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Saturday, September 27, 2008

Encoding web video in the age of the iPhone

Allan Tépper | 09/27- 12:45 PM

We can’t afford to prevent over six million Internauts from seeing our content by making the wrong decision.

The last time I looked, Apple had already sold over six million iPhones after just 13 months since its initial launch. I don’t think that there have been six million extra standard computers sold (desktops and laptops) in the past year, compared to prior years’ sales. As a result, I conclude that mobile handheld communication devices [like the iPhone (plus the iPod Touch, Blackberry, Treo, and some others)] represent the fastest-growing segment of Internauts (Internet users).

Increasingly, I find myself having to warn my friends and clients against using Flash for their website and web video, since Flash is simply not playable on the most popular mobile handheld devices. (There are some handheld devices that play Flash as Adobe quickly points out, but I said “most popular”!) The formats that the popular handheld mobile devices play well are HTML, animated GIF, and H.264. Many graphic designers are so into the Flash rage, they attempt to minimize this vital and practical issue, in the hope that someday Flash might play on the most popular mobile handheld devices. I don’t know about you, but my clients and I need to communicate, sell, and eat today, not someday. We can’t afford to prevent over six million Internauts from seeing our content by making the wrong decision.

When some graphic designers and web artists hear that practical objection, they sometimes end up offering to create two versions of a website: one with 100% Flash, and one without. In an ideal world with unlimited budgets of time and money, that might be a good idea, especially if the website is going to be static (no frequent updates), not dynamic (frequent updates). For most people and organizations, keeping the website updated is very important (although difficult). It is time consuming enough to keep one version of a website up to date, let alone multiple versions. Many of the websites I manage are bilingual, which means that almost every update is already 2X. If there were also Flash/non-Flash versions, then there would be four total versions, so updates would be 4X. If a website is trilingual, then there will be six total versions, with updates being 6X. However, if you can justify the additional resources for a separate website version for mobile handheld devices… and especially if your website is blog-based (or other type of database-based website), see the sidebar “Making and maintaining a separate website version” on page 4.

Web Video •

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Top of the line article. Very intresting information.

Posted by  on  09/30  at  12:44 PM

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Thanks for the great article.

Long story short, I have a Quicktime file that I’m very happy with. Looks great, plays smoothly. It’s an H.264 .mov file that’s about 1500kbps bitrate. The size is 640x360.

After reading your article. I want to make this file an mp4.

Following your directions, I’m using Compressor to re-encode my master file into a mp4.

My question is:

How do I make an MP4 file that looks just as good as my H.264 encoded, beauty of a Quicktime file that I described above?

In Compressor 3, when I change the file type to “H.264 for Apple Devices” all of my compression options change. Certain options are greyed out, certain options just don’t exist. I can set the bitrate to approximately be the same as I did with my Quicktime beauty, but other options just aren’t available.

What this means is a compromise in quality. When I compare my original MOV h.264 file (described above) to the “h.264 for Apple Devices” (iPod / iPhone VGA setting, with mp4 typed in as the file extension), it seems that the mp4 is brighter, shows more blocky pixel artifacts, and the color appears less smooth than with the mov file.

Just for reference, both the mov file and the mp4 file are the same size....and both are encoded with H.264.

So my question is: how do I make an mp4 that looks just as good as an mov? Or, does the mp4 format mean a slight compromise in quality?

Thanks for you help and for the great article.

David

Posted by  on  10/05  at  10:15 AM

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I had a similar problem, and another problem when I started down the path of mp4 web delivery.  I’m using Adobe Premiere Pro CS3, and the Adobe Media Encoder. 

My video is widescreen, but when I create the iphone compatible h.264 the preset forces it to be 4:3.  When I changed the encoding, the file it generated won’t play properly (it gets random pixels on the right side of the image).

A bigger problem is this:  I’d like to have the h.264 mp4 file for download on the website (for iphoners) and then also stream within flash player.  The problem(s) are:
1) flash player requires that I download the whole video before playback begins.  Supposedly you can run a utility on the file to move the headers to the start of the file, which should fix this, but hasn’t worked yet for me.

2) seek within a file only works with a custom lightpd plugin, which I can’t run with a normal ‘shared’ hosting plan, or even with most of the VPS (virtual private server) hosting packages out there.

So now I’m back to creating an h.264 mp4 file for iphones, and an FLV for flash player. 

Frustrating.  Any ideas or success stories would be welcome.

Posted by Tom Frisch  on  11/03  at  03:14 PM

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