ultra high video compression ..

[BJ_M]

A final step is to break out Bink or Smacker, part of the great RAD Video Tools suite produced by RAD Game Tools (www.radgametools.com). This is completely free to download, but comes with the caveat that their logo is displayed at the end of every movie. Even for professional videos, I find this is a small price to pay. You can also buy and no logo ..

Those of you who are game fans may have noticed that many of the Half-Life 2 demo videos were recorded using these tools - the codec produces amazing quality for both static windows and FMV.

I won't delve into the settings here a great deal, except to say that there are two options here - 256-colour mode (Smacker), and Hi-colour mode (Bink). The colour reducer here leaves everything else I've seen for dead, and I normally go with Smacker for the lower file size. A decent bitrate for this at 800x600 is about 300,000 bytes per second.

The benefits of encoding to Bink/Smacker:

* Great quality, especially if reducing to 256 colours * Very low system requirements for the user - uses ~2% of CPU * PHENOMENAL compression ratios * Can save out movies as .exe files, with the codec built in

Just to give you an indication of what I mean by phenomenal compression ratios - a average compression ratio is about 1000:1, and I've had up to 3000:1 on occasion. This means that 2Gb of video data compresses quite nicely down to a single 700kb-2Mb file, and I can't tell the difference between the original and the encoded file!

This is a far cry better than all of the messing around I've done with QuickTime, WMV, RealPlayer or DivX. Sadly I've never had the chance to mess around with the TechSmith Capture Codec... but it's hard to improve on this when it's free

At this point, we have a single .exe video ready to go, which will automatically play the movie and accompanying sound, and requires absolutely nothing installed on the client's machine. Given that it's encoded in 256 colours (or hi color) at 800x600, it also means that it will play on almost any Windows computer out there!

[yoda313]

Hello,

Huh?????

256 color????

Might as well be black and white :P :P

Kevin

[BJ_M]

depends on the content -- how many colors do you think you get on most cable anyway - or vhs ?

[BJ_M]

plus there is both 256 and hicolor .. options , read above ..

[tedkunich]

depends on the content -- how many colors do you think you get on most cable anyway - or vhs ?

No comparison - color information in cable/broadcast and VHS recordings are analog and really have no corrillary with 256, 16K, 24K color. The latter are purely digital domain catagories.

T

[BJ_M]

almost all cable today is compressed and/or sent in a digital domain at some point in its transmission path --

so there is a VERY direct connection --

you can have an analog connection with your cable - but i hate to tell you it is still compressed digital ..
And in many cases - not much more or equal to 256 colors ..

[celtic_druid]

Well MPEG1/2/4 is stored as 12bit YV12 so you really aren't saving that much. You aren't seriously suggesting using this for movies, etc. are you?

[BJ_M]

no - of course not , it would be for distributed content on cd's like corporate presentations or learning disks ..

also - some mpeg2 profiles can be better than 12bit

YV12 (not that that it matters here)

some good info btw

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnwmt/html/YUVFormats.asp