I've fiddled around with this a bit myself. After lots of experimentation, I
found that Windows was the trickiest platform to target. The default
Windows Media Player was the most finnicky about which codecs you used and
supported the fewest. Don't worry about the Linux people -- if they use
MPlayer they will be able to playback anything your create. Generally I
found Quicktime very robust under both PC and Mac, but the PC users need to
install Quicktime -- obviously.
I found that Microsoft's MoviewMaker works, but supports a handful of codecs
and doesn't generate quite as good output as various other tools.
You always want to start with the highest quality source and transcode /
render to the destination format without an intermediary. That means, start
with your raw DV (raw, or encapusalted in a QT or AVI file) and edit that.
Render to full-frame full-speed DV, then transcode. For many videos, you
can get aways with decrementing the frame rate by 50% and not have
something too jumpy.
If you have multiple choices of encoders for a target format, try them all
to assess their quality. Personally, I use ffmpeg (the CVS version) with
very good success.
Be careful of the combination of container, audio, and video codecs. I had
originally assumed that Linux would have been the most picky and started
testing my video playback there. Everything worked, regardless. Then I
found that when I moved to the Windows platform, many combinations of
codecs didn't work together (Quicktime was even worse). It turns out that
Linux players entirely abstract away the container, audio codec, and video
codec so that they have ne bearing on each other -- any combination is
permitted. Unfortunately, that wasn't true elsewhere.
If your target is the broadest range of platforms, I'd go with MPEG-1 as
it's the most widely supported, though it doesn't have the best quality or
compression.
If you are targeting handheld devices, then you probably want 3GPP today (I
don't know what Windows tools encode to 3GPP, but ffmpeg will got straight
DV to 3GPP).
Personally, I encode to MPEG-4 and make everyone download QT6 to view them.
There are MPEG-4 players for Windows, Mac, Linux, and FreeBSD. Everyone I
knew was using one of those, and I just provided links to the players that
support them well. MPEG-4 seemed to generate the best combination of
high-compression and high-quality video. My only chagrin is that QT
requires that you use the AAC audio codec, whereas I would have preferred
VBR MP3.
<posted & mailed>
Dan Christensen wrote:
