Viddler

Hi,

Is there an official position on how to encode videos for Viddler?

If not, why not?

Here's the problem:
- Viddler limits the bit-rate on videos but does not change the sampling rate (for audio) or the frame size (for video) to match.
- Unless you get the settings right, you end up with lousy quality because your audio/video will be overcompressed.
- If you end up with lousy quality, you will get frustrated and go elsewhere.

I'm speaking from personal experience here because this is exactly what I did, and I know others have too. It took me three or four attempts to get Viddler to produce a video with acceptable quality. And this was only after trying the same video on Youtube. On Youtube it works FIRST TIME, because they adjust sampling rate and frame size to match the encoding bit rate. This means that videos always have consistent quality.

If you are not going to resample the video, you need to give very explicit instructions about what settings to use. Without this information its too "hit and miss".

You need to state:
1) That Viddler is not going to resample the video, so its important to choose the right settings
2) What the target bit-rate is for audio and video
3) Give some suggestions for settings that will work for audio sampling rate, frame size, bit rate, codec, etc. Eg. for audio to sound OK at 48Kbit/s you probably want 22Khz mono MP3, etc.

Sorry if this sounds like a rant, guys, but this is your "core business" that we're talking about here. I love all of the extra features in Viddler, but if I can't produce a good quality video they're not much use to me. You shouldn't hide this critical information in the support forums. You need to be up front about it. It should be on the "Upload" page just under "Supported File Format", and it should also be in the "Help" section under "Uploading Videos".

Cheers,
Stewart

Hi Stewart,

Thanks for taking the time to put all this down. We really appreciate your input. You're absolutely right, we need to add recommended encoding settings to our FAQ. (a Trac ticket is being filed as you read this ;) )

Our inital target encoding settings are 448kbps (400 video + 48 audio) and 4:3 aspect ratio. This allows us to provide the "best" video to "most" viewers, given the capabilities of broadband.

Below is a quick summary of the settings we (our users) have found work best:

Video:
codec / compression type = H.264
multi-pass encoding
frame rate = 24 fps
keyframes = every 24 frames
quality = "high"
data rate = restrict to 768 kbps
interlace source video

Audio:
Format = AAC
channels= mono
rate = 44.1kHz
quality = "best"
target bit rate= 64kbps

Hope this helps. Please let us know how this works for you.

BTW - we have an enhancement in the works to provide "advance" encoding options which would allow you to set some encoding parameters (i.e., fps, keyframes, kbps, de-interlace) And we're looking into providing multiple versions of video (512kbps vs 448) for higher quality delivery.

Thanks again for your input & thanks for using viddler.

-donna

Hi Donna,

Thanks for the info. It will be great to have that in the FAQ. To complete the picture, it would be nice to have some suggested video resolutions that are known to work well with the VP6 codec at 400kbps.

My camera records 16:9 format interlaced MPEG2 at 720x576, 4000kbps. I have to transcode it once to get it onto Viddler - this reduces the size, deinterlaces and makes the pixels square. So far I've used MPEG4, but I'll try H.264 and see if it makes a difference. My experience is that 512x288 works OK, but 384x216 seems better. Since it has been transcoded twice its a little hard to see exactly where the improvement comes from.

Another issue on Viddler is that the player widget rescales video without interpolating. This makes the video look "grainier" than it really is. Is there a reason that you do this? Performance perhaps? I've verified this by playing the downloaded FLV in mplayer - it looks much smoother.

About the frame rate: Viddler seems to encode to 30fps, so presumably its best for me to either use 30fps or leave the frame-rate unchanged (25fps) and let Viddler pad out the missing frames. Why does Viddler change the frame rate when it leaves all the other settings unchanged?

I'll try some of the suggested settings and see if that improves things. The "advanced" encoding options sound great - looking forward to those. Another good feature would be the ability to replace videos (eg. with an improved encoding).

Cheers,
- Stewart

Can someone translate this into how I can best save my video in Windows Movie Maker (Vista version)? People without high tech video editting software (like myself) don't seem to have the options above, or at least I couldn't find them in WMM. I'm having a lot of trouble figuring out how to optimize my video quality with the smallest size file possible...

I'm also curious. How do I create a H.264-compressed video that's not an M4V file, which it seems like Viddler maybe can't upload (but maybe I'm just not doing things right on this end, I'm not sure)?

I'm also wondering what Viddler's native resolution is. As sgreenhill already mentioned, rescaling without interpolating looks quite poor.

@fiddlinlady: Thanks for the settings! In addition it would be very helpful if you could add the native resolution to the specs already posted. Thanks!

By the way, I just joined yesterday. After comparing all the features of the different video sites I really think Viddler is the best, by far (just think of adding comments directly to the movie...)

This might help some of you with Windows Movie Maker. Not sure what all the options are in the drop downs but you can at least change the bit rates.

Anyone know what codecs are supported with this?

@chrisclark: In iMovie choose 'Quicktime Movie' as the format and click 'Options'. You'll then find all the options you can change, including the H.264 setting (from the drop down).

NB: MOV file sizes will be bigger than M4V files, but you can get them down by changing the bit rate and quality.

Thanks Greenhill for the post..
Videoegg and Vimeo all do much better in terms of
what you get the first time you upload the video..


If Viddler can get this right they will be the big bomb!!!

