Video file format for downloads

[Richard Holland]

I've searched for, but not found, the info I need. If it's already here and I missed it..... sorry.

I'm using Video Studio Pro X2 on XP.

I have a personal website and upload video files for people to download. My videos are around 45-60 mins long and I save them using mpeg optimizer usually, resulting in file sizes of around 2GB. These files take a long time to download, and I have to upload them overnight. I've downloaded video files of around 60 mins in duration from other sites which have been only 500MB in size. These tend to be WMV files 25bit with frame size around 640 x 480 and bit rate of around 1122fbps, frame rate 25fps.

Is this the best format for achieving a compromise between quality and file size?
The WMV options un custom are much smaller frame sizes, where can I find the right option?
Is there a better format available in the custom menu?


I hope someone will be able to help me, or point me in the right direction.

Thanks
Richard

[Ron P.]

Welcome to the forums,

The quality depends on the original source files quality, the format, and then what, if any, conversion is done by the websites. The popular video hosting sites now use FLV to display, stream the video. This is a very good compression scheme. It provides a very good quality video, with a very small file size, and is very efficient in using bandwidth.

So if you're uploading and distributing DV (avi), or MPEG-2, the quality will be good, however the file sizes are huge, and will eat up a lot of your bandwidth, which can get very expensive. This is especially true when you go over a "cap" or ceiling set by a hosting service. So to counter that, you need to use a format that does provide a good quality, small file sizes for downloading and uploading, and yet can be streamed for viewing over the internet. So far FLV is about one of the better ones for that. You must also take into account if the video will need to be recoded. Every time a video file must be recoded, it runs the risk of taking a hit on quality. So if you upload a WMV file to YouTube, they recode that to FLV, thus it may be degraded. The key would be to start with a very high quality video file.

Another video file format that seems to be gaining popularity is the MPEG-4 (wrapper), using a variety of codecs, one being the AVCHD. The downside of AVCHD is that it takes a powerful computer to even view it. MPEG-4 has used h.263 and h.264 for sometime, and both are good. Download a file from some of the sites like YouTube, and you may find them to be using one of them.

This is just my opinion, but for any web distribution, I would say use WMV, for it's widely acceptable, recognized usage, or FLV, since it does a good job of producing a good quality video file, with a small file size.

[Ken Berry]

The other factor you need to bear in mind is using a format which the majority of users might be able to access and play on their own computers. I agree with Ron about WMV and FLV being the best formats in this regard. However, with a niche market burgeoning in iPads, you will also need to be aware that iPad owners will not be able to download and play FLV files because of Apple's refusal to have anything to do with Flash... although I am prepared to be shot down on this by owners of iPads...