A shoot-out of some well known, maybe some not known, and respectably priced apps for consumers to encode video ready for the web .
First of all the developers of the respective apps were not involved in these tests and there is no relationship between myself and the developers other than the fact that I may have paid for the apps :(
I will be using a reference file example at 1280x720 resolution.
Now I am not going to get into the science , I am using my day to day machine and taking this from a point of view as ʻJoe Ordinaryʼ wanting to encode video for the web with a maximum budget of 100USD. The video will then play in FlowPlayer and I only have the extra requirement that it must stream also from my test server :)
The line up VideoMonkey - free: open source based on VisualHub code base Transcoder redux more info at http://videomonkey.org/
VisualHub ( RIP - this is no longer available for sale and it used as the reference baseline for the other apps to follow)
DV Kitchen - 79.95 USD http://dvcreators.net/dv-kitchen/
All software versions are up to date at time of writing (May 2009)
Test machine : Well mine of course and not the latest model - ʻhint hintʼMachine specs MBP 2.4 GHz Intel Penryn 4Gb RAM, I have enough disk and this spins at 5400rpm, Graphic chip GeForce8600 I should add that iTunes was playing in the background, Mail and Safari was open to give it a day-to-day usage situation. No time-machine backups were running during these tests.
To Kick off: I have a reference movie recorded in ScreenFlow but exported as a Lossless (uncompressed)1280x720 movie file (Apple Animation)
File Size : 547MB - (Duration Length 9:09 )
Audio is left in Stereo for all exported formats at 128kbs , although depending on the video content for your own sites you can get away with mono (podcast , video blogs), but to ensure the file encoding standard is high I will leave this at stereo.
Steps to follow in all encoding engines - create an H.264 encoded .MP4 file that is ready for progressive download and pseudo-
streaming from my web server and Flash Player - sounds easy!
Then letʼs us see how the apps stand up to a real-life test.
I will show all the encoding settings I have used and output via the QuickTime Inspector as we progress through the document.
However, VideoMonkey does not save this H264 file as a FastStart file for progessive download , I wonʼt bore you with details but you will see this movie download first before it even starts playing and we do not want that, do we?
We use the Air Application (yeah I know) QTIndexSwapper to get this fixed, which is super easy.
Contender 2: VisualHubWhilst no longer developed, supported and on sale the app is sill widely used by screen-casters who picked it up . You can call this our legacy application to baseline against.
in the image you can see that I am using a High Setting and no custom parameters in VisualHub just a plain old AppleTV export .
This completed the encoding job in 6 minutes also and gave a slightly smaller file size and reduced bitrate, in addition the H264 file is ready for progressive download
As a note: VideoMonkey gives a warmer tone on the mp4 file compared to VisualHub.
Time to encode as a MP4: 6 mins Size of File : 18.1MBNot bad for an old-timer
Contender 3: Stomp:From ShinyWhiteBox software you could pretty much call this the exporter that QuickTime did not include or forgot and it comes with a wide range of presets
I am using this one (H264)
However, I have to say I aborted this after a very long and excruciating 40 minutes as it failed to complete encoding using this very obvious preset.
I had to force quit Stomp and restarted Stomp again with the same reference file now using
Glad to say that this test did not crash or fail !
Time to encode as a MP4: 15 mins Size of File : 60MB
Quality of the export was pretty poor at screen switching and fast transition movement , if we increase the bit rate, we will see increased quality but we will get a larger file size too .
Re-Running the test and setting the bit rate in the export options to 756kbs gains a more acceptable output especially where it failed with transitions before
Time to encode as a MP4: 18 mins Size of File : 85MB
Contender 5: DV KitchenLast of all lets see DV-Kitchen from dv-creators.net in action
Beforehand, these guys know video very well and provide training on FInalCut, DV Kitchen was developed to fulfil a whole host of workflow issues in video from encoding to publishing . I am only going to concentrate on the encoding side and DV Kitchen makes use of the h.264 alternative X264encoder engine instead of QuickTime h.264.
Time to encode as a .MOV : 13 mins I renamed the file extension to MP4 for the web server streamingSize of File : 31MB
