WebM
Lots and lots going on with web video these last few days. I’m not going to speculate about stuff or talk about the politics of it right now. I just wanted to play with it here. There aren’t many tools out there to create WebM videos. I tried something by Sorenson but the video it created just crashed Firefox. So I tried some other Windows only tool and it worked but it took an hour to compress a 1 min video and made it 175MB. Of course I tried ffmpeg and I think I have it patched for the VP8 codec and everything but I have no idea what parameters to give it to compress the video. Just as I was about to give up, Miro released their Miro Video Converter 2.0. It’s a super simple drag and drop thing. You can’t customize anything but it does work. The video here is compressed with it. It’s compressed at about 540kbps total (both video and audio) so it’s about half the size of what I’d use with H.264. It looks pretty good but the audio is way too compressed, though I’m sure they’ll fix that. Anyway, even at 540kbps the quality is good. I’m sure when we have some decent tools to encode WebM we’ll be able to make stuff that looks great.
In order to view this video you need something like the latest build of Firefox (that’s what I’m using). And just for rough comparison here are the direct links to the WebM file and an H.264 version. They’re both 640×480 but the H.264 version is about two and half times the bit-rate.
Here’s some more info on WebM including the announcement at Google I/O: