Google’s(On2) VP8 and the video future
May/100
Google has made “public” and “open-source”, “patent-free” and “royalty-free” their recently acquired with the purchase of On2 video codec VP8. It’s an amazing step for the world of digital video. This step obviously was coordinated with other companies like Adobe, which ensured support for the new codec in further versions of Flash and Sorenson that presented an encoder ready to work with the new codec. They have also provided patches for the hugely popular transcoding programs ffmpeg and mencoder that
This is big news and consequences for web video may be really profound. It’s an amazing amount of events for a single month and they did in in a single day. Well done Google!
HD compromises – “near HD” – “HD Lite”
Aug/091
High definition video imposes huge requirements on bandwidth for the video data stream. The requirements are so high that many enthusiasts consider the bandwidth in the BluRay(40mbps) and HD-DVD(28mbps) to be inadequate to get a “decent fidelity” HD video playback. Well this is formally true … in some cases. In practice we’ve lived with the low standard definition(SD) content for more than two generations now. If the technology still struggles with single consumer solutions, what do we do with HD video on the web then? Besides the raw bandwidth there are other solutions improving the odds in our favor a bit.
HD web video
Jul/094
High definition video or HD video as it is known, is digital video with higher resolution than the previous standards (i.e. SD video and DVD). This high resolution is achieved through new video file formats, which allow new codecs, certain performance optimizations (like deblocking) and a lot higher bandwidth(bitrate).
HD resolutions are noted with the number of lines and if it is progressive or interlaced stream. Thus 540p for instance means – resolution 960 x 540 pixels (assuming 16:9 aspect ratio) and progressive stream. Note that interlaced streams are primarily available for compliance with older standards like DVD.
Live video broadcasting
Jul/090
A video stream that is being broadcasted in near realtime on the net is called live video broadcast or live video feed. Live video can be broadcasted on the internet through a real time protocol by a streaming media server. Live video broadcasting allows an experience similar to TV or satellite broadcast. Another term for live video broadcasting is online TV. The main emphasis of this technology is time synchronization. As with satellite TV there is always a slight delay with live internet video due to network delays and stream processing(replication).