Video Formats for non-Windows Users?

ccdotnet asks: "I look after a small web site for a rising sports star. We have a small number of short videos in .WMV (9) format available for download. These .WMV files are typically 3-5 MB in size (we do a "low res" and a "hi res" version). Each video is typically 1-2 minutes and 320x240. The site gets maybe 100 visitors per day. Our outbound hosting bandwidth is _very_ limited, so although we are keen to cater for non-Windows users (around 7% of our visitors), I've struggled to find a suitable video format which doesn't blow the size of the file right out. Ideally I would like to keep these files at a similar size but at the same time want to maintain a reasonable video quality. Are users of other platforms just out of luck? What non-Windows/Mac video formats can people recommend so that I can deliver this content to people who can't play .WMV for one reason or another?"

A few years ago, playing .WMV files might have been problematic for users who didn't use either a Macintosh or a Windows-based operating system. Now, with MPlayer and its derivatives making strides, it's not as much of an issue. Of course, there are still .WMV files that don't play well in Mplayer, but what suggestions would you have for creating Mplayer-safe .WMVs as well as other, more cross-platform friendly formats?

Re:XVID

[Anonymous Coward]

I love XviD, but while your average slashdot geek has the latest codec installed, your average net surfer, I'm afraid, does not. I'd say stick with the big three--wmv, quicktime, or real. But don't use real. It's evil.

Real Player

[redwoodtree]

Works on linux(Helix Community [helixcommunity.org]), mac (www.real.com) and windows of course. And if it is a pay-site and you can afford to buy the encoders you can get professional support as well.

Re:For bandwidth management...

[Tibor the Hun]

It's a small site too.

How would you explain to your cousin to download Azureus, update JVM, download the file, put it in Azureus, and leave it running for a few days?

Direct download is the better solution than torrent in some situations.

Flash Video

[modeps]

Convert your files to Flash video. As much as Macromedia kinda stinks, most people have the Flash plugin installed. Crossplatform and cross brower friendly. http://www.wildform.com/ [wildform.com] has a cheap converter. Quality and size dont change much.

Free IPod/MacMini

[Anonymous Coward]

Take anything this guy says with a large grain of salt. Look at his sleazy sig.

Re:Xvid

[JohnnyBigodes]

Maybe, just maybe, because it isn't supported out-of-the-box, and since most average users can't even double-click without help, they won't take the time/effort to install an external codec, much less one they never heard about (maybe you could get away with RealPlayer or something like that, but anything less known and it's pushing it).

Re:Quicktime

[Anonymous Coward]

because after all, quicktime has a native player for... one platform.

MPEG4 with AAC audio

[dmoore]

I went through a similar process encoding streaming some videos from my recent wedding. My requirements were this:

- Playable by 95% of Windows, Mac, and Linux users without installing additional software.
- Streamable and seekable
- Decent quality and compression
- Encoded and streamed completely using free software (or at least freely-downloadable software)

The answer was the MPEG4 video codec, AAC audio codec, contained in an MPEG4 wrapper (.mp4 file extension). I could encode video using mencoder (ffmpeg might work too), audio using faac, multiplex using mjpegtools, and stream with darwin streaming server. All these are free. Recent versions of the quicktime player support .mp4 files (both playing them and streaming them). This also works with the quicktime browser plugin. Also, Linux users get to use mplayer without even needing the binary quicktime codecs, since MP4 is an open standard.

Re:For bandwidth management...

[Night Goat]

That's ridiculous. The site only gets 100 users a day. Not all of them are going to be downloading the videos. The torrent is going to be basically useless since it'll take forever to download a small video. Torrents are not meant for this. Not to mention they're enough of a hassle that casual visitors to the site won't bother watching the video.

Flash?

[chipster]

I know I have seen sites offer vids/demos/peresntations in (small footprint) Flash movies. The quality of the movies were more than satisfactory.

SWF

[DanCentury]

You can deliver video with Flash/SWF files now. I think that's your best bet.

Re:For bandwidth management...

[pstreck]

bittorrent probably isn't a good option for them with so few hits a day. the biggest advantage of bittorrent is when lots of users are running a specific torrent at once.

Matter of opinion I guess

[trezor]

• More often than not, they're just going to skip over it and move on to another page.

