM8 are only realized at higher bitrates (500kbps and up). there isn't much difference at lower bitrates like 56kbps. and then there's the WM8 audio... which is great for music and movie sound, but inferior to Fraunhofer for narration (like a church sermon).

SO in conclusion i think both formats are useful in different situations. i look at them as separate formats, not sequential versions. If they were meant to be sequential versions, why the change of extension?Microsoft is trying to get rid of ASF for commercial reasons only. If you notice, the 6.4 player is very capable, but it doesn't have all the advertisement crap that 7, and 8 does. MS would like everyone to upgrade to 7 and 8 players so they can sell space in the players to other companies. that is the motivation behind the change of extension, mutually exclusive features of the formats/players, encouragement of certain companies to drop support for the ASF encoder, etc... I just want to point that out in case you are wondering... 'well if asf is the way to go in certain situations, then why is MS pushing WMV as the way to go?' So there you go. As usual they are letting marketing motivations take precedence over usability of the product. it is free after all... they have to cash in somehow.

i'm in tune to the intricacies of the players and the formats because i develop training CD-ROMs using an HTML/JavaScript based interface which takes full advantage of the scripting capabilities of Windows Media Player. so i have media files with markers and other commands embedded into the stream... and a custom interface for the player itself. not skins... but a real custom interface with a SEEK BAR, Volume Slider and everything. like anyone developing for a MS platform, i've had to learn all about the stupid things that ms does to further it's marketing goals at the cost of screwing over developers. end users rarely get the opportunity to see the darker side of MS. see they do have 2 sides... a dark side and a darker one. we just have to make the stuff work for end users because we have no choice. OKAY sure i could make a training CD for Linux, but i'm not sure it would have the same penetration... hmmm... you think?

so am i way off SF? why was ASF encoding removed from Vegas Video?