Results tagged “Video” from Stream #0

CNET posted a reasonably ordinary piece regarding the quality of WebM, when compared against H.264. However, there were two interesting links in this piece. 

The first pointed to a WebM project page where the indepth encoding parameters for WebM content are outlined. If you're planning to create WebM files, reading this page is essential. 

The second link, to the quAVlive website provides some various examples of H.264 (using x264) encoding compared against WebM. I can't really see a lot of visual difference in the "Sunflower" example. However, it is easily clear to my eyes, without even enlarging the screenshots, that in "Park Joy" and "Riverbed" H.264 is certainly superior. I would like to have seen more information regarding the time taken to transcode these examples, with each codec, and the resulting file sizes. Picture quality isn't always everything, transcode time and storage requirements should also be taken into consideration.

Everyone's jumping on the WebM bandwagon with software and hardware support. Gstreamer claims full plugin support, which means in turn there is Moovida support and the Transmaggedon transcoder can also output VP8 codec files, although not in the Matroska/WebM container yet. Not to be outdone, Flumotion, will also stream live VP8/WebM content. The Miro Video Converter will also output valid VP8/WebM files, claiming to be the first to do so. The list could go on, but the easiest thing is to probably just keep tabs on the WebM project page listing all the supported devices and software tools, both commercial and open source.

Also worth a shout is the fact that both Mozilla and Opera are pushing for VP8/WebM to be specifically included in the HTML5 specification. Previously, major browser makers couldn't agree on one specific video file format - Mozilla and Opera backing Ogg Theora and Apple sticking with H.264. I can't see that particular situation changing now. 

The FFmpeg team have finally made a release - version 0.5 - with a silly long name. Previously, users were always told to download and compile the latest SVN version of FFmpeg, if they expected any support from the mailing lists.

Now it would seem that there is a stable release, only a few years since the last one, that can be used by software developers and packagers everywhere. I still expect that many mailing list issues will be dealt with by the instruction to download from the SVN or Git repository and compile. I also expect that bug fixes and enhancements will make it into SVN quite quickly, but that also the next release might be some time away.

Release notes are available on the FFmpeg changelog (long!) and there's a lively, as always, Slashdot discussion around this momentous event.