That is really interesting. For me its the other way around. DivX and XviD I'm all good with, but there's no way I'm spending time or bandwidth downloading Quicktime or Quicktime movies. I just skip over it and go to another page.

To be fair, it's not as much the fileformat or quality that disgusts me, it's the player. You actually need a seperate player to play the files. To me that's more or less the definition of a crappy format. If I can't play a videoformat in the player of my choice, the videoformat belongs to the pre-2000 era.

And there's no need informing me of the existence of quicktime-alternative, I know of it, but this is a matter of principle. Maybe I'm borderlining stupdity here, but hey I'm man enough to admit it.

Another option: Sorenson Squeeze

[PopeAlien]

I've found Cleaner to be somewhat less userfriendly and stable than Sorenson Squeeze [sorenson.com] - Squeeze also costs about $100 less. Its does realplayer, quicktime, mpeg files as well as flash SWF and FLV files which are good for cross platform no brainer plays-in-a-window video files. You can also set it up as a watchfolder renderer, so all you have to do is drop new videos into a watched folder and it will automatically render all your set formats.

I see a lot of suggestions here for torrents, divx, etc which are not as wide spread and userfriendly as WMV / QT / FLASH /MPEG options. your best bet is probably to provide multiple format options to hit the widest audience, which can be batch rendered with Cleaner or Squeeze.

Re:Mpeg.

[wohlford]

I'd recommend MPEG4. Good quality and a small size. And MPEG4 can easily be played QuickTime.

If the clips are being played directly in a web page like maybe the low-rez version, I'd also recommend re-saving the MPEG4 as a QuickTime movie with fast-start. That way the movie feels like its steaming. Then offer the high-rez version as a pure MPEG4 compressed in a zip. The reason its zipped up is so that it doesn't accidentally play in the browser.

Encoding can be done using tools that handle DivX, xvid, or ffmpeg codecs as they do MPEG4. I prefer xvid. I'm on a Mac, so I can't recommend specific PC tools. I'd guess that open source tools are available for encoding, and are quite sure that freeware or shareware encoders are available. QuickTime Pro ($20) will be needed to resave the MPEG4 as a fast-start movie.

There is an example on my website showing off my then unborn son [wohlford.org] (no sound).

Re:Mpeg.

[johnnyb]

Almost all browsers support flash, and flash has its own video format which is pretty nice.

Re:Codec w/ most market penetration

[forand]

Um isn't Quicktime a 3rd party codec? You even say it is proprietary in your post. So if people can download and install Quicktime(which you can't do anymore on XP unless you also get iTunes) why can't they install xvid? Seriously it is even simpler than installing iTunes/Quicktime given the correct link.

Re:Codec w/ most market penetration

[LeiGong]

You missed my point. QT (and Real) are 3rd party codec has the most market penetration next to WMV. So if you are posting a video w/ a 3rd party codec, it should be the one which you can assume a majority of the people will already have. That way, they wouldn't have to goto another site to install it just to view a short video. I can say with 100% certainty that more people have QT installed on their system than DivX, XVid or any other more efficent codecs. See? [itfacts.biz]

Again, the answer to the original question is not which codec is most efficent at compression (or even the fastest), but which codec is "best suited" for his business. Sure QT has its problems; but if you want to make sure your user has the least obstacles to overcome before viewing a video compressed on a cross-platform codec, you'd be hard pressed to find a better choice. QT also has brand recognition, people will be wary of installing some "open-source" codec over a codec branded with a company they trust. Besides, with QT, you're gauranteed 100% of the Mac user-base will have it installed.

I didn't recommend Real for obvious reasons...

H.264 later - 3ivX now

[gsfprez]

When H.264 becomes widespread - read - when Quicktime 7 comes out - you'll be in the pink.

It scales very well, and looks more better than anything else at any rate. Its quite the codec.

I've seen first hand files and worked with betas on QT7. It hands down pimp slaps Sorenson and WMP 9 files.

Plus, anyone can watch it on anyplatform.

Until then, I suggest you use DivX or 3ivX - and provide download links to both. 3viX is great quality and its every platform compatible and its free for the playback component.

