Streaming Video: Quality Comparison and Trends

There's a pair of interesting articles about streaming video at Digital Content Producer:
Encoding Best Practices, Part 1
Encoding Best Practices, Part 2

Part 1 is a report based on samples of what kind of streaming video is out there on the web. It's not a huge sample, but he does look at about 20 sites from broadcast video. So that's a good comparison for Link. Flash and Windows Media far outpace any competitors, like Quicktime and Real. One trend in streaming is growing bandwith and image resolution. Most broadcasters were streaming at a frame size of 460x325 and at a data rate of 500 kbps. Lots of good charts showing trends on this as well as frame rate and audio bit rate.

Part 2 is a quality comparison of h.264, on2 vp6, and VC-1 (Windows codec.) VC-1 gets the lowest marks. Both articles are interesting reads. I found them over at FreshDV.

Real video helps with saving videos

Real video seems to have fallen fatally behind in the video streaming arena, now that Flash has emerged as the dominant streaming video format and the powerhouses of Apple and Windows stay strong with their online media presence. But it sounds like Real is putting some interesting features into a new version of their player. They are making it very easy for users to download and save videos in a variety of formats (Flash, Windows Media, Quicktime, and, of course, Real.) They are also offering some features to burn video to discs for playback in DVD players. Read about this over at hardmac.com.