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Windows Media is still a poor video compression format

I was looking at some press release video today that was encoded with Windows Media and it's still pretty horrible compared to the alternatives. It does talking heads really, really well, but when it comes to video with a lot of motion, it's really horrible until you get into high bit rates.

For example, I recently compressed a few video clips for a client with high motion in QuickTime with Sorenson Pro (the codec generally used for movie trailers) and WM. I was able to get total bit rate with stereo audio at 320x240x30fps to around 120k with only a few minor compression artifacts. To get the same level of quality on WM I had to get the bit rate up to around 400k. What's up with that?

The funny thing is, Sorenson Pro 3 has been out now for at least three years.
Posted: Apr 15 2005, 10:25 AM by Jeff | with 7 comment(s)
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Comments

foobar said:

Index the QT file so that it's streamable. I think you'll be somewhat surprised as to how large the QT file gets.
# April 15, 2005 11:49 AM

Roy @ VsDevCentral said:

To start off with, I am impressed with the quality of QT videos. However, getting a very good quality video, in a small size, with Windows Media is possible if done correctly. Try either using Windows Medai encoder directly, or use Vegas Video (that is what I use for editing). Usually I will use Vegas to create a DV file, and then Windows Media encoder to create the WMV (but I have done it all in Vegas as well).
# April 15, 2005 12:42 PM

Jeff said:

I've tried every compression tool (Cleaner, Squeeze, etc.) and played with different settings endlessly, and for the same bit rate, you can't even get close to the same quality with WM. There's no contest.

And QT already streams just fine via HTTP... yet another thing going for it.
# April 15, 2005 12:54 PM

foobar said:

> And QT already streams just fine via HTTP... yet another thing going for it.

If you haven't set up a QT streaming server (Darwin, etc) then you're not streaming... You're downloading the file...
# April 15, 2005 12:59 PM

Jeff said:

And if it's embedded in a page, the user doesn't know the difference. Who cares?
# April 15, 2005 1:12 PM

foobar said:

Then what was the point of your comment? WM also downloads fine over HTTP. So does Real, mpegs, etc...

There are also bandwidth considerations when not using a streaming server, but I'll let you figure that out yourself...
# April 15, 2005 3:29 PM

Jeff said:

The point is still that the quality blows. Which part of that wasn't clear?
# April 15, 2005 7:25 PM
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