Archive for the ‘h264’ Category:
The difficult balance between quality and speed in video commerce
Did you ever notice YouTube offers the option to view some of the videos in high-quality? Have you ever experienced Hulu.com? If so, you are aware of the huge gap in quality between an ordinary video, and a high definition video.
On paper, I’d argue that the word “high definition” is implied when we talk about video commerce. Savvy marketers invest a lot of time and resources making sure their products and offerings are always well presented - and video as a medium is no exception to that rule. So yes, ideally, video in the context of ecommerce has to be high-def. The problem is that quality comes at a huge cost in the video world. Why? For starters, video requires a player (in general an SWF file, of the silverlight player) that typically is in the 30-60KB range. But that’s of course not the biggest issue.
The issue is the size of the video file. High quality video is a 10-12MB per minute proposition, a little less if you start reducing the size of the player and using advanced codecs such as h264. At that bit rate, not every user connection can follow. If if the user’s connection is good enough, you may see some undesirable side effects such as losing your IM connection or your email. And let’s not even talk about what would happen if you were on a modem connection.Here are some tips to keep things in check, in the context of video commerce.
1. Users prefer high-quality/small videos to low-quality/large videos. That’s why it’s best to keep it to 320×240 for instance. The other benefit of smaller players is that they’re easier to fit into existing product templates.
2. For Flash video, use h264 whenever possible. The h264 is fantastic for quality and not too bandwidth hungry. Do not encode your FLVs at a high bitrate using Sorensen for instance. Keep Sorensen for the low-def, and offer the h264 high-def option.
3. Be careful with h264 and other more advanced codecs, as they are not supported by all Flash player versions. If possible, implement a mechanism in your player that detects the codec support and serve the appropriate video dynamically.
4. Make sure your SWF or more generally your video player are as small as possible and cacheable.
5. Use a content delivery network for speeding up the delivery of your videos. Example: Amazon S3 or Akamai.
6. Use streaming as a way to buffer the content, but only trigger streaming when the user has chosen to play the video. Don’t have every user download a video on a product page that they haven’t chosen to view! And finally
7. Test and validate the user experience from your connection at home. Testing from a T1 connection at work isn’t reflective of what the general population actually experiences.
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