Perception & H.264

"What does all of this mean?"

Unless you've been living under a rock you'd realize that the Perception community is a huge bunch of quality whores that will take extra measures to get the best looking footage within reach; even if their own friends don't even notice. Well with that being said spending bundles of money in addition to time shooting as well as editing it almost seems like it defeats the purpose when you upload your video to a site and the quality gets downgraded to cellphone quality immediately.

Well this is where H.264 comes in, to make a long story short H.264 is a video codec released in the last few years that has revolutionized the quality of internet video delivery; however, all of the major video sites still broadcast their content in downgraded flash videos. Late last year Adobe Labs helped bridge the gap for online delivery of H.264 videos by allowing native playback within a flash movie.

Has your attention defecit kicked in yet or are you still interested? Well if you are you should be stoked Perception will now allow you to upload your own H.264 videos to deliver to the world without having to worry about a flash conversion downgrading the quality. Sometimes this concept is confusing to most since you're still watching your movie within what appears to be a typical flash player and not a quicktime window just due to differences of controls at the bottom. We can assure now that you see the wonderful H.264 banner above a clip then it had met the criteria and will be played within it's native High Quality form (or however you uploaded it).

"How come the clip won't play for me?"

Simple answer, you're just lacking the proper flash update. It wasn't released till late 2007 so it's still not common for most viewers to have it installed. Go to the Adobe Download site to get on board.

"Why does the clip have to load 100% before it plays?"

When a clip is compressed there are quicktime settings to enable it to fast start or let it load all the way before playing. Well those settings apply over when opened in a flash player. The original uploader must have their settings set to fast start for fast playback

"I uploaded a clip, why doesn't it play in H.264?"

Remember that we are not compressing videos to H.264, we're just simply logging the ones that are uploaded with H.264 video and AAC audio and give them automatic selection to be viewed as HQ clips. If you want a clip displayed to this standard you'll have to make sure you use certain settings when you compress your video on your computer before uploading to Perception

"How do I compress my clip to be played with the H.264 standard on Perception? "

Depending on which program you use to compress your video the steps might be a little different but the standards are the same. You can compress to H.264 and AAC no matter if you're on OS X or Windows. Granted resolutions and bitrates can vary, you just have to make sure you use H.264 for video and AAC for your audio codecs as well as prepare for internet streaming (i.e. fast start).

To the right is a screen shot of the particular settings that I use, 640x320 is a good size for the format I personally shoot but yours may vary. I have 700kb/s as my bitrate which I find yields a very high quality video in this codec as where it didn't before. Remember the file size limit is still 48mb so you won't get a successful upload on any file larger.

If you're still running into problems there's a thread on the forums regarding H.264 delivery if you still have questions.