What's the best site for delivering streaming movies?

Until recently, I would have said vimeo.com but now I'm not so sure. They have recently changed their policy for movies less than high definition (HD). Anything less than HD at 1280x720 will be resized down to 504x284.

504x284 is acceptable for embedding in a blog, but if you expand it to full screen the quality is poor. Currently, my personal preference for a good movie resolution that can be stretched to full screen and still be very watchable is 720x404. However, if I upload that to Vimeo it will be cut down to 504x284.

The big advantage of Vimeo is that when converting your movie to Flash Video (flv) it does so at a high framerate. A word of caution however – it only converts HD video to 24fps so if your original is at 25fps it will simply chop out 1 frame every second leading to a very annoying stutter when there is a lot of movement. Standard definition movies will be transcoded at up to 30fps.

So what about blip.tv? The good thing about Blip is that the resolution is unchanged. However, the major drawback of Blip is that all framerates are transcoded to 15fps. If your movie involves a lot of movement, then this is a major disadvantage.

Blip does, however, allow the original movie file to be streamed. This is by far the only way to ensure your viewer sees streaming exactly what you had intended. The problem with this is that most of these movies are too large to stream, and I suspect that what happens is the file is downloaded first to your computer before playing. That means there is a very long delay before the viewer can press play, by which point they will have clicked on somewhere else.

I have carried out tests on Vimeo and Blip. I also used Youtube just as a comparison.

For this, I was going to need an HD test track, so I fired up IL2 with a very simple mission, flew it and recorded the track. Then I set the game resolution to 1280x768 and frapped the track at 24fps. I dropped this into Sony Vegas and rendered at 1280x720 (cropping a little off the top and bottom) with HuffyUV.

No post-processing was carried out. This is pure IL2 with some mods to enhance sound and clouds.

I was very impressed with Vimeo streaming my HD version rendered at 1280x720,24fps,3000kbps:
http://www.vimeo.com/1396396

I rendered an SD version at 640x360, 24fps, 1500kbps and here Vimeo reduced the size to 504x284 which is too small to view full screen:
http://www.vimeo.com/1396472

There is a trick to keep the quality of the 640x360 if you do not have an HD version of your movie. Resize your movie to 1280x720 before uploading it. Vimeo then displays it as HD and I found the quality quite acceptable:
http://www.vimeo.com/1396532

On Blip, the HD version was a similar quality, but the 15fps made the action not smooth:
http://blip.tv/file/1107813?filename=Russellboyd-IL2Mac...yTestHD720p24240.flv

Use that link and ˜select the format' to view the original avi but you will have to wait with a blank player for at least a minute before it shows up. This will show you the exact same quality as the original 3,000kbps movie.

The SD version on Blip maintained the 640x360 resolution, but again at 15fps:
http://blip.tv/file/1107821?filename=Russellboyd-IL2Mac...QualityTestSD753.flv

For comparison, here's the Youtube version. The default quality is 320x240 at 15fps, but if you click on ˜watch in high quality' you will get 480x360 at 24fps.
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=RvefUxgzbVk

As to the actual picture quality, here is a portion of a screen grab from all the above formats:


Conclusion?

You'll have to draw your own conclusions depending on what you want to do.

For me, the best way for viewers to see the quality I want them to see is to provide the movie as a download file.

If I have to stream then I would provide a link to the Vimeo HD version. I would like to hear feedback from anyone with limited download bandwidth, or with an older PC to see how well that works.

If I want to embed in a blog then I would also use the Vimeo HD code. However, the embedded version does not allow HD in full screen. The viewer has to click the player to go to the actual Vimeo site and view the movie there in HD.

If I have a movie of less than 1280x720 then I will enlarge it to that size and use Vimeo HD.

As is the nature of streaming sites, these guidelines are bound to change over the coming months!

PS, you can see how they all look embedded in a blog here:

http://eaf602.blogspot.com/

Personally I don't like streaming sites.If there is a new movie I will have a quick look if there is a youtube link or similar,then look for a D/L link ASAP.

Totally agree, Uther.

Not everyone is so keen to download, and also install Divx, so streaming still has it's place.

Some good news, I just got a great tip for blip! If you transcode the avi yourself then blip will play it as it is

I was able to use a free tool "Free FLV Converter" from http://www.koyotesoft.com/ and transcode at 24fps and 1500kbps. Blip accepted it no problem at all.

I'm not sure if the site can handle streaming at 1500kbps, I certainly had a couple of stutters on this although it may have been my connection or the server. Maybe the bitrate will need to be reduced.

http://blip.tv/file/1114333

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Joe-90,

JOE!

