Quote:
Originally Posted by Ron Bennett
Robbie have you tried adaptive streaming?
That's what most all the mainstream sites, along with many adult, use ... imho, the OP is on the right path - encode videos at multiple bit rates and use adaptive streaming.
If your point is perhaps the OP should default playback to 720x480p (and/or be very conservative with setting up adaptive streaming), I agree 100% ... best to assume the user's computer is slow / old, loaded full of crapware, etc and serve content accordingly.
However, from my understanding, the OP wants to encode videos now and not deal with it doing again for a couple of years - to only encode at 1.5 Mbits isn't going to cut it - video cards and playback software have greatly improved, even on very low end machines, and continues to as many people have come to expect HD quality video capability.
Ron
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It's not the video cards or anything else except CPU.
And .h264 is a compression that is designed to be a lot lower than people were used to encoding .wmv's and even flv's
There really isn't any visual need to encode a .h264 .mp4 that has it's settings tweaked in carefully to anything above 1.5 (most do 1.2)
Matter of fact it was on HULU back a couple of years ago that I saw those 500kbs .h264 .mp4's that looked beautiful.
Anyway...my laptop isn't a "low end" machine. It's a dual core and has 4 gigs of ram. But with antivirus running on it, a browser running, and the million other little windows background tasks running...just encoding my vids at 2.5 was enough to make it stutter.
I've been doing streaming for the members area since 2008. And I guess I've probably tried every bit rate and vid tweaking combo known to man. lol But in the end...you don't need to encode .h24 vids very high to achieve a nice looking vid. And your end users are not going to be able to stream them that high anyway.
So I never had to bother with adaptive streaming. The vids looks great. Members are happy.
And if enough folks end up with quad core 64 bit OS machines with 16 gigs of ram in the future...I'll definitely crank it up. But the difference in quality is really negligible because of the nature of the .h264 compression.
But I had to learn that the hard way. lol
I was old school and couldn't believe that a 1.5 mbs .h264 could look better than a 5 mbs .wmv
But it does.