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Web Video
Welcome to the mixed-up, ever-changing world of video for the web. Along with the miracle of video and audio over the internet, we unfortunately currently have to contend with various companies battling for dominance in the market. The upshot of this is that, as a content creator, there is no one obvious choice for all your web video needs. However, that doesn't mean web video is not worth your time or effort. It does mean that you have to make some format choices first.
The format that is best for your needs is not necessarily simply the format that looks and sounds the best. All of the major formats look and sound quite good compared to the technology of just a year or two ago, and all are usable for the purpose of transmitting video and audio over the internet. You need to consider what will work well overall for your audience. You might be providing the latest, most amazing-looking format, but if your viewers don't have the right software then what's the point?
With that in mind, let's look at the current major formats. We've encoded the same video clip in each format, at both 300Kbps and 56Kbps, for easy comparison:
| RealVideo 9 |
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Real is perhaps the best choice if you only want to offer one format. Real has a large install-base on both Windows and Mac, and the player is free and works reasonably well on both platforms. There are even versions of Realplayer offered for Linux. Although the quality is currently somewhat behind the latest versions of Quicktime and Windows Media, it is fine for most needs.
The main downsides to Real are: 1) the player software is not installed by default on either Windows or Mac, 2) the server software costs money (although if you use a web server to serve your video this isn't an issue).
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| Quicktime 5 & 6 (Sorenson2 & QDesign2 codecs) |
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Despite widespread misconceptions among Windows users, Quicktime is a cross-platform format that offers a stable and robust player, and very high-quality compression formats. The player is free, and works well on both Windows and Mac. The server software is also free (again this is not an issue if you are serving your video from a web server). If your audience is mainly Mac users, Quicktime is the obvious choice becaue it is part of the OS.
The main downside to Quicktime that it is not installed by default on Windows, and there is no version available for Linux. This immediately limits your audience to Mac users, and Windows users that have installed or are willing to install the Quicktime player.
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| Windows Media 9 |
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Windows Media is currently offering the highest quality video encoding (its also the most recent to market). The install base is quite high, due to the fact that it is part of the Windows OS by default. However, keep in mind that most installations of Windows are going to have an obsolete version of the software installed, and will require an update to play the latest and greatest format.
Windows Media is a good choice if your audience is exclusively Windows users. However, if you want to make your content available to Mac or Linux users, Windows Media is bad option. The Windows Media player for Mac is truly horrid and is always out of date compared to the Windows version. There are ways to play WindowsMedia on Linux, but there is no official Microsoft player available.
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| MPEG 4
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MPEG 4 is currently the sad story here. MPEG 4 is an open standard designed by the Moving Picture Experts Group, the same body that brought us MPEG1, MPEG2 (DVD), and the mighty MP3. It was designed to be a cross-platform solution that would provide us with a way to encode video into one format and have it play everywhere. However, only Quicktime 6 and MPlayer (Linux/OSX) can play MPEG 4 at all, making it essentially just another Quicktime format as far as web video goes.
The key to MPEG 4's future is for Microsoft to add playback capabilities to Windows Media Player. If that were to happen, would be the obvious format for making video and audio available on the web -- one file would play everywhere. Unfortunately, Microsoft is showing no signs of adopting the format, and in fact has made statements that they will not do so -- they clearly understand the threat that MPEG 4 poses to their Windows Media 9 format.
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Music Videos