Images on this site were compressed using e-Vue MPEG4 technology in 2001, which was groundbreaking at the time for its DRM component and higher compression than JPG, however e-Vue is no more — we are transitioning these images to JPEG for 2004.
One the video is captured, the next step is compression. The finesse in compression and encoding content comes only through experience and testing. Because of so many variables having to do with frame rates, audio compression inside a movie, variable bitrate (VBR) encoding, and data rates, it can be a real trial-and-error process to get the best results. Products like Media Cleaner help with a bevy of presets for most tasks, but you can get 10-30% smaller files by learning the little things and experimenting.
Terran Interactive's Media Cleaner Pro offers many preset and advanced user tools for converting captured video into streaming and other digital formats.
According to iCanStream.com's Becker, "For the professional the biggest hurdle is coming into the light as to how streaming media can make you more money. More and more pros leaping that hurdle to understand that streaming media is a huge profit center to their current business model. It simply gives them the ability to take the next step and offer distribution as a service to their clients. In the past that was never possible. For the consumer, beginner, (the) 'I just want to dabble' guy, the hurdle is thinking about their computer as a way to communicate more than just e-mail. In the past, it was hard and complicated to get your video on the Web. Now, it's just a few short steps. One of the things we do at iCanStream.com is teach the basic steps for the beginner or the pro."
The Standards
There are really only a few choices for streaming media, because of the need to offer the highest level of compatibility to a potential audience. This means that you must stick with standards. Apple's QuickTime is pretty much the acknowldeged winner when it comes to the best quality for things like movie trailers, because of the beautiful Sorenson codec which offers variable bitrate encoding and gorgeous color. Sorenson has been a part of QT since version 3, and reportedly has 100 million copies in use on the Web. The only drawback to Sorenson has been the long compression times on even a high-power workstation. It's not uncommon to let the video compress overnight! QuickTime 5 is now available and incorporates the new Sorenson 3 codec, which allows for faster encoding and smaller files.
In the other corners we have the indomitable Microsoft with their Windows Media Format (formerly NetShow) which is the successor to AVI and could become a contender primarily because Microsoft gives away the streaming server with the Web server operating system (IIS), and includes the player with every iteration of MS products like Office and Internet Explorer. While a bit shaky on the Mac, it works well under Windows and creates very small files.
The first streaming company back in 1995, Real Networks, is still a big player today. Real's audio and video formats are highly popular because they are cross-platform and because almost everybody has the ability to playback Real media. Their most recent codec and player were RealG2, and have now been replaced by Real8 which outperforms RealG2 at 63% of the data rate. The downside to Real is that their realtime streaming server is expensive when compared to Windows and QuickTime.
For on-demand streaming, all of these primary formats work well, with Real being the best cross-platform, with QuickTime working better on Apple and Windows Media working better on (surprise) Windows.
In many cases content providers will offer two versions of a video file, such as a high-quality QuickTime movie, and a lower-quality (or smaller in size) RealMedia file. With Real's increasing quality, some companies simply opt to develop only for the Real format, using their Surestream technology to embed multiple quality level files, and the slower connected user gets a low quality version while the broadband client gets a high resolution file.
Hot Java
One interesting new player is IBM, which has announced their latest version of Hot Media v3.5, which is free from their Website. What makes this an interesting potential alternative to other existing standards noted above is that Hot Media uses a Java-based player and doesn't need a pre-installed plug-in application to view content. If you can see mouse roll-overs of graphics on a site, you can likely view Hot Media files. It's still a bit pokey, and doesn't like many formats other than AVI, but it's very promising.
The Future
What many proponents of streaming tend to gloss over is the fact that not too many people outside of the East and West Coasts have broadband (i.e., xDSL) connections. Most folks are still surfing on their 56Kbps modems, and quite a few more are still venturing out with their 28.8Kbps and 33Kbps modems. For the forseeable future, online video will remain a 1/8th-screen proposition with dropped frames and mono audio.
