Quote:
Originally Posted by glowlite
Build your sites to render for whatever Walmart has on sale. Code your vids to the current low-level YouTube standards. Adult web masters consistently fail by assuming everybody on planet Earth has hardware and internet connectivity like their's.
Seriously , throw a bigger net and you'll consistently catch more fish.
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I understand, as that is kind of what I did when I first started years ago. I was offering small videos (240x160, then 320x240, then 640x480, etc). Now I am faced with having to go back and recapture and re-encode hundreds of hours of older video (while keeping up with editing the newly shot video).
My plan is to offer multiple speeds to capture the current lowest denominator (Low) you speak of, as well as the current upper end customer (Medium), and hopefully to anticipate what the next big leap will be so that I don't have to re-encode everything again in a year (High). By using Adaptive Bitrate Streaming, it will hopefully make it so that the customer doesn't have to choose the speed, and the content will be delivered for a good end-user experience.
I started archiving captured video of my newer video content over the past several years, so at least I won't have to repeat that step again.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Robbie
ADG...do NOT encode h264 at 5 megs. You will have tons of surfers complaining.
It has nothing to do with internet speed.
Here is why you don't need to encode them past 1.5 MBS:
First off H264 is DESIGNED to give incredible quality at low bit rate.
When I first started doing streaming video I did a ton of research. And I saw guys who had vids encoded at 500 kbs that were stunning.
I never have gotten THAT good at tweaking the encoding settings. 
But where you want to be is around 1.5 MBS (1,500 kbs)
And here is why...when you are streaming a vid, the load is on the end user (viewers) computer.
I didn't realize that at first.
And I got all smarty-pants about it and decided that I was going to encode my streaming vids at 2.5 MBS
They looked GREAT! And I had no problem streaming them on my work computer!
So I went in and re-encoded all of the members area to 2.5
Then I left home to go to one of the shows (I think it was Phoenix Forum a couple of years ago)
I got to the hotel and opened up my laptop and checked email.
Suddenly I've got dozens of members writing me raising hell and saying that the vids were "stuttering" and buffering, etc.
So I went there on my laptop...and YES they were.
You see, my work computer is a monster (mega cpu and ram for video work) and it had no problems streaming those vids. But a "normal" computer? No way.
I had to write emails for the next 3 days from the show asking my members for patience as I couldn't do anything about it until I got home.
I re-encoded every vid to a variable 1.5 to 1.7 bit rate when I got back home. Problem solved.
Then I did a little more research and found out that "no" the average computer can't handle an h264 stream much bigger than that (with anti-virus running and background tasks etc.)
So do NOT try to stream .h264 at that high of a bit rate. Trust me on this. Or at least go ahead and encode one at 5 MBS. Then set it up as a test stream and go to several different "normal" powered computers and try to watch it.
It won't matter how fast your internet connection is...the stream will use up all the remaining computer resources on the user end (as you know most PC's are using up tons of resources when they aren't even doing anything). |
Good advice as usual, thanks!
My reason for going for a high end that exceeds most current users needs is that since I have to re-encode old video anyway, I want to try and get slightly ahead so that when the public starts demanding higher speed/res I can deliver it, while I then am keeping my newest content moving along again at a higher level than most will be able to benefit from.
Part of my rationale is that the people that invest more into higher end systems and bandwidth, might have more disposable income to spend on a web site, and they want sites that can take advantage of their set-up.
I do agree that initially, I should try it out as a sample. Since I run most of my batch encodes while I am sleeping, I figured adding one more high end encode wouldn't adversely impact me too much.
Something else driving me, is that there has been a lot of discussion about what HD (High-Def) is, since much of what is passed off as HD is really SD (either SD video converted to HD, or video that is not truly HD). I also noted in a recent Review Site posting that their ratings were skewed towards sites offering as high as 8Mbps videos.
One final issue, is that while most streaming video until now has put the load on the end-users computer, however my understanding is that the Wowza streaming server that I am switching to keeps the load on the server side, so that the end-user is only seeing a "hint" of the video, which also allows the end-user to click anywhere on the video and not have to wait for it to before it starts playing again.
I'll be checking into this more next week, so any input in the meantime is greatly appreciated.
Thank you,
ADG