Picking a Video Encoding.

Recently I purchased a camcorder to document my child as she grows up. Nice thing about it is that its a digital camcorder, and through a Firewire connection I can upload video to my computer, and create clips that I can send to the grandparents. Only problem is which video encoding to pick. Through some video editing I've done previously, my first choice was obviously MPEG-2. Its pretty standard, considering its the encoding used in DVDs. Only I forgot that because MPEG-2 is a licensed technology, typically one needs to purchase some DVD player software in order to get a MPEG-2 decoder installed on one's computer. And because of that, a few people I had sent some clips to were unable to view them. Doh! So I began searching for a different encoding, one that is supported on a variety of platforms - MacOS, Windows and Linux or Solaris - and that one that does a decent job of compression, something suitable for broadband, but not necessarily streaming. I ended up putting together a survey of several different formats. But haven't chosen one yet. However, in my quest to find out more about different available encodings, I ran across a set of pages at MIT. A Video Guide for the MIT Computer Graphics Group. The Compression and General Video Info sections I found to be pretty good overviews several topics. Whoops, I just realized, the best pages on the different encodings aren't even linked from the main page. The Codec Comparison goes over 20 or 30 different encodings, probably half of which I never heard of.

(2005-02-17 21:29:01.0) Comments [5] // Permalink