One of the most important discoveries I made in working on Vidget Version 1 was the H.263 Quicktime Codec. For this sort of work it was very important to use a codec which didn’t require a huge amount of CPU power, provided fairly good quality images, at low data rates and which could be played both forward and backwards. In the case of most codecs the rule seems to be: “fast, small, good, pick two”.
Sorenson 3 video features excellent images at small file sizes but requires quite a bit of CPU (I’ve found it gets a bit choppy when I try to do too many things at once but others such as jeanpoole
swear by it) and is no good at playing backwards.
I used to think that the Photo-JPEG Codec was good because it was able to play well backwards or forwards but it only looked decent at high bitrates and was quite CPU intensive.
3ivx D4 4.5 is a 3rd party MPEG 4 codec which produces better images than the standard Apple MPEG 4 codec at quite low bitrates. This is largely due to the fact that it features two pass variable or constant bitrate encoder. I definitely plan on using this codec for future linear works but it is a bit too CPU intensive for this project.
H.263 will soon be joined by H.264, which has designed to be scalable from limited bandwidth applications like video phones right through to HD. I can’t wait.
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