Roland Tanglao's Weblog

In a completely unscientific test, I took this original MPEG-4 video from a Drupal 5 screencast I made using Snapz Pro X and then uploaded it to blip.tv, Google Video, YouTube and Brightcove Consumer.

In the original MPEG-4 you can clearly make out the text. Only Brightcove's transcoded flash video has legible text. In the others, the text is very blurry and almost unreadable. I don't know anything about transcoding but could the fact that Brightcove transcodes to a slightly bigger size explain the fact that its text is not as blurry as the others?

Does this mean I'll switch to Brightcove Consumer for all my video? No! Why? Because I need the Creative Commons licensing and original file options that blip.tv gives me. And if anybody can improve their transcoding, blip.tv can!

See for yourself after the jump if you don't believe me!

blip.tv:

Click To Play

Google Video:

YouTube:

Brightcove Consumer:

UPDATE:It looks like blip.tv took the FLV that the Brightcove Publishpod encoded out of my MP4 (if the video below doesn't work, go to my blip.tv post to play it!):

Click To Play

The first video I did with my N93 was a 5 minute one of the SkyTrain (of course!). It's an awesome video but its 100MB (since I did it at 640x480 30fps MPEG4). I tried to upload it to Brightcove (since I know it won't work on blip.tv, my fav service; file is too big) but it didn't work. The Brightcove Mac OS X uploader, Brightcove Publishpod, successfully encoded the MP4 to flash video aka FLV but the sites says it's processing (and it's been saying that for 24 hours!).

I guess I'll try Google Video. I did search the Brightcove knowledge base and FAQs but found no documentation for video file upload limits or that MPEG4 (and yes I know there are many variants of MPEG4 and perhaps Nokia's is not supported) was not supported. Ah well early days. Brightcove sounds great (Robin Good's Brightcove review makes it sound wonderful) but I couldn't get it to work.