Advanced search

On other websites (4201)

• Wave Goodbye; What About VP8/WebM?

  7 August 2010, by Multimedia Mike — Multimedia PressWatch

  Some big news in the geek community this past week came in the form of Google’s announcement that it would no longer be caring about its vaunted Wave technology. I was mildly heartbroken by this since I had honestly wanted to try Google Wave. Then I remembered why I never got a chance to try it: they made it an exclusive club at the beginning. I really did try to glean some utility out of the concept by reading documentation and watching videos and I had some ideas about how I might apply it. Then again, I try to think of a use for nearly any technology that crosses my path.

  It still struck me as odd: Why would Google claim that no one was interested in their platform when they wouldn’t give anyone a chance to try it out? A little digging reveals that Google did open it for general use back around May 18. That date sounds familiar... oh yeah, VP8 was open sourced right around the same time. Maybe that’s why I don’t remember hearing anything about Wave at the time.

  But now I’m wondering about VP8 and WebM. How long do you think it might be before Google loses interest in these initiatives as well and reassigns their engineering resources? Fortunately, if they did do that, the technology would live on thanks to the efforts of FFmpeg developers. A multimedia format has a far more clear-cut use case than Google Wave.

• Compressing videos from a smartphone

  9 November 2016, by fejesjoco

  I have a Nexus 6p with the stock camera. It’s set to record at 1080p, 30fps. Here’s a 5 second sample (11 MB).

  Videos from this phone come out at about 17 Mbps on average. I tried to compress it with ffmpeg with -c:v libx264 -crf 23 -preset veryslow, the result comes out at about 5.5 MB, which is about 9 Mbps.

  I think this bitrate is a bit too much. When I look at torrent file listings, I can see high quality videos at 3 GB in size on average, and if such a movie is 90 minutes long on average, that is about 4-5 Mbps which sounds okay.

  I’m wondering, why the big difference? I can notice that my video is noisy/grainy (which is expected from a phone), and that might reduce compressibility. I tried a few ffmpeg filters, like hqdn3d and atadenoise, but the noise mostly remained (maybe I didn’t play with it enough). Then I figured, the video is also shaky (which is also expected), and that might reduce compressibility too (and even makes temporal noise filtering less effective). I tried to stabilize it with the deshake filter, but that didn’t help either.

  I know I could just limit the bandwidth to whatever I like, but there must be a reason why ffmpeg thinks it needs a high bandwidth to maintain a certain quality, and a lower bandwidth would just decrease the quality.

  Why do these videos have such a high bitrate? What’s the best way to compress them more while keeping or even increasing their quality?

• Compressing videos from a smartphone

  21 September 2019, by fejesjoco

  I have a Nexus 6p with the stock camera. It’s set to record at 1080p, 30fps. Here’s a 5 second sample (11 MB).

  Videos from this phone come out at about 17 Mbps on average. I tried to compress it with ffmpeg with -c:v libx264 -crf 23 -preset veryslow, the result comes out at about 5.5 MB, which is about 9 Mbps.

  I think this bitrate is a bit too much. When I look at torrent file listings, I can see high quality videos at 3 GB in size on average, and if such a movie is 90 minutes long on average, that is about 4-5 Mbps which sounds okay.

  I’m wondering, why the big difference? I can notice that my video is noisy/grainy (which is expected from a phone), and that might reduce compressibility. I tried a few ffmpeg filters, like hqdn3d and atadenoise, but the noise mostly remained (maybe I didn’t play with it enough). Then I figured, the video is also shaky (which is also expected), and that might reduce compressibility too (and even makes temporal noise filtering less effective). I tried to stabilize it with the deshake filter, but that didn’t help either.

  I know I could just limit the bandwidth to whatever I like, but there must be a reason why ffmpeg thinks it needs a high bandwidth to maintain a certain quality, and a lower bandwidth would just decrease the quality.

  Why do these videos have such a high bitrate? What’s the best way to compress them more while keeping or even increasing their quality?