Windows Media loses ground to Apple’s H.264, On2 Flash codec
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Feb 27, 2006 at 2:15pm
StreamingMedia.com says RealVideo offers the best video codec, followed by Apple’s H.264, Flash and Windows Media. What’s more, Windows Media is losing group to H.264 and On2Flash.
One of the key findings from StreamingMedia.com’s report was that the quality of the best Flash and H.264 codecs still trailed RealVideo, often by a significant margin. To research the reports, report author Jan Ozer, produced a six-minute test file composed of 38 scenes representing typical business, sports, and entertainment videos, along with several animations and still image pans and zooms. The reports analyzed video quality in up to five configurations—modem, 3GPP, 100 Kbps, 300 Kbps and 500 Kbps—and compared frame quality, temporal and color quality and playback smoothness. Buyers can download all videos and still image files used in the analysis, along with a convenient interface for viewing the video files and still images.
The Flash report found that On2’s VP6 codec was clearly superior to both Wildform and the Sorenson Spark codec, but that VP6 output quality varied widely between encoding tools. In the report, Ozer advises that producers can achieve optimal results with VP6 by customizing encoding parameters for video content and bit rate.
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Contributor
Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
