Quote:
Originally Posted by the Dutch mountains
Anyone with a Mac can convert movies to play on an iPod or iPhone. QuickTime can do it, VisualHub can do it, and there are probably 5 more free apps that can do it.
What I don't understand is why most sites stil use the ancient WMV format. It's almost impossible to convert material to WMV without losing a lot of quality, while H.264 can maintain quality, even with fast moving or complex material.
For example the video from Pepper. I absolutely adore Pepper and Danielle, so the video of them in the pool was a dream come true. Until you actually look at the video, and see this:
That is clearly a compression problem. The motion of the water is fast, and needs a good motion estemation setting in order to keep the quality maintained, and WMV lacks good ME settings. ( Unless this already went wrong in the camera, which can happen when you shoot in the AVCHD mode ) So if you really want to deliver good quality FullHD movies, you should use a format that can give you that. Formats like H.264, which also play fine on any OS. |
I think a big part of the problem is that the big company (MS) is American, and over this side we just aren't up to the same quality as you in Europe are. Look at how your TV is encoded--PAL, an efficient method with higher resolution, while our TV is encoded in NTSC with a lower resolution (I think its in the neighborhood of 100 lines less that you're used to). Why? Because American businesses weren't patient enough to let the technology develop even just a few more years--it was all about getting TVs into the market and into the homes as fast as possible. In Europe, from what I understand, the delay of just a few years allowed the companies to refine their product and so we wound up with a bunch of already obsolete TVs and broadcast system when compared to what was established in the UK, Germany, Nederlands, France and so on. Similar story for VHS v BetaMax (Beta was better quality, but VHS was produced faster). MS dominates just about everything over here, so, alas, you're somewhat stuck with what is bought by most Americans. Apple is a better product, in part because they take more time to develop & refine their product, but it is also more expensive (sometimes prohibitively so) for many Americans. Did that make sense? I guess what it all boils down to is that the market is too often impatient to get a product, release something that's not "finished" and we buy it, then we're stuck with the level of technology it can support, and where business takes the longer view and develops and refines more, where the quality goes up, you wind up stuck with something that by comparison is substandard--i.e., you get the dumbed down version that "we" think is just the bee's knees (this is in part recalled from what my grandpas told me--one worked in management for IBM, the other for Lawrence Livermore).