Getting video on the internet right

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).

On quality

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.

Winning comment on Freakonomics blog

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.

Seth Godin on status quo

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.

Cool TED talk on wisdom

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.

Joost embeds!

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

Why I want Joost to succeed

Last week we had a lot of meetings about what we need to do with regard to content ingestion and distribution at Joost, and it has been interesting, very interesting. On Wednesday we had a break out session, and we managed to think up a lot, both things that we will be able to do in the short term, and longer term stuff.

One of the main things where we returned to was who are we doing it for, and this is where we can make the biggest difference. If you look at things like the CBS audience network, big content is rapidly commoditizing. In a way doing Big Content is easy. You put the right content online, have it exclusive, and people will flock to it, because they love it.

What we can do too, and why I personally hope that we will succeed is that we can be a mechanism that enables small, back-of-the-shed-operations, to put their professionally produced content online and make a decent buck from it. I won’t divulge many details about our new product yet, but stay tuned, it’s going to be a great ride!

*Edit*

Okay, this got picked up by the Joostteam blog. Just for clarification: big and small is not an or/or preposition. We still sign on big deals (for example NHK is a huge content owner in Japan that hadn’t done any distribution deals over the internet up to now), and we will continue to do just that, it’s just that if we do it right, we can also help the smaller companies to start making a living of their hard work.

Thedailywtf posts a non-WTF story

Like many other IT people I’m an avid reader of thedailywtf, a site about all kinds of things that go wrong in and around IT in companies, and where the only right response is: WTF!

Today I read a post that was not WTF at all, and something that I can really buy. Long story short: Law and accounting have been using the Cravath System from the beginning of the 1900′s

“Here’s how the “Cravath System” works. Bring lots of new employees in, team them up with mentors, provide real work to do, and give them a choice: either get lots of great experience and get out, or work hard for a higher-up position. Whenever you hear someone aspire to “make partner”, he’s undoubtedly working at a firm that’s adopted this model.”

When employees leave an employer, because they have reached their value apex, the point where they aren’t bringing anything new anymore, they don’t become ex-employees, but instead they become alumni, who will gladly refer their friends to their previous employer, if they think that that they need the same kind of experience as they have had. I can relate to this story, and for what it’s worth, I’m an OGD alumnus myself, so at least they did it right.

On work (as far as I’m concerned non-WTF), Joost really wants to hire more people, and they have a whole list up somewhere on the website somewhere, but around me some people are hiring too: We really need someone who can do more or less the same work as I am doing currently, which is making sure content gets online. So what do we need? Computer skills like any college student has, good communication skills, accurate style of working, autonomy, and a drive to get things done right, even with imperfect systems.

Also, a colleague dropped by my desk, and asked if I know someone who has basic scripting, basic database (SELECT and UPDATE), and basic linux knowledge (ls counts) who wants to learn a lot about scripting and converting values to information, to do scripting and business information work. I haven’t worked under her, but from what I’ve heard she is a nice boss to work under, and when you’re done you’ll have gained invaluable knowledge about information processing that will change your resume forever. :-)

So, if you are in need of cool work, ping me, and I’ll set you up :-).

Battlestar Galactica

As some of you may know I love Battlestar Galactica (aka BSG) and I can’t wait for the fourth season to start, because it’s bound to kick ass again. SciFi channel has been so kind to provide an 8-minute recap of 3 seasons of BSG and it’s pretty darn funny (and has an extremely high spoiler density). One of the many cool quotes: “But then Helo tells Starbuck there’s a bun in the toaster.” Check it out if you’re also a BSG afficianado, if not, get your paws on BSG and start watching, from episode one, it’s great SF, grim, with real people (some episodes can be a bit soapish, but over all it’s a hell of a ride).

Radically incompetent

It isn’t much of a secret that I don’t like Geert Wilders, our national extremist, fear mongerer and muslim hater. I am convinced that his extreme standpoints and hostile attitude are more effective at alienating a significant part of our population, than they are at minimizing the threat of terrorism. At the same time he is costing out economy lots of money, so I am convinced that we are better of without his kind of people.

At the moment he is holding our national public opinion hostage over a movie that no one has seen, claiming that he can’t release it because no one will let him, oh poor poor oppressed boy. I think he should fuck off, because he is stupid. Anyone with half a brain knows that it’s trivial to publish anything on the internet, and once the message is out there, there is no way to hide it again. So not only is Geert Wilders an arrogant, egotist fucktard, but he is only glaringly incompetent, and that is why he should shut up and fuck off.

I for one do know that ik have the technical and social engineering skills to get the crappy movie of him out to one million people within 48 hours, but I am not going to help him, he should ask one of his extremist friends to fix it.

We are the knights of the technosphere

I recently read some sensible post from one of the tech blogs I follow about internet addiction, that is on the one hand quite sad, but on the other totally true. If I read the qualifications that I generally read, I’m an internet addict, and along with me, my sister and at least 50% of my colleagues.

We are the people that check mail several times per hour, are updating ourself through news feeds to see if anything interesting has happened, and we generally know about the latest and greatest about our field of interest, be it open-source software, horses (for my sister), Apple hard- and software, video, webcomics, or the latest offer on iBood.com.

It is true that this addiction can be quite inconvenient at times, and it makes us spend money on mobile internet (but unlimited internet for €10 per month is something I can live with), phones that can display that internet more decently than the w810 I had, and worst of all, it makes me waste time on the internet instead of reading books (but generally I do get to spend enough face to face time with people because I plan my schedule to have enough face to face time.

On the other hand the blessings are great too. Our extended net awareness is what gives us the tools to function in our day jobs. We know what’s going on, and when we don’t, we are able to google whatever information we need in a heartbeat, we take part in specialized communities that explore and develop knowledge where there was none before. We know and we connect, and build friendships over the internet that run as deep as many face-to-face friendships (I’m still in contact with some former OGD colleagues on IRC, and keep friendships up to date, and even make friends with people that joined OGD after I left). Our online existence might hamper our real life social contacts every once in a while, but as a whole, it has landed us friendships we wouldn’t have had otherwise, quite well paid jobs, and direct connections with some of the smartest minds that walk around on the internet.

I’m proud to be a knight of the technosphere.