what format(s) do you use for the web?

Spot|DSE wrote on 7/19/2004, 7:56 PM

Real is losing the race, as you've more or less figured out. WMV for all its warts, is the winner in the streaming game. REAL is disliked because of how they acted like spyware and took over your whole machine. That's changed now, but the damage to their rep is done, IMO.
We exclusively use WMV unless we know we're aiming at Mac users, then we use MPEG4 in a Quicktime wrapper.

stormstereo wrote on 7/19/2004, 8:01 PM

I don't like Real because when installing the player it also adds some background processes, attempts to become the default player, splashes ad's in my face and want's to implement functionalities to my system that I do not want.

Usually I use WMV for the web. After analyzing website traffic I concluded I'll reach almost everyone. If it's important content I'll add QT. Both WMP and QT behaves a lot better in my opinion.

Best/Tommy

Chienworks wrote on 7/19/2004, 9:07 PM

Even the newest version of RealPlayer keeps reactivating "realsched" every time it runs. I keep disabling it, and next time i run RealPlayer it's back again. I think i'm gonna have to subvert it the same way i did with the old tklbell or whatever it was with the previous version.

PigsDad wrote on 7/19/2004, 10:05 PM

I refuse to have any software from Real installed on any of my computers, and I know a lot of other people who feel the same way. They may no longer be spyware, but they are annoying as hell with all their medling w/ default players, and reminders / pop-ups, etc. As another poster stated, the damage has been done, and there is nothing that would restore the lost trust for me.

Since I made the decision a few years back to ban Real, I have never regretted it. I simply ignore any website that only offers Real media.

Kurt

Grazie wrote on 7/19/2004, 11:21 PM

I loathe RP . . should be RiP!

Radio/TV of choice? The BBC. What do they use for my favourite Music Prog? RP! Go figure. Just tried to access it . . RP threw a wobbly . . .

Grazie

Grazie wrote on 7/19/2004, 11:29 PM

Ok there is WMP .. here is the Link to THE BEST Digital Radio EVER!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/6music/presenters/phill_jupitus/home.shtml

Grazie

kerrying wrote on 7/20/2004, 12:33 AM

Use WMV, Real Media and AVI on and off for playback of different multimedia files for some time now and Real Media is often the only one that seems bloated, sluggish, sleazy and makes your system goes havoc (regardless of platforms and Real Player version). Pretty annoying at times. MPEG4 in AVI wrapper seems great to me.

From the way the website of Real Media trying to highlight the Real Player 10 (which costs money) and quietly tug away the download link to its free version of the player to one corner is interesting, too.

zcus wrote on 7/20/2004, 2:11 AM

What about DivX - I just bought Canopus Pro coder which comes with the DivX Pro Codec. I know not many people use it but I get better results with it than WMV. And just to let you all know (in spite oft the price) Pro coder does an assume job converting to DV to MPEG - I REALLY can't tell the difference between the source and the MPEG + it allows you to ad filters before the incode (sharpen, color correction, color safe, gamma correction, blur, bitmap keying, temporal noise reducer...)

KingVideo wrote on 7/20/2004, 12:17 PM

I went from QT to WMV and now i'm on Flash. Flash by far is the best for web video, because windows media player (.wmv) is still kinda unreliable on some peoples machines, with QT some people have to update their QT. Flash is on about 97% of machines out there and updates real quick. You can embed the player in the project file which is real nice as well as stream.

Check it out, I think Flash video is the future for web video....

stormstereo wrote on 7/20/2004, 6:17 PM

Hey Chienworks - find the "realsched.exe" on your C drive and rename it to "realsched.exe.old". Now it wont start but the player works just fine.

Best/Tommy

Chienworks wrote on 7/20/2004, 7:16 PM

Tommy, good deal! Thanks!

With the previous incarnation renaming or deleting the pernicious file didn't help; RealPlayer would simply download and reinstall it. Grrrr. I had to create a "null.exe" file and rename that with RealPlayer's name for the file. Then it assumed the file was still there even though it was now non-functional.

stormstereo wrote on 7/21/2004, 3:08 AM

Download again huh? I hate when the kids in the 'puter does not do what they're told. I'd like to see, during installation or after (of any program), questions to ask permission to run background tasks and connecting to Internet. Let the user decide, not the ware.

If for some reason my tip does not work try renaming it to "realsched.old" instead of "realsched.exe.old".

Best/Tommy

Chienworks wrote on 7/21/2004, 5:28 AM

Hmmmm. "realsched.exe" not found. Apparently that's not the name of the executable file.

Spirit wrote on 7/21/2004, 5:52 AM

Agree on Flash. The future of web video is definitely Flash - no doubt at all in my mind. Bet the house on it ! It is orders of magnitude more flexible andversatile. The way you can mix stills, video, text, links etc at the absolute lowest file size makes it the clear winner.

Try mixing high-quality stills and full-motion video on wmv !

patreb wrote on 7/21/2004, 10:58 AM

WMV is simply unreliabl on mac and since often you target that grou (kinda like we want as many people in the industry to see it -- i'm saying that despite my love for PCs) the QT is your best option.

Real isn't even installed on my machine anymore.

wombat wrote on 7/21/2004, 4:19 PM

Quicktime also is intrusive when installed on PCs, and has constant, annoying "pay up for the real version" messages when you start it up. IT people on our network refuse to install it anymore because of the problems it causes. Ironically, perhaps, they are happy with Real Media

And do you imagine that Windows Media Player does not spy on you? It even reports to Microsoft and interested parties the serial numbers of audio CDs that you put in a drive, unless you specifically disable the 'feature'.

