On quality

In the past two years that I’ve been working in transcoding at Joost, I have learnt a lot about what works, and what doesn’t, when it comes to putting video on the internet, and I have also seen that in many cases, the best thing to do is go back to the source. This is too much to fit into one guide, so today I will just introduce you to some of the characteristics of great looking video, and in future installments I will explain how to get individual things right using free (and possiby open source tools).

Most websites will compress video a lot, and encode video to a smaller frame size. Nevertheless it’s a bad idea to send low quality files to aggregrators; each encode will cause more quality loss, and if an encoder tries to encode a low-quality blocky video, the encoder will spend a lot of bits encoding the artifacts in the file you delivered instead of the actual desired picture. So just send the high quality, full size (be it 480p, 720p, or 1080p) and leave the dealing with scaling to the aggregators. They have their systems set up to do that anyhow.

File formats

I recommend two file formats, when preparing video for delivery. Either good old MPEG-2, the workhorse of the video industry, or mp4, with H.264 video and AAC audio. You almost cannot go wrong if you use the following bitrates for these formats:

• MPEG-2, SD: 8 Mbps
• H.264, 480p: 3 Mbps
• H.264, 720p: 8 Mbps
• H.264, 1080p: 20 Mbps

I must admit that I have relatively little knowledge of Windows Media, but while it has been common for streaming video for a while, it has lost ground to H.264 video these days, and it is not a native format for most video editors, so I can’t recommend it. Generally I recommend staying away from Quicktime if at all possible. Although modern Quicktime files generally will work just fine because it contains more or less the same things as a mp4 with H.264 and AAC, I have seen at least one occurence where there were cards (think a couple of slides) at the beginning of the video which were not part of the video track, causing ffmpeg based players and encoders (think Youtube and VLC) to not display things as expected.

Fill the frame

In online video you only have a limited amount of pixels, it’s a shame to waste about of a third of the pixels available to encode just black because your content is letterboxed, pillarboxed, or worst of all: windowboxed. Letterboxed content looks like this:

Letterboxed video, for in-depth explanation on letterboxing, see the wikipedia entry

Make sure there are no interlacing artifacts

One of the biggest killers for online video are interlacing artifacts. Interlacing artifacts are horizontal stripes, that can mostly be seen during fast horizontal movements, when the camera gets panned, or at very quick transitions. They are caused by the fact that back in the day televisions did not build up the picture progressively, but first rendered the odd lines, and then the even. Handbrake’s guide on interlacing is pretty good, and it is also a great tool to remove it.

Example of video with interlacing artifacts

In almost all cases I have seen of interlacing artifacts, these have been caused by issues in the video that has been uploaded. The two ways you can get interlacing artifacts in your video are:

• Encoding a video that was interlaced to progressive without running a deinterlace filter.
• Resizing a interlaced video without deinterlacing it first.

As far as I can tell there is no real decent way to remove interlacing artifacts once the damage is done, so if you ever have issues with this, generally the only way to go is to move back to the step when your video was still interlaced, and fix things at that stage.

Source

I LOVE freakonomics; they approach the sci^H^H^Hart of economics with a sense of humor, delight and curiosity, and they attract a readership that has the same qualities. Today they are asking their readers what they think the reason is that there are seemingly more men than women that write books that make “serious non-fiction subjects accessible and popular.”

Some commenters decided to make it into a joke, but it is the reply that made me laugh.

Hmmz, looks like I’m becoming a sucker for images that are texts in typewriter style on blank paper:

I follow Seth Godin’s blog, because he tends to have interesting things to say about marketing. This time I think he’s really really right; organizations that are trying to maintain a status quo through regulation are doing their members a disservice; the world is changing, and the pace of change in the world is ever increasing, so you’re better off if your trade association helps you adapt to the changing world and remain relevant 5 years from now, than if it fights a losing battle against change and innovation.

Like most geeks, I love TED talks, and think it’s great that they’re put on the internet for free for anyone to watch. I really liked this one, although I have a hard time believing that all the answers are as simple and clear as the speaker makes them out to be.

Deep down inside I remain an optimist. That is why I loved this gem I encountered on ffffound:

Joost embeds kinda work now, although I have to go through vodpod.com to embed in wordpress because wordpress doesn’t allow me to post code :S. Anyhow, I so love this video, watch it and love it!

more about “Joost embeds!“, posted with vodpod

Internet memes are an amazing phenomenon, from badgerbadgerbadger, to lolcats, to rickrolling. The latest is quite odd, in a sense disgusting, but still fascinating, subtitling a section from Der Untergang, where Hitler is having a fit, with commentaries on current affairs. The latest one on the housing market works remarkably well:

It is also about politics:

Or Windows Vista:

It might be wrong, but I like it…

Today is the second day of my First Annual Staycation™, and I must say, it’s weird. I haven’t really taken a break from work for so long that I don’t really know how to do it, so even staying away from mail and Skype has been somewhere in between hard and impossible for me.

I’ll try to explain why. Whenever possible I have always taken work rather seriously, but working in a startup has proven to be a completely different for me. While I always took work quite seriously, since starting at Joost, I’ve started to take things real personal. In many ways this is a great thing. Work doesn’t feel like work that much that way, and that is the only way that I’ve been able to put in an above-average amount of hours (even to Joost standards).

This means that I’ve flung out my heart to the people that I’m working with, and that means not just the Leiden office, but even more with our London and New York offices. In many ways it’s quite like being in love. That’s all good and well most of the time, but right now that means my heart is floating somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic, while I am here. If someone sees it float by, can you pick it up and bring it to me?