Video Formats

[andyf]

I have written a few walking books and articles and now want to start publishing (selling!) my walks by way of video slideshows. I am completely new to video though. I have Proshow producer on which I have been producing my slideshows. I want the slideshows to be downloadable and then playable on tv, iphones (and other smartphones), ipads, pcs and any other mobile devices.

The trouble is, there are pre defined settings for all these in proshow producer (eg iphone 3, iphone 4, ipad etc) but if I was to produce a video file for each device (varying output size it is giving me varies from approx 100Mb to around 700Mb for ipad version) I would have 20 plus different videos available just for each walk - giving me a massive file storage problem.

Therefore is there (say) maybe one, two or three general format types that I could use that would work on all devices? I can get outputs in the form of avi or mpeg4 (say) but then there are various options for these (avc, sp, bit rates etc) - all very confusing to me! Is there a sort of default format and setting?

Ideally I would like to have (say) a maximum of 3 files for each walk, but that then anyone with any device would then be able to get one of these 3 files to work on their device.

Any help / advice would be much appreciated.

Thanks

[DB83]

You may be asking the immpossible there.

Just as an example, I looked at the Blackberry. Their documentation lists some 20+ different phones and each of these support different video formats.

MP4 appears to be common to most but MP4 is not a video format. It is a container for a video codec and an audio codec.

Apple, AFAIK, also use MP4 but with a different codec structure.

You will also have issues with video sizes. A video created for a small screen device will look like sh*t on a tablet.

The approach I would suggest is to offer one video, in a good quality and large frame size, and point your customer to free software - look at this site for conversion programs - to convert that to their particular phone. They would have the specs for that.

[edDV]

The approach I would suggest is to offer one video, in a good quality and large frame size, and point your customer to free software - look at this site for conversion programs - to convert that to their particular phone. They would have the specs for that.

I agree. For the "high quality format", I'd suggest a 60p, 1920x1080 or 1280x720 resolution h.264 in Blu-Ray format. That will immediately be acceptable to the majority of conversion software.

You might also author a 50p version for the "PAL" video markets. You may need to offer both 16:9 (for TV) and 4:3 (for phones/players) aspect ratios.

You might also offer conversions acceptable to popular players such as iPad and/or Kindle.

An iPad format file (1024x768, 30p, AVC/AAC*) will also play in most media players.


* per Apple, "H.264, 30 frames per second, High Profile level 4.1 with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps, 48kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4, and .mov file formats". An mp4 container would be most universal for other players.

[Computer Nerd Kev]

The approach I would suggest is to offer one video, in a good quality and large frame size, and point your customer to free software - look at this site for conversion programs - to convert that to their particular phone. They would have the specs for that.

Boy I'm glad I don't have to put up with Apple rubbish myself, this seems to be another case of a company with money to burn somehow allowing a completely ridiculous flaw to exist with their products.

Although it would still make me cringe personally, a better solution than asking people to convert the video may be to ask them to use this (iTunes link) version of VLC for Apple devices including the iPhone and iPad. This should let you get away with just one video file although I'd recomend one in high resolution for the iPad and one in lower resolution for the smaller devices for which high resolutions would be a stupid waste.

I don't have iTunes to check if that link is still valid (not sure if Apple would actually be mean/stupid enough to take it down), but hopefully it is. Here is the review which informed me about this software in case it says more than iTunes does.