[plug] screen capture/recording software

[Jason Nicholls]

Hey Arjen,

Thanks for the pointers but in my quest to get decent streaming video and
post-encoded video for the PLUG AV team I've done my fair share of testing
and haven't been able to come close to the x264 encoder for size and
quality. I'm happy to be proven wrong though!

To put this in perspective our live stream video is encoded with theora,
decent bitrate so it'll work for ADSL1 and up connections, full resolution,
half framerate, good quality video, and excellent audio. However, our
post-encoded mp4 files are about half the size (bitrate), full framerate,
and superior quality.

Don't take this as resistance to open formats or theora/vorbis cause it
does work and perhaps at the time theora came out it was competitive but
it's not now. We use a fully open source software stack to produce the PLUG
videos, which includes the GPL x264 encoder (using ffmpeg). The theora
codec and also WebM both suffer from being single threaded too which is a
limitation on modern hardware as with x264 we can do approx x3 realtime
encoding on a quad-core i7 mobile CPU. After a PLUG event finishes we can
encode and upload to youtube before we even leave the venue, while packing
up the other equipment.


Jason


On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 2:05 PM, Arjen Lentz <arjen at lentz.com.au> wrote:

> Hi Jason
>
> > My "unfortunately" comment was with respect to quality and filesize of
> > ogg vs mp4 rather than a statement on anything else.
>
> As I understand, there are difference ways and gradations for compression
> of Ogg Theora streams, and similar for transcoding to a lower res or other
> lossy process to get to the size you need for a particular purpose.  (Ogg
> is just the container format, it does not encode either audio or video
> itself).
>
> See these links for info, links and tools for this:
>  http://v2v.cc/~j/ffmpeg2theora/examples.html (ffmpeg2theora)
>  http://free-electrons.com/community/videos/mini-howto/
>
> Ogg formats (both audio and video) were specifically designed to have good
> quality at low bitrates, so I'm pretty sure you can produce a satisfactory
> result with the appropriate postprocessing.
> Once you are happy with the parameters, that process can be
> scripted/automated for future recordings.
>
>
> Cheers,
> Arjen.
> --
> Exec.Director @ Open Query (http://openquery.com) MySQL services
> Sane business strategy explorations at http://upstarta.com.au
> Personal blog at http://lentz.com.au/blog/
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>



-- 
Jason Nicholls
jason at mindsocket.com.au
0430 314 857
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