H.264 Tastes Like Chicken

H.264 is a codec used to shrink down high resolution video for storing, viewing or delivery. Think of the codec as the cookbook and H.264 as the chicken section. In a cookbook, there are many ways to prepare chicken. You can fry it, bake it, broil it, make soup from it, the list goes on. The same is true for video. Once you prepare it, you can burn it on a DVD, broadcast it, stream it on the internet, make quicktime movies for iPods etc. You take the same ingredient (chicken or video) and cook it into something that can be consumed in different meals or in the case of video, different media applications.

H.264 is a cooked (finished) format like fried chicken is cooked from raw chicken. The fried chicken is finished and ready for consumption. You might be able to watch uncompressed video on the web if you have huge bandwidth and time on your hands just like you can eat raw chicken if you want to, but there are better options.
… Continue Reading

Video Compression Webinar March 16th

Marcelo Lewin over at NewMediaWebinars is offering a free video encoding webinar on March 16th.

In this webinar, Andy Beach will walk us through some fundamentals of video compression, then show us how to apply them in some of today’s most popular applications including Telestream’s Episode Pro among others. Those new to compression will gain knowledge as well as old hands looking for new “recipes”, processes and workflows to improve how they do their job.

… Continue Reading