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Best Quicktime Codec For Web-Streaming? (Part 1)
By Frey | October 19, 2007
The best Quicktime codec I’ve found for both compression and general usage seems to be Quicktime’s MP4. Sure there are others, but MP4 has been supported since QT6 (released in 2002). As long as someone has a version of Quicktime newer than 5 years old (which most people do), they can watch your video.
H.264 is a really nice codec and it compresses better than MP4, but it takes a LOT of processor power to encode. It’ll make a dual 2.0Ghz G5 seem like it locked up. My old G5 would take several hours for one 3 minute clip. Luckily, the new 4-core and 8-core Intels can chew it up without any real issue, so if you have some power under your hood, you should be good to go.
Even more, for all the work, many viewers still don’t have QT7, which is needed to play H.264 files. It was released in 2005, so it’s only two years old and most people just don’t take the time to update their software, so they tend to click on to the next page - and this means they will never see your video. As a film maker, you want as many potential clients to be able to view your video reel as possible, so h.264 doesn’t seem to be an ideal solution for people with 3 year old computers.
Another really nice codec, although not Quicktime, is DiVX. But again, someone has to download something other than the film, which is not optimal.
To backup my claims, I recently tried implementing H.264 QT the other week for a client. I wanted to see if H.264 could possibly be ready, in my book, for mainstream. The response? “Sorry, it wouldn’t load.” The client is in the video industry, so you’d think H.264 would have been a given there. Oh well.
Another test was done last year and is still going on: a movie trailer was posted in both Quicktime MP4 and DiVX on the Independent film Hunting Dragonflies‘ website. The Quicktime MP4 is downloaded more, much more, at roughly a 2 to 1 ratio!
So, all in all, I guess it’s better to stick with MP4 for at least another year. Better codecs will come and go, but if you want to hit your widest audience, you have to use something the audience is familiar with.
Stay tuned next week for the 2nd half of “Best Quicktime Codec For Web-Streaming?” (Part 2), where I’ll go into detail over proper MP4 streaming settings, sizes, and a quick reference formula.
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