Comments on: Video quality on YouTube versus Blip.tv

By: mykey

mykey — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 10:58:49 +0000

and http://www.youtube.com/chukcanuk
The first videos I uploaded to blip tv look great. Not so the more recent ones. All were uploaded directly(using ftp) with Adobe Premiere Elements 4 as well as by saving as a .flv and uploading via the site. I have tried uploading flash withhigher bitrate but Blip looks ugly now. Youtube . Any ideas as to where my problem might lie?

By: Technology in K9 SAR » Flip Video - mini review

Technology in K9 SAR » Flip Video - mini review — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 00:47:23 +0000

[...] Then YouTube transcoded a second time to Flash Video (H.263 and down to 3.7 MB). And, again, they don’t use the best codec or setting possible. So the video you see above — after being processed twice — is very [...]

By: Technology in K9 SAR » Flip Video - mini review

Technology in K9 SAR » Flip Video - mini review — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 11:40:47 +0000

[...] YouTube transcoded a second time to Flash Video (H.263, I believe, and down to 3.7 MB). And, again, they don’t use the best codec or setting possible. So the video you see above — after being processed twice — is very poor. The good [...]

By: BJ

BJ — Wed, 30 May 2007 11:48:27 +0000

Hey â€“ since youâ€™re a YouTuber, you might want to check this outâ€¦ Thereâ€™s a video company thatâ€™s recruiting
YouTubers and if they like your stuff, (and they should) they will actually pay you when your video gets a hit.
Hereâ€™s their linkâ€¦ http://www.flownetworkproductions.com/videorevenue.htm. Itâ€™s about time the people who make
the videos get some of the money instead ng to YouTube!

By: Partner-TV: telling it like it is : Mix 07: Tom Raftery

Partner-TV: telling it like it is : Mix 07: Tom Raftery — Wed, 16 May 2007 16:40:53 +0000

[...] Tom Raftery is an social media consultant and influential blogger from the lovely Cork in Ireland and Steve Clayton caught up with him at Mix 07 to find out if this Microsoft “critic” was impressed with what he saw at the conference. [...]

By: Paul Fallon

Paul Fallon — Sat, 12 May 2007 19:50:18 +0000

Hi Tom,
I have been making the same obvservation and have been looking into it on and off over the last few weeks.

So far my findings can be summaried as the following,

- For obvious reasons all of very large video sites use the Flash player, i.e. ubiquitous, 95+% penetration etc…

- What is not so obvious is that the output of the Transcoding process for most of these sites is based on a Codec that is over 8+ years old, i.e. H.263.

- As mentioned above, the H.263 codec is over 8+ years old and is supported by Flash 7 or greater. As far as I can determine, it seems that the big three video sites, i.e. YouTube, Google Video and MySpace video all use this codec. By todays standard this codec is seen as legacy and far superior ones are starting to gain traction (obviously Silverlight success/adoption is a factor in the future, with its support for the VC-1 codec, which is viewed by some as having superior compression, quality and better reflects where the current stat of Web video is at), with the VP6 codec (from On2 technologies been the current (pre release of Silverlight) contented to chip away at the use of H.263 right now.

- Smaller/Competitors to YouTube etc… tend to use the more modern/effective/better codec VP6, which is a patented technology, requires licenscing, and is the default/better codec for Flash 8 or greater. As far as I can see Blip.Tv uses VP6, I spotted some comments on a Blip.TV blog that mentioned VP6 and On2.

Like I mentioned, this is just a quick summary of some of my findings to date, so it is quite possible that some of my comments maybe wrong, but all I have found todate seem to indicate this the highlevel state of play why some sites are crap quality and perhaps even slower downloading and why other are better quality and better download rates.

hth,
/P

btw
What I have found todate about the other big guys in this space is that Yahoo wrote their own Codec and I would love to know what AOL use as I think they are one of the best out there at the moment.

By: Gareth Stack

Gareth Stack — Sat, 12 May 2007 17:18:40 +0000

Interesting to note that the Youtube video plays in Google Reader and I’d imaging other feed readers, whereas clicking on the blip video prompts to download the flv.

By: dc crowley

dc crowley — Sat, 12 May 2007 17:10:49 +0000

I use vimeo myself. I am not saying it is better than blip.tv. The blip.tv terms look very good. Vimeo has a 250mb cap per week. But is has an incredibly clean interface. Just my 2 cents

By: neil

neil — Fri, 11 May 2007 18:26:04 +0000

the Blip.tv video’s loading faster for me too

By: KD

KD — Fri, 11 May 2007 14:46:50 +0000

try dailymotion.com they encode at at good quality

By: Gerard Hanratty

Gerard Hanratty — Fri, 11 May 2007 12:33:53 +0000

BIG difference alright, strangely I was doing something similar on a break earlier and noticed how good blip.tv was, it also had a nice widescreen format on the geektv video I watched. I lost patience trying to get something from Microsoft channel 9 to play.

By: Paul M. Watson

Paul M. Watson — Fri, 11 May 2007 10:35:43 +0000

Thanks for the comparison Tom. What would be a handy feature on these sites is a Choose Your Output Quality option.

There is a definite need for the low quality, fast download of YouTube but sometimes you want the higher quality as shown in BlipTV.

It might be a revenue stream for the sites. “Pay for higher quality output.”