Thought real media (player) can be annoying, it is a proven and very effective format. The last time I tested (more than a year ago) artefacting of streaming video at given compression / data rates, Real Video came out ahead of WMV with QUicktime noticeably last. And although Flash does a good job with sources like screen capture - planar areas of colour and relatively little action - I think it is a long way off the mark for normal video streaming.

With Vegas, anyway, you can batch output to different formats, can't you? So offer your clients options so they can use their preferred format.

stormstereo wrote on 7/22/2004, 2:39 AM

Chienworks said: "Hmmmm. "realsched.exe" not found. Apparently that's not the name of the executable file."

Huh? It's found on my machine. Translating from Swedish version: It's in C\Program\Shared files\Real\Update_OB

I renamed it Realsched.old and have not seen it it the task manager since.

Best/Tommy

earthrisers wrote on 7/22/2004, 1:54 PM

an additional 2cents' worth...
I abandoned Real a couple of years ago, when I bought/downloaded their $29 (I think) player, and AFTER THEY HAD ACCEPTED MY CREDIT CARD, a message informed me that I was also being signed up for some music service for $10 a month, charged automatically to my credit card. There was no prior message ASKING if I wanted the additional "feature." It took phone calls and much other annoying hassle to get that undone. I uninstalled Real at that time, and have never looked back.

I've recently gone to Flash -- using Wildform's "FlixPro" software to convert from AVI to Flash; had been deploying in WMV format before that, and still use WMV sometimes. Also, occasionally, QuickTime, if that's what a client specifies. If I had my pure 'druthers, I'd probably use strictly Flash.
Ernie

stormstereo wrote on 7/22/2004, 3:51 PM

Ernie - The vector video output in FlixPro is just about the coolest thing I've seen (if ya trim it right).

Just had to get that out of me.
Best/Tommy

Techest wrote on 8/31/2005, 3:40 AM

The best way to convert avi / mpeg to Flash is Video to Flash Converter 4.1

http://www.geovid.com/Video_to_Flash_Converter/

trock wrote on 8/31/2005, 5:37 AM

I had a project recently where the client wanted an 8 minute 720x576 online streaming video using Flash so they could have a single cross-platform file. I usually use .wmv and QT (which I find always needs a bigger filesize to match .wmv's quality, especially as frame sizes increase) and I always frameserve from Vegas to external converters.

I did the conversion to Flash first at 512 kbps and played it back and was pretty surprised. It looked really bad and very blocky. The original footage had a lot of panning, zooming, morphing and dissolving while panning and zooming so I thought it might be that. So I tried it again at higher and higher bitrates all the way up to the maximum (2 MBps) and it was better but nothing like as good as the original and the file size was 64MB.

So I did a couple of tests as a .wmv and the one at 512 kbps looked beautiful. I did one also at 256 kbps and it' was not quite as good as the 512 one but was still very good indeed and was 16MB.

I tried several Flash converter programs including Macromedia's own (Flix) and got the same poor results. So I started to read up on Flash video and discovered a lot of info that explained what was going on.

Basically, the whole emphasis of Flash is on convenience of delivery rather than high quality. At the Flix site it does say explicitly that Flash is not so much about quality as it about accessibility and ease of compression. It even recommends going with .wmv or .mov when quality is the priority.

The quality loss is not so bad when you're using small videos but it gets progressively worse when the video framesize is bigger.

On August 8th Macromedia released Flash 8 and in a July 25th interview the CEO explained that the current Flash video technology is 4 years old and that Flash 8 is vastly improved. He claimed it was 10-20% better than .wmv (but at an increase of 30% in file size).

So, until there are Flash 8 encoders and a good base of Flash 8 users (estimated to be a year away) I don't personally find Flash to be a viable alternative for large framesize high quality movies. YMMV.

Coursedesign wrote on 8/31/2005, 8:27 AM

So, until there are Flash 8 encoders and a good base of Flash 8 users (estimated to be a year away) I don't personally find Flash to be a viable alternative for large framesize high quality movies.

Macromedia advised they will ship my fully released Studio 8 Flash encoder week after next, so the tools are very close indeed and you can try the public beta now if you want to see the file sizes.

Any Flash 6 or 7 user who clicks on a Flash 8 video will be asked if they want to upgrade to Flash 8, and it's a VERY fast download. That means that Flash 8 could spread in a, well, flash among users.

The design criteria for Flash 8 included being able to play back on older machines, so H.264 was out of the question (and ya'll know how WMP10 fares on old hardware). The On2 VP6 codec chosen is about 2-3x more efficient than the old Sorenson Spark 4 codec.

I just love that the user doesn't have to wait for a player to load, that it works on almost any machine, that the video can easily be interactive, that you can use alpha channels if needed, that you (the producer) chooses the skins for the playback, etc. etc.

Macromedia's tools are also much easier to work with in V8, they said this was the first time they went out to customers to ask what they wanted....

trock wrote on 8/31/2005, 9:24 AM

Good news, thanks.

TheHappyFriar wrote on 8/31/2005, 9:55 AM

the only downside of flash (and I see this as a HUGE downside) is that once you start download the file in a browser you're commited to downloading it unless you change your IP. Even if all browser windows are closed.

So, technically, you can't stop a flash add/video from downloading if you don't want to see it.