“StreamingMedia.com today announced publication of two new research reports, ‘Proprietary Streaming Codecs, 2006’ and ‘Flash Codecs, 2006.’ The first report compares RealVideo and Windows Media with top Flash and Apple’s H.264 codecs, while the second compares the quality of Flash video codecs and encoding tools. The company found that quality of the best Flash and H.264 codecs still trailed RealVideo, often by a significant margin. ‘While the progress of H.264 and Flash codecs has been impressive,’ quipped report author Jan Ozer, ‘rumors of the demise of all other codecs have been greatly exaggerated.’ To research the reports, Ozer produced a 6-minute test file composed of 38 scenes representing typical business, sports, and entertainment videos, along with several animations and still image pans and zooms,” MacNN reports.
Full article with more info and links here.
“StreamingMedia.com on Monday announced the publication of two new reports that suggest that Apple’s QuickTime H.264 video encoding has gained ground on Microsoft Windows Media. The winner, however, was RealVideo,” Peter Cohen reports for MacCentral.
Full article here.
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boo…
So that is what Robbathehut was spending all his money on. Doctored up reports.
It’s the VHS/Betamax argument. Yeah, Beta was better, but VHS had more market place.
Okay, how is that possible. I guess it must be the people then, if its not the codec; cause at least 75% of the Real Media videos I’ve seen have crappy quality and don’t stream smoothly.
Uuuh, huuuuh….. I’ve watched video using all of these codecs, and Real’s is _only_ better than Windows Media. It’s far, far below a good H.264 movie.
Oh yeah, and I love to watch Real video buffer all the time too. Great stuff there!
MW: mind, as in what poor Mr. Cohen has lost.
I suspect that this may be a case where the technical analysis gives one answer (or was doctored to give one answer . . .’StreamingMedia.com’?? . .Please,) but the empirical experience is much different. I can’t stand RealVideo.
Because .h264 is. It’s not “Apple’s” it’s an MPEG standard.
Beta did not become dominant in the consumer market, but had a death grip on the professional market right up until the digital revolution. Sony made a ton of money on high margin pro equipment with this technology.
The 8mm and High 8 VCR/Camcorders were nothing but shrunken BetaMax units on Evaporated Metal Tape. The Digital 8 format still uses the BetaMax U transport.
By the way, Sony invented the M transport and sold it to Matsushita. They in turn marketed it as VHS through their JVC and Panasonic brands. Sony used to have ads that said “Before we invented our system we invented theirs”.
It’s funny how all of you guys try to dismiss as irrelevant or biased any reports that might indicate that Apple’s product or software is not the absolute best, but had the Apple product come out on top, you’d be seeing a ton of comments about how <insert snide, arrogant, elitist, ignorant, and outright stupid comment> the competition is. Pathetic.
i agree with the above post from “hypocrites”
Cool.
A “6-minute test file composed of 38 scenes representing typical business, sports, and entertainment videos, along with several animations and still image pans and zooms.”
I wonder why video in RealVideo format looks so crummy on my Mac, when compared to QT H.264 and even WMV files? It must be my Mac, and those cheap Apple Cinema HD displays.
I also wonder why video in RealVideo looks so crummy on my parent’s Sony Vaio, when compared to QT H.264 and WMV files> It must be Windows, or perhaps those cheap Sony displays.
I wonder who sponsored the research report?
It must be Real Networks.
Tera Patricks
Tera Talks
Bottom line for me – I wish “Real” would go away. Not only is their codec technology clearly not better, subjectively or objectively, I Really dislike their players, on any platform.
Beta is in fact still used widely in the professional realm. there is in fact digital beta. every news program you watch is recorded on beta.
every editor learns linear editing on a beta or beta sp U-matic.
it’s a great format.
VG
What I’d like to see is a more independent test than this.
“The test clip includes 38 clips grouped in sections for business, sports, entertainment, animation and pan and zoom content. Apple, Microsoft and Real encoded the test clips to our parameters to ensure optimal quality.”
See? Each of the vendors was allowed to encode the video test clips. Did they know why? What were the encoding settings? What was the objective of each? Who is on the judging panel and what is their background and qualifications?