How did you get the choppy water like that?

BTW converting to FLV as I type!

BTW...I save the FLV in the 16:9 for mat, but it doesn't offer a wide screen pixel choice.

When I upload it to Blip, it smooshes it to TV 4:3

You get choppy water when you set the conditions in FMB to blind or worse.

You won't get squashed video in Free Video Converter if you set both SIZE and ASPECT to 'No Change'.

quote:

Originally posted by Joe-90:
You get choppy water when you set the conditions in FMB to blind or worse.

You won't get squashed video in Free Video Converter if you set both SIZE and ASPECT to 'No Change'.

Unfortunately, it is still 4:3. No idea why. Uploaded it several times to no avail.

http://lazarus-.blip.tv/#1125263 done with "No Changes"

Once you convert to flv, watch your flv clip locally to make sure it is right.

I still think you may have a mistake in your settings. This is what you should have:

quote:

Originally posted by Joe-90:
Once you convert to flv, watch your flv clip locally to make sure it is right.

I still think you may have a mistake in your settings. This is what you should have:

oooooh
My page interface didn't look anything like that! I will check again.

So....Has there ever been a general consensus to which site offers the best viewing in size and quality for our movies? It was also mentioned by Wolf, and I agree, the value of high traffic potential. My you tube gets about 75 hits a day, but I would still want the best viewing experience available on my website.

Lazarus,
Jury is still out for me, I just tried blip tv and I quite like it so I'll hang on there for a bit, but then I thought that about vimeo initially until they started this "art police" guff about what is machinima and what isn't.
I also closed my youtube account recently for a few reasons, one of them is sound problems, although the high res option is decent, sound is still totally awful.
A recent movie I made which I think you've seen on blip? I tried 3 different music levels and all failed, engine sounds etc always come in much louder and you cant hear the music so you crank the music up on another render in then the music comes in with a huge boom and weird echo effect and I just gave up, I dont remember it being that bad when it first started.
Where youtube still wins hands down is not only on hits but making contacts which of course can also be a hindrance. For example a sample of the last movie I did actually post I got 3 different people contact me in 2 days to tell me they knew who the pilot was, I've always been curious about him etc etc, I'm putting it on my avation blog etc etc and avaition geeks love talking about actual historical movies and most seem to be from the Czech republic.
Also what I found interesting was seeing in the links who had embedded the movie, one thing I made ended up on the site of the Afghanistan pilots assoc and you just follow the link into the forum and there's F-16 pilots discussing your movie mind you that was a Falcon4 video, but some of the IL-2 links led me to interesting historical WWII forums where I joined and went in and talked to them. I also met direwolf on youtube who directed me here after I'd enthused about Deadliest enemy which is still one of my all time fav movies, but anyway you certainly wont find that kind of contact level on other sites.
It all depends on yer priorities!

Yep, Horses for Courses.

My current POV:

Get it on Youtube for the reasons Wolf mentions.

If I have HD 720p then get it on Vimeo (it'll be creative and machinima related so the art police probably won't bother)

Otherwise, I'll put it on blip.tv but convert to flv myself to get a decent bitrate and 24fps.

Or I may artificially upsize my videos to 720p and put them on Vimeo.

Gamerztheate used to be a great place, but it seems to have dropped in popularity now. Gas hasn't been around for ages to keep us in touch

What we really need is a stress test of the options to see how they actually perform. Can blip actually deliver at 1500kbps or higher? What about viewers who are still on low bandwidth broadband? Some are still down at 512k, and there are still the old modem users out there. Youtube is great for them.

I'll hopefully have something that might get some stress testing in a week or two, and I'll be trying all the options when distributing to see what the punters go for.

I figured out my problem with the FLV conversion not working...I had the wrong flv software. I downloaded the correct one, convert some files, uploaded them to blip, and they are playing at a quality level that is larger and better than youtube. So, I've changed all the viewers on my website from YT to Blip and I'm going to hang out at blip. I think I'll still keep the YT going for the sake of exposure but Wolf is right, I noticed the sound was not only bad, but some of the audio was out of sync with the video! I'm not sure how that happens but it sure is aggravating. I played it back on Blip and I could hear all the deep tones, the bass was boomin' and the picture was much better than before.

So, thank you, Joe-90, for making me aware of the FLV converter. I was simply trying to convince myself that I was happy with YT. until something better comes along, I think I will, at least, be satisfied with Blip using the FLV converter.