While prepping my cool drawing site for launch this month, I decided to do help videos. It's a quick series of 12 videos, running from 30 seconds to about a minute-and-a-half, for a total of under 13 minutes.

I used Cam Studio to do my screen captures, and captured them with the lossless video compressor/decompressor (codec) you can download with it. This codec is great for low-motion screen capture videos because it results in crisp, clear videos without the blurring, fuzzing, and other problems encountered when you use a lossy compression scheme.

The videos are a bit bigger than you might want to use directly online, but they're meant to be masters which you can then convert to Flash or a more common video codec for online use. They're also good for uploading to services like Google Video or Revver. Those services do their own heavy, lossy compression on the video, so the cleaner the source you give them to start with, the cleaner the final result.

A brief aside, before we continue... you may be asking "where's YouTube in all this?" Well, sadly, YouTube can't process videos made with this lossless codec. Google & Revver, on the other hand, have no problem with the codec.

So, back on track, a friend was raving about the clarity of Revver, so I decided to try uploading one of these videos to Revver and comparing the output to Google.

Revver's video was supposed to be sharper than Google's video. And it is, but for screen capture stuff like this, it's more jagged. Seems Google uses a smoothing algorithm to make their videos less jagged. The pro on this is the stuff looks more like it should, but the con is that it looks like the old "soft focus" photography style.

Compare for yourself.

Revver Video

Google Video

While Revver is definitely sharper, it's also a lot more jagged. BUT, this can be attributed in part to the nature of the video. This is a high-contrast video. In a lower contrast video, such as shooting video of a person indoors, it wouldn't be as much of a problem.

So, where video quality is concerned, it seems Google is going to be your better bet for screen-capture type videos with high contrast and low motion, while Revver is going to be better for higher motion, lower contrast videos.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 27th, 2006 at 6:40 pm and is filed under Techno Thoughts, Web Programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.