How about a test for mere mortals? You know, the rest of us.
Oh, did you read about the Video Quality Test. They took the output from RealVideo, Windows Media Video, and QuickTime, and compared them to the actual video footage. QuickTime H.264 came in first, with quality performance 250% greater than WMV or RealVideo.
If you’d like to see the report, send me $2,950.00, and I’ll mail a copy to you.
“hypocrites”..
I agree that too often are things dismissed, but it’s hard not to make a snide comment here. RealVideo is terrible. It buffers every five seconds, and never seems to stream properly. I find the buffers sometimes put the audio and video out of sync in favor of the audio.
Whatever happened to MP2? Wasn’t that a video format?
Does it my arse. RealVideo always looks shite to me, just take a look at the BBC for a prime example. Would be interesting to know if this is real world use or use under optimal conditions.
RealMedia: buffering… buffering… buffering…
hypocrites wrote and Dank agreed…
“you guys try to dismiss as irrelevant or biased any reports that might indicate that Apple’s product or software is not the absolute best, but had the Apple product come out on top…
While I might agree that there is a fervent, blindfolded, non-objective, knee-jerk pavlovian response <i> (did I forget anything?)</i) that we see here quite often, in quite a few of these cases the “report” is far from coming from an objective source. However, having looked at <a >StreamingMedia.com’s</a> website, they look like they’re pretty serious.
Always best to take a wait-and-see approach to these kinds of things, but h.264 looks pretty tough to beat.
MW:HAND, as in…
<e> An h.264 in the hand is worth two ghost codecs in the bush!</e>
I’m keeping my day job!
Gosh, I wonder why HD-DVD and Blu-ray have dismissed RealVideo as a desirable codec. LOL
“RealMedia: buffering… buffering… buffering…”
Just because you have a slow connection or connect to a server with limited bandwidth doesn’t mean the codec is bad.
Question: Why was it called Beta?
Loosely translated, Number Two…
(oh, man.. toilet humor joke not intended)
WHY would you name your technology “2nd Place”
Just in my box
Secret photo taken, no description.
The Real, the Original MacDude
(Often imitated, never successfully duplicated)
Y’all are confusing a couple things: Encoding and playback.
What those godawful expensive reports are saying is that if you start with the her master test file, when encoded as a Real Media file it had a smaller file size and fewer artifacts.
Her report said nothing (at least in the abstracts I’ve read) about the streaming quality of the file or of the playback software.
Since the researcher only used one test file I would have to say her data is suspect. You need at least 16 different files to make a good test (at least two samples each of video dark, video medium, video light, text/presentation graphics, CGI dark, CGI medium, CGI light, and combo text/video). Also she neglected DivX encoding altogether…Hmmmm…
(With suspicion) I can buy her file size argument. I’m sure that Real made her file the smallest.
(With suspicion) I can buy her file artifact argument. I’m sure that with the settings she used that Real’s encoder left the fewest artifacts.
Maybe across a range of files Real’s encoder does produce smaller files and fewer artifacts. Again, she didn’t use enough test files, left out a major encoder, and I’m not gonna blow $400 to parse her methodology.
But, as everyone else has pointed out we all know that Real Player/Mac sucks at playing streaming media. I’ve never used it under Windows. My test with Windows Media suggest that it sucks on both platforms, though it is much more reliable at streaming than Real. Flash video is damned near bulletproof (as anyone who has visited YouTube.com can attest), though I take off points for user friendly.
Overall QuickTime Player is my favorite for overall experience. I’m happy that DivX plays inside QuickTime so the DivX and QT experience are one and the same. Now if Flip4Mac would just support all WMVs inside QT then I’d be really happy.
On a T1, they all seem quite similar in my experience. However, the settings used to produce streaming content have a major impact on quality. More subjectively, Windows Media and Real often seem more prone to visual artifacts, and QuickTime more prone to hangs (I don’t mean crashes, but movies that partially download, stop, and cannot be resumed).
Mac Dude -thats for an apple store
“We’re setting the stage
for something big”
Our **** *** ** ** ** **. The Apple Store, ??????.