Tag Archives: Video codecs

Few Thoughts on Web Video

On Air


It’s really full of video sharing websites out there, but in fact almost all of them use Flash player to display their video files. This is the reality now, but with the coming of HTML5, perhaps the things are changing a bit!

First of all if you start dealing with video sharing platforms the first thing to do maybe is to find a good Flash (.flv) player and to convert all your video content in FLV.

Few things to know with Flash video players:

  1. The user can play those videos only after installing the Flash Plugin to his browser;
  2. The video must be encoded either in FLV (or FLash Video) or in MPEG-4 with h.264 codec. Only than the Flash player can play it;

The HTML5, which can be described as variety of new “things” in the HTML comes with a native <video> tag. Something like the <img> tag where you can just point the source of the image in the src attribute. Continue reading Few Thoughts on Web Video

ffmpeg, libx264 and presets

When working with FFMPEG you can convert/encode in various formats, but in my case this should be an MP4 file, encoded with libx264. This combination is quite well known in the web community, because those videos are playable under almost any flash player and Apple products.

Now the problem is that this comes with very large list of options, which are difficult to setup, especially for newbies like me. Than everything’s difficult, once because the resulting quality is not always the same as the input file’s quality.

The Solution

Is to use presets. Thankfully ffmpeg with libx264 can be used with presets, i.e. NORMAL, HD etc. which means that you don’t have to setup a command by hand and the resulting quality is the same as the input quality.

Here’s a sample command using normal preset:

ffmpeg -i source.mp4 -acodec libfaac -ab 128k -ac 2 -vcodec libx264 -vpre normal -threads 0 -crf 22 output.mp4

here the source can be either mp4 or some other file format as FLV for instance.

Does Firefox play mp4 h.264 within the HTML5 video tag?

As Firefox has declared it will play only open formats within the HTML5 video tag support. But however is there any way to play video with the mp4 h.264 codec under FF with no plugin support?

That is the question.

Opera supports the video tag!

Opera 10.50

Today I saw a interesting article in one of my favorite blogs – ajaxian.com. From now on Opera will support the <video> tag in the new version 10.50.

Actually there is a bunch of new features in that version, but I was curious which codec will be supported, as I was interested in that from my previous post!

The codec is …

supporting OGG. Vorbis and Theora!