Archiving Recorded Regionals 2008

[artdutra04]

Having everything encoded using h.264 or MPEG-4 is definitely my preferred choice for all the match videos. I personally use h.264 now for all my edited video that makes its way online, because it's a superior and much more versatile codec than WMV.

Also, if anyone needs another mirror for the videos online, I have half a terabyte of storage space and five terabytes a month of bandwidth at my disposal.

Originally Posted by Tom Bottiglieri

MP4 is fine on our side. (In fact, it's much better. Hopefully when flash 9 is polished we can do away with FLV's)

It will take more resources for compression, though. We are battling an h264 encoding problem at the moment. Does anyone know a good way to compress this stuff in real time?

Just use a hardware h.264 encoder, like this:

http://www.elgato.com/elgato/na/main...oduct1.en.html

Originally Posted by notaPINKtruck

h.264 is really processor intensive both on the compression and playback ends, and it's definitely not designed for real-time encoding (at least by anybody other than DirecTV and the likes). I don't think you're going to get good performance unless you buy a specialized encoder card or have a REALLY high end system.

While I agree that the h.264 codec is intensive on the encoding side, it's not so much on the playback side. I can play movies encoded in h.264 at HDTV (720p) settings just fine on my two-year-old 1.4Ghz Celeron laptop with 1.25Gb RAM and an integrated graphics card. And since I doubt that the match video would be encoded at such a high resolution and bit-rate, any computer made in the five or so years should play h.264 video just fine.

And on the encoding front, it's a lot easier just to bring along a massive eSATA or Firewire external hard drive, and capture all your video as uncompressed DV. Then, chop up the video in a video editing program, and again export each match as uncompressed DV. Then when you have a huge playlist of videos, use a batch conversion program (SUPER Media Convertor works for this, and it's free) and just let it run overnight.

Also, if you just play the video using VLC Media Player, MPlayer, or Media Player Classic, it will play a lot faster and smoother than with Quicktime.