How can BotR convert my videos to FLV and get a high quality and efficient result when videos can be so different ?
I mean, a video of a sleeping turtle will probably need an entire different set of settings than a fast pace all-over-the-court basketball game.
Can BotR choose the most efficient settings for uploaded videos ?
Both codecs used (H264 and VP6) have a two-pass variable bitrate setting. In the first pass, the video is analyzed (saturation, motion, cuts) and in the second one the appropriate bitrate is used. Fast-paced parts will have higher bitrates than slower ones. This tech is part of the codecs themselves, not something we implemented.
Overall it works nice, but it’s of course not perfect. Doing some manual tests and tweaking conversion settings for specific videos might result in a better bitrate-quality tradeoff. Unfortunately, that is a lot of work and it requires specific knowledge of videoformats. We have a set of testvideos (slow ones, fast cuts, flat lines etc) we use to tweak the various conversions so the best average result is achieved.
I will add to that BotR does do well converting videos as a beta tester ive uploaded videos on youtube, botR, and a few other services and found BortR's one of the best quality wise - also i will add that ive uploaded videos shot by myself andf got the same quality as in the orginal file after conversion by BotR
Jeroen, when I mentioned settings I didn't mean the bitrate. I meant for example frame rate and master frame frequency.
If I currently use sorenson squeeze, should I keep doing so and just use BotR as host.
Or am I missing something ?
when will this site be up and running? it sounds great!
Sweeto!
Saw the sample video. Works great. Waiting to test when its live.
As you might have seen, we released last week: www.bitsontherun.com.
Creating an account is completely free, so fire ahead!
Nice! that site rocks. is there a limit on the size of videos or the number of videos free users can upload?
You can up/download a maximum of 1GB per month (100 5-min. streams?). There’s no functional restrictions to the system.
Will the 1 GB limit ever be increased do you think?
Perhaps, but we don’t strive to be a Blip.tv / YouTube clone. Bits is a service for integrating video into professional sites, and we do charge for that.
The pricing seems to be very expensive to me. I mean a "professional" video site will surely stream more than 10TB (> 2500). If I set up a 100mbit-box with lighttpd and ffmpeg to do conversion and stuff by myself, I would pay not even the half of it. However, wish you good luck with these project - looks indeed very professional! And please keep up the other good work ;-)
Thanks!
And note that for sites >1TB/month we indeed have lower prices. We’ll contact them if they get >1TB or sites can contact us (bitsontherun.com/contact).