I'm using Ulead VideoStudio 11. What is my best option to encode it for viddler. I really appreciate anybodies hep on this. If you guys think Ulead is no good. Please recommend me a different process to extract my DV video from my camera.

thank you,
R

I'm using Avid Xpress Pro - still learning as I go, so I'm not quite up on all of this here. Anyone have an idea which is the best way to export? WMV? AVI? MOV? I can do all of those but am never sure what's best. I also don't seem to have all the options FiddlinLady gave. I have some and then some additional, but not everything listed there.

I have successfully used WMV and AVI with Viddler before however I'm trying to see if I can get a 36 minute movie down for upload with respectable quality. So far, it ain't happening. (I keep reaching "maximum file size" with AVI no matter what I do.)

Valerie

It would be great with a tutorial already from the export step in Premiere, Avid and FinalCut to get the absolutely best results of the video quality.

What's the status on the mentioned works to get us more options for how our video encodes on Viddler, FiddlinLady? :)

Its strange that its no information in the faq about how the get the best results, ill think after seeing winelibrary tv that viddler have great potential in the videoquality but many doesn't know how the get the best results.

/Peder

StockholmSweden: We really need to build some tutorials and we are planning on doing so. For now the forum is the best resource for this type of information.

@brandice - first, I Love the new avitar & congratulations on the new Mac! We're actually in the middle of team mtgs to figure out which enhancements get added in which release. I'll update you all when we have the schedule. Also, I gave up on windows movie maker & bought QT pro - basic but still better. How are u enjoying iMovie? :)

For native resolution - Right now, we're 4:3 and our player is 545 x 408.
If you upload a 640 x 480, that's the resolution it gets encoded at. But the bits per pixel is impacted by the resolution, as well as fps & bitrate. So, the larger the resolution, the higher the probability that some resampling will be done.

@FiddlinLady - thanks and thanks! :)

I have to say, I think I've set up my videos to encode exactly as mentioned above in iMovie, and I'm still not entirely sure that I'm getting the best quality... I mean, the videos look perfect on my 'puter, and then all square pixelated on Viddler. What can I do to fix that? I'm not really sure that the original recommendations for the settings are the best ones possible, because it seems like .avi clips from my digital camera sometimes looked better with something I did in WMM (which I can't do anymore and never nailed down what it was).

I love creating vids, but get really frustrated when they don't look as pretty on Viddler as they do when I'm done editing them. I expect a bit of a difference, but it seems like I see a big one, especially with fonts when there's text overlay involved.

kthxbai. ;)

Oh, and I'm really liking iMovie so far. :) As mad as I am at M$, I will say however that WMM is a bit more user friendly initially. I'm quickly getting the hang of it though... it's a big switch with a new OS, new video editing options, my brain is sometimes fried! :) (But in a good way.)

New things can be fun, and torturous! Have fun though.

I'm still not sure those options listed above are the best ones. I'd really like to see more help on this front (for me personally, but also for those of us trying to produce the highest quality video possible for professional uses). I even mentioned above that I didn't feel they minimized the square pixel look and all that, but we're not really getting a lot of help on optimizing our video, and video is the main reason we're here.

Can haz helps, plz?

Just wanted to chime in again with some updated information. I compressed the same snippet of video a dozen different ways and compared the resulting size and quality, before and after Viddler re-encoding. I think I've finally found a formula I'm happy with. I don't know how useful this will be to other people, as I'm specifically using a Turbo.264 hardware encoder, and my source video is in high definition. But here it is anyway: http://skitch.com/cmasto/f7qn/viddler-turbo.264-settings

The key, I found, was to drop the data rate while keeping the resolution reasonably high. Viddler can handle 800x450 just fine, and there's no reason to keep the default 2+mbps AppleTV rate -- the files just come out ridiculously large and Viddler's encoder does a worse job with all that extra data to throw away.

These are the settings I used for the January NY Video 2.0 Meetup videos (http://viddler.com/groups/nyvideo2.0/), and I think they scale very nicely to full screen compared to the previous stuff I've uploaded.

One last tip if you're using a Turbo.264: the custom video size is important. By default (because the hardware's capabilities are just short of full AppleTV res), it will create a nonstandard size video but set the QuickTime movie to stretch it to compensate. Unfortunately, Viddler's encoder doesn't recognize this and it comes out with a strange aspect ratio. Manually reducing the size to something that doesn't require nonuniform scaling avoids this problem.

Hope that helps someone eventually.

so has anyone from viddler posted some official suggested encoding specs? i can't find anything, and the forums don't seem to be searchable, I found this one thru google.

I have played around with this and I have been fooling with codecs for what seems like for ever but I am always willing to try something new. I tried the H.264 and I was not happy because it took for ever to encode. What took me 30 minutes with H.264 only took about 8 minutes using ffdshow which is related to H.264. My video went from 250 MB using H.264 to 48 MB using ffdshow. All I can say is for me ffdshow is the ticket. Why would any one need super high quality video of a person standing and talking to a group? Unless you have videos that are full of high speed action, why else would you need such tremendous high resolution videos? Viddler is still better than YouTube and the videos here preserve more quality than if you went about it the youtube way. I just think we are not there yet. Like this kid said (Boxer Kelly Pavlik) When my computer replaces my tv. then we will start airing fights via the internet. Makes sense to me.

fyi - in case you hit this thread with a search (like I did) encoding specs are here: Howto: Encode high quality video for Viddler