High-Definition Video on the Web

I remember the first time I saw video on a computer. It was 1993 and someone had a video file on a floppy disc. It was ugly and played at about 1 frame per second. But I was still amazed. Not long after that we could watch little mushy videos over the web. The compression tools have continued to improve to the point where you can now get pretty good quality video over the web.

We have been shooting a lot of video in High-Definition lately. It has to be compressed to play over the web, but the final quality is rather impressive. For an example, check out our HD sample.

YouTube Is Finally Catching Up

A few months ago we were lamenting the poor quality of YouTube videos. No matter how good they looked when we uploaded them, they turned to mush on YouTube. Since then, YouTube has improved their compression and now videos on their site look pretty good in "HQ" (high-quality) mode, and really good if you upload them in HD. In the default/standard mode, the videos look, well, not too bad.

Here's an example of a frame of SD video uploaded a year ago, and a similar frame uploaded recently (and played back in HQ mode).





You can really see the quality difference in this portion of the frame.




Video on the web has come a long way from the early days of small boxes that looked like mushy postage stamps. Streaming HD video over the web? Bring it on!