My eyes always open wider when I see an article comparing these technologies. We chose Adobe Connect and with the recent chest thumping about which technology was best, it was good to read an article that had some numbers - regardless of any suggestion of bias that the article was supporting one technology over another. You can read the article in full below.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/perlow/web-video-showdown-flash-vs-quicktime-vs-windows-media/13176?tag=nl.e539

What questions did it raise for me? What questions did it answer? What to I need to look out for?

Technical information so we have a line in the sand, compare apples with apple etc...

The video specifications they chose were:

Resolution: 640×480
Frame Rate: 29.97 fps
Video Bitrate: 1200 kbps
Audio: 44100Hz, 16-bit Stereo
Audio Bitrate: 96 kbps

For Windows Media, the codec used was the WMV9 codec for video, and the WMA2 codec for audio. For both QuickTime and Flash, we used H.264 for video, and AAC for audio.

We encode for 600 kbps and because we are a country that uses PAL our frame rate is either 25 for full framerate or 12.5 if we really want to crunch the size down.

So what do we have to consider being an educational agency providing computers to teachers and students? These folk need to look at our videos through our moodle server, our adobe connect server and soon our media server.

Interestingly we are at the research and investigation phase of the software solution for our media server which may be flash based but could equally be a microsoft solution however I suggest that it is unlikely to be a Darwin server although we are ironically based in Darwin, Australia.

A consideration I hadn't really prioritised is that Intel has addded hardware acceleration for the h.264 codec into their chips and this was reflected in the results of video played on later model computers. Will our students have computers with those chips? Now that is a question to ask. But it suggests that encoding using h.264 is the way to go if we are encoding to flash video.

The surprising discovery was that the wmv format from Microsoft was the least cpu intensive of all three.

The encouraging discovery is that upcoming versions of Flash will allow developers to switch off the programming portion or overhead of the application and let be simply a video streaming tool as required. This will result in a speed boost and reduction in cpu usage.

In reading through the comments and trying to wade through the hype of the adobe vs apple vs microsoft video debate, it is important to remember that 99% of our educational video is being delivered on reasonably powered windows XP or 7 desktops or laptops in a LAN environment. The delivery to iPhones and other mobile devices and thumping laptops with the latest chips is still confined to our research labs and by the time delivery to mobile devices is mainstream for the education sector in Australia, I think the schoolyard squabbles of the big three over whose video marble is shiniest will have been resolved and they will have moved on to gang up on Google or someone else.

As a final comment, I am comfortable with our decision to encode our videos in the flv format using h.264 but will keep a watching brief on HTML5 and the developments in the Silverlight space which we will be researching through a project involving the Office Communication Server from Microsoft.

 

This entry was posted on June 10, 2010 at 7:43 AM and has received 401 views. There are currently 1 comments. Print this entry.