I wanted to test out a couple of video publishing platforms so I made a short clip of my youngest trying to pick up and eat some banana cubes! I uploaded the clip to YouTube and Blip.tv
I was shocked with poor quality of the result in YouTube in comparison to Blip.tv. Check out the difference in quality for yourself below:
YouTube:
Blip.tv:
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Thanks for the comparison Tom. What would be a handy feature on these sites is a Choose Your Output Quality option.
There is a definite need for the low quality, fast download of YouTube but sometimes you want the higher quality as shown in BlipTV.
It might be a revenue stream for the sites. “Pay for higher quality output.”
BIG difference alright, strangely I was doing something similar on a break earlier and noticed how good blip.tv was, it also had a nice widescreen format on the geektv video I watched. I lost patience trying to get something from Microsoft channel 9 to play.
try dailymotion.com they encode at at good quality
the Blip.tv video’s loading faster for me too
I use vimeo myself. I am not saying it is better than blip.tv. The blip.tv terms look very good. Vimeo has a 250mb cap per week. But is has an incredibly clean interface. Just my 2 cents
Interesting to note that the Youtube video plays in Google Reader and I’d imaging other feed readers, whereas clicking on the blip video prompts to download the flv.
Hi Tom,
I have been making the same obvservation and have been looking into it on and off over the last few weeks.
So far my findings can be summaried as the following,
- For obvious reasons all of very large video sites use the Flash player, i.e. ubiquitous, 95+% penetration etc…
- What is not so obvious is that the output of the Transcoding process for most of these sites is based on a Codec that is over 8+ years old, i.e. H.263.
- As mentioned above, the H.263 codec is over 8+ years old and is supported by Flash 7 or greater. As far as I can determine, it seems that the big three video sites, i.e. YouTube, Google Video and MySpace video all use this codec. By todays standard this codec is seen as legacy and far superior ones are starting to gain traction (obviously Silverlight success/adoption is a factor in the future, with its support for the VC-1 codec, which is viewed by some as having superior compression, quality and better reflects where the current stat of Web video is at), with the VP6 codec (from On2 technologies been the current (pre release of Silverlight) contented to chip away at the use of H.263 right now.
- Smaller/Competitors to YouTube etc… tend to use the more modern/effective/better codec VP6, which is a patented technology, requires licenscing, and is the default/better codec for Flash 8 or greater. As far as I can see Blip.Tv uses VP6, I spotted some comments on a Blip.TV blog that mentioned VP6 and On2.
Like I mentioned, this is just a quick summary of some of my findings to date, so it is quite possible that some of my comments maybe wrong, but all I have found todate seem to indicate this the highlevel state of play why some sites are crap quality and perhaps even slower downloading and why other are better quality and better download rates.
hth,
/P
btw
What I have found todate about the other big guys in this space is that Yahoo wrote their own Codec and I would love to know what AOL use as I think they are one of the best out there at the moment.
Hey – since you’re a YouTuber, you might want to check this out… There’s a video company that’s recruiting
YouTubers and if they like your stuff, (and they should) they will actually pay you when your video gets a hit.
Here’s their link… http://www.flownetworkproductions.com/videorevenue.htm. It’s about time the people who make
the videos get some of the money instead ng to YouTube!
and http://www.youtube.com/chukcanuk
The first videos I uploaded to blip tv look great. Not so the more recent ones. All were uploaded directly(using ftp) with Adobe Premiere Elements 4 as well as by saving as a .flv and uploading via the site. I have tried uploading flash withhigher bitrate but Blip looks ugly now. Youtube . Any ideas as to where my problem might lie?