Video on Internet

Skrivet 2007 och är Silverlightbaserat

We began with dial-up modems about 10 - 15 years ago, later came the ISDN connections and two buttons on the clips for different clip speeds, we used publishing systems like Realmedia and Realplayer. When broadband arrived, it was a small revolution and streaming internet video of good quality became a reality.

 

Sites like YouTube were introduced for those not using your own websites to publish streamed media. They were not known to have the best video quality in the world and another problem is that all files sent to the site will be reencoded to fit the bandwidth available. It is possible, if you have the knowledge, to publish rather high quality videos on YouTube.

  

As YouTube is free is it a very good place to use for advertising. The costs to get a real high quality clip published at YouTube might be compared with doing advertising in magazines with the difference being that magazines gets old and thrown away after a while.

 

Your customers want to look at high quality clips as much as you want to present yourself in the best possible way. Below is something that I published on YouTube a while ago.

 

YouTube 720P HD

  

 

Also, it is possible to create in 1080P for YouTube, but 1080P clips have difficulty playing in realtime on some lower end systems that I have tested.

YouTube 1080 P

 

 

Microsoft Silverlight

 
Despite the fact that the YouTube clips linked above are of a somewhat higher quality than the average for YouTube, having your own site is the best way to get the highest quality out of your clips. Since I started to use Microsoft Silverlight as my publishing system a couple of years ago I use nothing else for my own work.

Microsoft Silverlight also works very well worldwide. I am able to publish clips that linked from my own Scandinavian server stream and play well in Australia and America, for example.



Below is the same clip encoded with a VC1 advanced codec which might have some difficulties streaming on some systems. Inside the player at the bottom, second from the right, is a button used for offline playing. You download the entire clip to your computer as a player.

 

Silverlight 720P HD

As we have noticed over the years, the speed on the internet has increased dramatically, but today we are seeing our viewers taking a couple of steps backwards in speed because of the use of wireless modems and other solutions to watch published media.

At the same time, the "old" technology allows faster and faster connections and high end systems are getting better which means that many more viewers have the opportunity to see our product at higher quality.




Microsoft has a solution for the need to stream at different bandwidths while maintaining quality, it is called Smooth Streaming where several files are contained inside the published folder. This allows the receiving system to automatically select the correct file to play in realtime, there is also the possibility for the viewer to manually select a slower speed from inside of the player.

 

2013 and HTML5 - The final solution ?

As predicted when writing this in 2008 the file speed had to be decreased a lot for this to work in the long run, both considering what the net can handle and what viewers can handle,  the quality of the files have to be at least as good as with those earlier larger files of course

To use an external player, in those above posted examples Silverlight, wasn´t either a good solution in the long run, the new html5 player is already built inside your web browser, when writing this it´s only Apple with their iphones and ipads that aren´t fully accepting html5 but I´m rather sure of that they also are going to support this in a not too distant future.

The encoding procedure that I use today allows me to go as low as  (when writing this)  600 kbps when encoding to 720p, this without too much, or any, quality loss.

When playing those clips connected to the net and using my Surface Pro I feel pretty confident that this will be more and more common also among ordinary users now that it is possible to combine low speed files with high quality.

Since I like music and old cars this is the type of clip that I´ve choosed for my demo, there is more to look at on the same movie site www.limpans.com/movies.htm

If you like what you see and and / or want something to be encoded using the same tech for your own website, don´t hesitate to contact me, tomas@limpans.com