Timeline: Uncommon Exports

Morgan Paar
August 2007

» Next Image Previous Image «

If you or I made a video ten years ago, we would be extremely lucky if anyone other than our family and friends saw it. Television or a movie screen was the only outlet, and it would have cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars to get your work there. A short decade later, a video that costs a bit more than the price of a Mini DV tape has many distribution options, from YouTube to the iTunes Music Store to cell phones and handheld media devices. But all of these outlets require different compression strategies. Let's take a look.

YouTube.com , iFilm.com, MetaCafe.com, BitTorrent... video outlets on the Internet seem endless. Not too long ago, it was a real challenge to compress video and audio for the World Wide Web, and, even if you did a good job, the viewers' experience was not always great, due to their connection speed and/or the quality of their computers. There have been great improvements in all aspects of Web video, from faster and cheaper computers to quicker connection options to better codecs (compressor/decompressor software) to Web sites that have invested millions of dollars in server space and bandwidth.

YouTube is the obvious leader in online video. One of the obvious reasons for YouTube's popularity is its ease of use, for both the producer and the viewer. YouTube, like other sites such as iFilm and MetaCafe, uses Adobe Flash as video player and compatible codecs, probably the leading online streaming method. Not only do videos look great in the most recent version of Flash Player, but YouTube has made it really easy to upload your video (see YouTube and MetaCafe sidebars for compression suggestions). You can upload .wmv, .avi, .mov and .mpg files to YouTube and MetaCafe from just about any camcorder, digital camera or cell phone (though members of the Videomaker community will probably edit them first). These Web sites then convert your video into an .flv Flash file.

BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing software client that can deliver any type of file to and from anywhere on the World Wide Web. Some filmmakers will distribute trailers or whole movies using BitTorrent. Many use this service to trade copyrighted material, which is illegal. Most people distributing movies via BitTorrent use DivX compression, a form of MPEG-4. DivX is interesting, not only for its superb ability to compress lengthy video and audio files, but also because many new DVD players will play DivX files burned to a DVD or even from a Thumb/USB drive.

What could be cooler than pulling a handheld media device like the iPod out of your pocket to show off one of your movies? Taking a nine-hour flight to Europe or twelve-hour flight to Asia? No problem, as you can put four to eight feature-length films on a 1GB memory card to watch on one of these small players (make sure your device accepts memory cards). You could also plug one of these portable players into a video projector to show your videos.

iPod, PSP, Zune and many other handheld media devices primarily read video encoded with the H.264/AVC/MPEG-4 Part 10 codec, more commonly known just as AVC or H.264. Many of these devices can read other MPEG-4 formats, as well as other codecs.

It can take some time to encode H.264, but the finished results are excellent. You can accomplish this with most editing systems, as well as with QuickTime Pro, PSP Media Manager and products from companies such as Nero, Neuros and the PQ Computing Corporation. There are even a few free compressors online that you can find with a simple Google search.

The one thing to keep in mind, especially if you are manually compressing video for a handheld, is the screen size of the player. The iPod and Zune are both 4:3 ratio at 320x240 pixels, while the PSP is 16:9 at a 480x272-pixel resolution. Dish Network makes Pocket Dish, a gigantic handheld with a 7" LCD, in a 16:9 ratio at 480x234 pixels.

• Digg This!
• del.icio.us
• Technorati
• StumbleUpon
• Reddit