pouët.net

How come people still do the video versions on .avi? Wasn't .mp4 h264 the best option at the moment, or I missed something?

Well, you seemed to have missed this discussion.

What's the difference?
Is mp4 really a format or is it just an avi renamed? All avis now are using the h264 codec. If the videos only have video and audio (no scene information, no subtitles...) the avi format should be enough. But like I said I don't really know what the mp4 format supports or even if it is a real format.

Forgot to mention that most MOVs today also use h264.

AVI or MP4 are containers. DIVX/XVID or H264 are codecs.

mp4 is the official MPEG4 container format. The main advantages over AVI are proper VBR audio support and less file format overhead (and the fact that it's an ISO standard, though that's not much of a practial issue).

and better software support. (mencoder cant output into MPEG4 afaik?)

I need this - badly. Most users can't do proper audio when creating AVIs (proper = CBR). Well, either that, or all the hardware DVD players I've tried suck at playing AVIs with VBR audio streams. And it's a damn bitch having to correct them all....
I just wonder how most budget DVD players will handle MP4 with VBR audio streams...
Oh well, money to be spent, blood to be shed!

The point is that, I don't know any plugin that can play .avi files (apart from divx files) from the web. At the moment I'm downloading still-09-ferner.avi without being able to see what I've downloaded by now.

Probably I'm not too used to this quicktime plugin that plays/streams the .mov .mp4 files. However, I know that there is people that hates this plugin. But still, flash player now support mp4/h264, so enconding your video in that format, ensures that all the mac/quicktime lovers will see/stream your video eaily, and also all the people that has flash installed will be able to see/stream your video.

Maybe I'm the only one that doesn't like to download videos to the desktop, watch them and then delete them (being in a world that you can watch videos online that is).

oh, and now flashplayer happens to be windows/mac/linux

...and by that i obviously meant that AVI has better support.

Gargaj: AFAIK Ryg has mastered creating mp4 files with mencoder, but last time I asked him he just started giggling like mad, babbling something about "my precious" and then broke all parkour records just by running away.

Ah, open source software, how I love thee :)

trace: for a demo, nothing beats fullscreen. But yeah, previewing it in the browser is great too for when you just want to preview something.

The main problem I have with avi is all the issues with some files playing, others failing, and some working but badly (especially on the mac, but with windows too). And needing to download vlc or some other player just to be able to watch them.

Speaking of which, is it possible to output .mp4 directly from kkapture? I got it to save h264 compressed .avi directly, but for some reason some files play perfectly in quicktime, but others cause it to hang.

kb: i too saw several mencoder scripts which had "-of mp4", so it must be in the CVS _somewhere_ :D

psionice: as soon as the flash plugin using h.264 is widespread enough (does that thing auto-update btw? going from the fact that almost from one day to the next every flash video player is able to do proper fullscreen i definitely think so), watching video streams of demos directly from the net could become a very viable option. Setting up a flash based video player is a matter of a few minutes nowadays.

kb: i have a feeling it doesn't update, but shockwave does. Might be wrong there though. It's not hard to include a version check in the player though, to pull up the installer for the current version.

Isn't h264 support still in beta though? And would it be easy to provide a save button, that saves the file without re-downloading it? If so, all we need is somebody crazy enough to host a 1080p demo video site ;)

first of all, you need somebody crazy enough to have hardware that can actually decode 1080p h264 in realtime... with my old 2.4ghz pentium-4 i'm still having some problems doing 720p@24fps

No, h.264 is in since 9.0.60, current version seems to be 9.0.115 for all major platforms, but it doesn't seem to update (I had 9.0.45 until a few minutes ago ;)

Download button... no idea exactly, but perhaps good old JW Player can be tweaked towards that.

downloading a few hundred mb to watch the demo, then downloading it again to save it would be pretty bad for the server (and anyone on dial up :) so that save button would be a blessing.

Any idea on direct .mp4 export from kkrunchy? Or is there anything on it in the kkrunchy thread?

The way flash player updates nowadays is thanks to major sites like youtube/myspace. If they update their player to the latest version, you'll have to update your player. And sooner or later, youtube will jump from .flv vp6 to .mp4 or .m4v (which is the same) h264. So.. well, I guess I made my point clear already.

mencoder only supports avi (properly, that is). i currently encode to avi then remultiplex to mp4 with mp4box.

psonice: I usually export from kkrunchy to plain .avi, and then I use a cracked version of Quicktime to save as .mp4.

trace: yeah, that would be easier. Problem for me is my windows partition is WAY too small for 1080p captures. I didn't consider using it for that when i set the disk up.

Hmm.. thinking about it, I have a spare 40gb usb disk I could use. Is that big enough, for say a long-ish demo like lifeforce, at 1080p/60? And can quicktime read the files huffyuv makes?

no, QT (i must bed one of the three persons dumb enough to have registered the Win version) won't work with Huffyuv. And 1080p@60 is WAY beyond anything current hardware (perhaps apart from the the newest gen of bluray players, but then i haven't seen any @60 stuff on bluray yet) is able to handle, watch out ;)

AFAIK yes.

apple :(