“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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It’s about waaaay more than just the codec. H.264 is not universally the best codec out there. It’s got some really great key advantages, but codecs can be measured by quality/data rate across a spectrum, with some being top at different levels.
Other considerations also include computing resources required to encode and computing resources required to decode, again across the spectrum of quality/data rate.
And all of the above can vary based on what the video actually is to begin with…talking heads versus action, or color differences.
After all of this is evaluated, I think one would find the top codecs in the same ballpark. So then other considerations should be made.
The RealPlayer and transport protocols SUCK. This is readily apparent when there is heaver server load or bandwidth issues. QuickTime simply blows away the competition in this regard.
While QuickTime and Real work well across platforms, Windows Media sucks harder on non WIndows platforms.
Finally, there’s the issue of what can be done with the media. QuickTime is a container format which can be used for editing. Real and Flash are end-file formats. You can still edit and work with them, but they suck in this regard.
Overall, across platform, I prefer QuickTime.
I would agree with that statement, unfortunatley.
In addition, the RealPlayer browsers is one of the most standards compliant browsers along with Safari. Try the Acid2 Test.
Yeah, but can you pause, fast forward, backup, and resume play? WMV sucks so bad in that respect. I can not think of a single instance where I could pause a WMV files, then resume play without the player restarting from the beginning. Quickytime has always been my favorite media player/format even before I was ever a Mac user because the pause, forward, and reverse buttons have always worked as I expected.
RealVideo is a frikkin’ joke and everybody here knows it. They have no chance to survive and should make their time. Move zig.
This has nothing to do with codecs but for multi-format players. Try this:
http://www.videolan.org/
plays just about anything
Oh, it’s free and open source and they have an OS X version…
http://www.videolan.org/
I dont know anyone whos uses real, everyone uses flash, wmv, or mov, which ARE the fastest and dont require spyware unlike rv.
To be fair, regardless of if you use windows or a mac, I think that the number of people who like Real Player is very small. A lot of people won’t have an opinion, they’ll just use what they’re given and not expect it to be good. Just look at the streamed apple keynotes and tell me real (at least for free) is anywhere near as good as that.
Prove it. Let us see the videos and judge for ourselves.
Hiding behind some fee based report and making these sorts of claims sounds like out and out slander.
poop
to: hobbes:
“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.”
*****************
5 megs down and 2 megs up says Real Video {sic} IS BAD. 3 macs and two dells agree – real video sucks fat-baby-cock! Who can argue with this? It’s ALWAYS sucked.
H.264 may be in infancy, but it’s coming along, and it’s NOT APPLE’s SPEC! They may have adopted it to maintain it’s grounding – but didn’t the MPEG cats claim it’s superiority? I’m an MP#G-4 fan myself, and as someone who needs a good codec and maintains them for a living, maybe people who DON’T Do this For a Living should shut their pie holes and continue Trolling..
I agree with S. Russell, though I would phrase it differently: If QuickTime performs well on a given network connection, and RealPlayer constantly bufffers on the same connection — then yes, that means its coding is inferior.
realplayer annoys me to no end, and I always uninstall it if it somehow sneaks onto my system. However I did notice that the video looked better than WMVs on my system. However since I’ve gone to h.264 I haven’t had a chance to compare the two. (and I hope I never have to because I never want to see that rp software on my machine again)