Thanks Rob. If I publish any of those versions they will be embedded in web players. But for the point of a comparison test I thought it better to encourage to download all the versions locally. If they have to sit through one embedded version, then wait while the next embedded version buffers, chances are the delay will make a visual comparison very difficult.

I will amend the page to make that clear.

Oh and I don't necessarily want to farm them out to a third party. I am thinking of hosting them myself.

Sorry, I was being difficult. My own clients are generally not all that patient or savvy so I was approaching this from a usability standpoint.

If I was only going to stream from the web and knew that my audience was likely to be on any of the big three platforms then I'd forget about xvid and WMV. Flash player is still the most universal although I suppose that most PC users end up with the quicktime player installed. So you're really looking at flash and quicktime. Which of those three samples look best to you?

FWIW, we generally provide WMV to our main clients because they are in the PC business and we know that all their products run Windows. We don't make them install players if we can help it.

Rob

Strangely, the On2 FLV version plays upside down in media player on my PC. I use On2 as well and have never had this problem.

That is strange Laurence. I will try and set it up embedded on a web page.

I've now added a 2-pass On2 FLV encode with the deinterlacing/resizing done in Vegas not Flix Pro. That makes the encode faster. It's number 6 on my page. A winner perhaps?

I've now added a 2-pass CBR WMV version to the page and updated the 1-pass CBR version with a lower bitrate to match the other tests (I had some confusion between bits and bytes in the encoder settings). Also added screen shots of all the Vegas settings.

Nick,

I read the terms of that Brightcove agreement. It seems a little risky in that they can bill you for their "free service" whenever they decide to and that your personal information appears to be up for grabs by their "affiliates". Are you sure Brightcove was a good idea? The player DOES work well I'll adimit.

John

I only compared the FLV and the WMV files. There were things about each that I liked and didn't like.

Primarily, I saw banding in parts of the FLV's graduated tones (out-of-focus BG). The WMV didn't thave this problem.

On the other hand, the FLV had a bit more contrast than the WMV, which made the image appear a tad sharper.

The contrast issue could be fixed prior to encoding for WMV. However, I'm not sure the same could be said for the banding issues in FLV.

Nick-

I only compared three: The Sony AVC, and the one-pass WMV and Flash. The AVC is the most vibrant and colorful to me. The WMV and Flash are pretty close on my screen, but the WMV has a little more punch. I'll check out the two pass later.

FWIW, it doesn't really matter what you show this stuff on, its amazing any way you look at it. Great footage-really envious man!

Cheers
kairosmatt

Thanks for the feedback guys.

John, I must admit I probably glossed over the Brightcove agreement somewhat. i will check it again.

OK, I've now totally rewritten the page, condensed the number of contenders down to four options, and re-encoded them all with audio.

We now have: On2 VP6 2-pass FLV, Sony AVC, WMV9 2-pass and Xvid 1-pass, all at 2000 kbps CBR with 128 kbps audio.

I have now included Javascript popup links so that they all open in (the same) popup window.

Hopefully this now makes a good usability/compatibility/playability test as well as a good quality comparison.

Looking at these 4 options, for me the Xvid is the clear winner in both quality and playability. It has the best detail and best player. But for sure it's the least compatible as most viewers will not already have the DivX Web Player and will need to download and install it.

FLV is OK but the player has no buffering intelligence. I can only set it with a buffer in seconds, not percentage. It's the most compatible though (98.3% penetration in mature markets by December 2007).

AVC has too much contrast for my liking. This time it insists on buffering 100% of the file before playing.

WMV makes the visibility look bad. It's too soft for me.

Please let me know your experiences. Thanks!

[note: You might need to hard-refresh the page (in I.E. hold down <CTRL> + <SHIFT> while clicking REFRESH) to get the updated version if you have loaded it previously]

I agree with you. DivX (What version of the codec was it?) looked the best to my feeble eye sight, but then again, I ended up with different media players for each file, since between my download manager and file associations, I couldn't get the popup windows to do anything but open the associated media player.. DivX looked a little sharper, but WMV wasn't really that much worse.

One other non-technical item with Flash. A lot of people have things like flash blocked via their browsers, because most of the online flash content is annoying adverts. But since you're hosting it yourself and telling people where to look, that shouldn't be a problem.

Nice work, BTW.

Congrats for all the hard work you've done. A couple of comments:

(1) Why would you want buffering to be based on a percentage of the file, rather than in seconds? What good does it do to download a huge portion of a huge file before beginning to play, versus downloading, say, 10 seconds' worth?

(2) Rather than people saying things like "This one was more contrasty" or "that one was more vibrant" I would prefer that the clips be ranked by their faithfulness to the original.

Anyway, good work; my preference is to stick with good old Flash, since everyone has it. For those who don't want their web pages to look like the Vegas strip, don't turn off Flash; just get an ad blocker such as the excellent AdBlockPlus in Firefox or AdMuncher in IE. I'm sure there are many other blockers that work well, but my experience is mostly with those two. My young daughter used to love the AdMuncher cow icon in the System Tray, munching on ads it came across.

Thanks for the feedback.

>> DivX (What version of the codec was it?) looked the best to my feeble eye sight... <<

jabloomf1230, I used the free Xvid 1.1.3 codec, not DivX. Xvid will play back with the DivX codec. Here is the encoding method.

>> Why would you want buffering to be based on a percentage of the file, rather than in seconds? What good does it do to download a huge portion of a huge file before beginning to play, versus downloading, say, 10 seconds' worth? <<

riredale, I was thinking that would then at least adapt to a certain extent to the viewer's bandwidth. The "bufferlength" setting in the flashvars is the number of seconds it buffers for, not the actual length of the video that it buffers. If I could set it as a percentage then I would set it as something like 60% so at least I know a good chunk of the file will play without stopping, and possibly the whole thing on a fast connection.

>> (2) Rather than people saying things like "This one was more contrasty" or "that one was more vibrant" I would prefer that the clips be ranked by their faithfulness to the original. <<

I agree and I put the AVC, WMV and Xvid onto the Vegas timeline below the original (Vegas won't take the FLV) and on my Dell 24" the brightness/contrast of all 3 of them was very close to the original HDV footage In Vegas at least. But for sure they are different when playing back in Flash Player or WMP or whatever.

Using my PIII 1GHZ 750 MB ram computer I was unable to run the flv video smoothly. It looked like a very beautiful slide show rather than a video.

The AVC completely locked up the computer usng the popup choice. For the Direct link choice it downloaded to VLC media player very quickly, but VLC couldn't play it without blocky breakups.

The DIvx file asked to install a plugin which I always decline.

WMV played just fine.

Mind you, with the exception of Divx I can play these types of files normally using the VLC media player or a quicktime plugin on this computer.

My XP dual core computer fared better, but the files are simply not encoded for ease of playback. Which is more important? Pristine footage that not everyone can see or worse, that turns them off because they have to reboot or good looking footage that plays well with others?

John