Windows users are happy - your 3ivX files play in WMP, Mac users are happy, your 3ivX files play in Quicktime, and Linux users are happy because it plays in XAnim

Re:Mpeg.

[Neon Spiral Injector]

Most DivX or Xvid files have AVI wrappers around them. They are not ISO .MP4 files. If you try to a .MP4 file in Windows you won't have much luck unless QuickTime or RealPlayer have claimed the extension. Even then my experiences have left me wanting. On the other hand if you do have a .AVI that has a MPEG4 video stream it will be opened by Media Player by default. It will then check for a codec and find nothing on Microsoft's server. This can be solved by pointing viewers of the website to a location to download the codec, and instructions to install it manually.

Don't forget the audio. MP3 will be OK; AAC will not be so easy.

So, yes. Player support is dodgy.

Wait a Second...

[Anonymous Coward]

QT and WMV movies don't play on Linux? Hello, MPlayer codecs [udel.edu].

Re:Mpeg.

[jephthah]

its simple: offer two different formats.

keep your .WMV files for the windows users, in a prominent position, since 93% of your visitors should be clicking this.

but add a *secondary* link, with a basic .MPG for your 7% non-windows users, in a not-so-prominent position.

This way, Grampa Charlie can point and click on the WMV files without having to call tech support, and the Linux/Mac/etc. users can view the MPG any way they feel like, and not have to install yet another media player.

so yeah maybe standard MPEG-1 files have poor compression, but they work well, and only 7% of the people should be using these links

Re:Mpeg.

[Anonymous Coward]

Fast script to convert from any video source to swf [grajal.net] (Using mplayer/mencoder, imagemagick, swftools):

And the source right here [grajal.net].

Re:The good, the bad and the unsupported...

[dghcasp]

By sticking to a standard, but non-proprietary combination, such as MPEG-4/XVID/AAC, you might even be able to cater to all platforms without maintaining multiple formats...

This, of course, is the usage of the word standard that linux people get all wet over, namely published specifications and open source.

This has no relation to the usage of the word standard that means "will run on Aunt Nelly's computer by default."

I'd suggest, that since (a) MPlayer does a pretty good job of playing .WMV files, and (b) your average Linux/BSD/MAC/etc person is quite a bit more likely to be willing to download and install third-party components, that you'd be better off staying the way you are (i.e. delivering .WMV files.)

In other words: Don't try to push the masses into needing to become "Educated" just to view your media. The number of people you lose will not be equalled by the number of people you gain by switching.

Re:Remind myself to remind others

[Anonymous Coward]

What the hell is a "none-Windows" user?

Re:The good, the bad and the unsupported...

[sirReal.83.]

You are absolutely 100% missing the point. This isn't about big-box electronics chains or portable player hardware. Most people haven't even heard of mpeg or avi or anything either - and those that do had to learn about them sometime. It's easy to get ogg vorbis/theora support on all 3 platforms including strange architectures on linux, but it's more difficult and totally illegal in the US to get support for wmv or qt on linux - and impossible on other architectures - and nobody is going to pay $30 just to see this athlete's videos. Real exists only for linux-ix86, but at least it's legal in the US...

The poster asked this question because he wants something that will work for everyone, and you're basically telling him he shouldn't want that. I repeat, you're missing the point.

Have you even tried ogg vorbis and theora? It doesn't sound like it.

Re:Xvid

[Lord Prox]

Here is a suggestion that might not be useful, but i'll post it anyway.

Use MPEG1. I know it's old and isn't that great but it will play anywhere and you don't have to run it at VCD bitrates, at 320x240 384 kbps gives ok results and then move your hosting to a better service, Speakeasy told me that they don't have hard bandwith limits (as of last year when I was looking into something similar)

With this setup you KNOW that your videos will play on anything from PDA's to old hardware to Mac, Windows, Linux, and damn near anything else with a screen. With other setups your visitors will also have to find and download the proper codec, and their machines are going to have to have enough CPU power to deal with DivX XviD (older machines may choke on them) with MPEG1 no "extra" downloads. Plays Eveywhere (tm) and as an extra you can make them available as a download or stream on demand with the use of a M3U tag file. (google for it)

Remember MPEG1 is the MP3 of the video world for more reasons than the obvious.