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Filed under: *VIDEO* •compression •Mobile Devices •Web Video •

Encoding web video in the age of the iPhone

My preferred códec for distributing video universally is H.264. Many people are under the mistaken impression that H.264 was an Apple invention. That is far from the truth. Just because Apple has strongly embraced H.264 doesn’t mean that Apple created it. H.264 is actually the 10th part of MPEG4. Also known as AVC, H.264 was developed by the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) together with the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) as the result of a partnership effort known as the Joint Video Team (JVT). As you now see, H.264 is not proprietary to Apple or to any other manufacturer. Today H.264 is indeed the preferred códec for many of Apple devices, including the AppleTV, iPhone, iPod, and iPod Touch. But way beyond Apple, H.264 was being used by Envivio as early as 2002 for efficient satellite transmission. You may know that H.264 is one of the approved códecs for Blu-ray video. In 2007, YouTube announced its gradual migration to H.264. In Barcelona, Spain in 2008, a new YouTube-style service called Wuapi.com was launched for HD, using H.264 (although embedding it in a Flash player: more about that later). Many people aren’t aware that the European DVB (Digital Video Broadcast) approved H.264 in 2004 for over the air broadcast, and as a result, H.264 is already being used over the air in multiple countries of Asia and Europe. The Brazilian terrestrial broadcast service uses H.264 in ISDB-T. Several direct broadcast satellite services use H.264, including BBC HD, DirecTV (in the USA), Dish Network (in the USA), SkyHD (in the UK and Ireland), and Sky Italia (in Italy). The reason that all of these organizations have selected H.264 is because of its high quality, efficiency, and scalability. [On December 4th, 2007, Adobe even announced version 9 of their Flash player, with H.264 playback capability. (More about that in the sidebar.) But to take advantage of that requires that you embed the H.264 video in a special Flash player on your website, which will thwart playback on all of the handheld mobile devices that don’t play Flash… unless you use special code that offers direct access to the H.264 file both possible ways, via browser detection. Just because Flash 9 can playback H.264, doesn’t mean that Flash is playable on all of the handheld devices. It doesn’t.] STOP PRESS!: The ATSC has just announced their adoption of H.264 too!

Of course, I like and recommend H.264 for distribution because it is high-quality, efficient, and scalable… but I also like it very much and recommend it because it is so widely compatible with popular computing and media platforms, including MacOS X & Windows computers (see chart on page 1), and even Sony’s Playstation 3 and PSP (PlayStation Portable), as well as the most popular handheld mobile devices, which represent the most fastest growing segment of Internauts. Those web designers who choose to create Flash-only sites are unfortunately excluding over six million iPhone users, not counting the iPod touch users, Blackberry users, and Treo users. But even if you do justify the resources to create (and maintain) the multiple versions required for both Flash and non-Flash (or mobile and non-mobile versions), you are still better off encoding your video in H.264 for the non-mobile version of the website! Read why in the sidebar: “Making and maintaining a separate website” on page 4.

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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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David and Tom,

The answers you need are at the end of my DVKitchen article. You will find it here at ProVideo Coaliton, if not on the front page, in the TecnoTur channel.

Allan Tépper

Posted by Allan Tépper  on  03/20  at  04:55 AM

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Apple Quicktime is far from be an accepted application in our Windows world, so H.264 is not a good solution to use embedded in webpages. Flash plugin is more accepted, small and simple to install. I love H.264, but until Windows Media Player play those files simple and easily, doesnt seem reasonable warn your friends and clients against using Flash.

Posted by Rafael Perez  on  04/28  at  04:59 PM

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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.....

Posted by casino de jeux  on  08/25  at  09:39 PM

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