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October 03, 2005
Codecs myriad
Not so much about music this time, not even about aviation, but codecs.
Since the beginning of this year I am uploading small videoclips I made to my website. Most of these are mp4 clips. Then I discovered the Sorenson codec which creates smaller files with a little better image quality.
A couple of months ago Apple (I am on a Mac) introduced Quicktime 7 with h.264. At first I was unimpressed, especially because of the large size of the demo and trailers on the Apple website. That the video quality is outstanding with these large files is no surprise. But I don't want short clips of 150 megabytes on my server.
But last weekend I was fiddling with codecs again and I discovered I can reduce the filesize of my videos with 50 percent compaired to mp4, and maintain a better quality than both Sorenson or mp4.
The trick is to reduce the bitrate, and I had to go below a bitrate of 256 to see the image lose quality dramatically at the size I publish my movies: 320*240.
I will maintain the old movies formats for a while, but at some point I will switch to h.264.
Posted by Renske at 20:00 UTC | permanent link