In Streaming.com's 2006 objective research piece - it clearly
states that VC-1 video sucks in comparison to Real video - and so
does H.264 and Flash video suck in comparison to Real video.
I've never understood that kind of argument. The video quality on
these codecs is pretty high, so who cares if Real can technically
be proved to be better. It would be like saying that nobody should
watch Blue-Ray or HD-DVD because it's not as good as D1.
I have been seeing/hearing the same kinds of the above arguements/
comments for about the past 10 years - on this site. I have no idea
what "pretty high" is when it comes to streaming video on the web.
How many artifacts are okay - to still call the quality "pretty
high"? How many blockies for videos being streamed are okay - to
still call the quality "pretty high"? How many "mosquitos" for videos
being streamed are okay - to still call the quality "pretty high"?
How small can a video being streamed have to be - to still be "pretty
high" quality. How much detail has to be lost from a video being
streamed - and still be "pretty high"?
Streamingmedia.com study compared Apple/Quicktime/H264 video with
Real's quality in five configurations: modem, 3GPP, 100 Kbps, 300
Kbps and 500 Kbps--and compared frame quality, temporal and color
quality, and playback smoothness. If you go and read the info from
Streamingmedia's site you notice that Apple's Quicktime experts -
themselves - prepared the videos for StreamingMedia's study.
Or is it all about some content producers live by the motto "see no
evil, hear no evil" and speak no evil. Well it looks like some
producers here are speaking "evil". Three cheeers.
- Harry Pasternak
Thousand Islands Institute
Canada's Independent Centre For
Housing Research & Education
