Blue Pacific have recently released Turbine Video Encoder 2, an easy to use Video Encorder. It makes it easy to convert videos to FLV/SWF and instantly publish it for viewing, complete with the html wrapper and the skin swf.
Besides just encoding videos, it comes pre-bundled with a bunch of click-apply visual effects, good collection of player skins and of course the ability to define properties to your player assets. Turbine Video Encoder 2 comes with the ability to add subtitles, captions to your videos and the ability to watermark a video.
Its Simple mode allows publishing a video in 2 easy steps - Encode > Publish while its Advanced mode allows tinkering with the different settings - video, audio, special effects, player, subtitles.
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Brajeshwar posted this article
on Tue, Feb 14th, 2006 at 8:34 pm
Categorized under Reviews, Technology
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I don’t get it, how can a company come out these days with their “new” video flash product without supporting the high quality VP6 of Flash8? Sparc is the past, VP6 is the future… too bad for a maybe otherwise good product. Hope they wake up.
That’s easy to say when the Company has a choice to do the best for its products. Unfortunately this is not the case since VP6 is a proprietary format owned and locked away by another company. Sparc is the past, but a good past, because it allowed anyone to build on top of its open standards. Unfortunately with VP6 Macromedia/Adobe opted to shutdown creativity and open standards.
Blue Pacific was forced to choose an open standard based on H.263 video that in my opinion isn’t very different from the proprietary format of On2.
It’s a shame that Macromedia/Adobe with On2 opted for closing this amazing technology which is Flash video… Ultimately it will hurt creativity and open standards.
Just a final question: why didn’t Macromedia/Adobe choose H.264 (as Apple did) instead of VP6? Do you think it was for the quality?
#1 QUALITY:
I can tell in a second without looking at the codec which video is encoded on Spark and which is encoded on On2-VP6 codec, same bandwidth consumption. The quality IS outstanding, and I cannot understand a company from a quality point of view how to settle for less
#2 PROPRIETARY ISSUE
Nobody is “forced” to use old H.263, you get what you pay for. Other companys do, obviously you want to earn money with your kind of product, this is legitimate, there are - surprise - other companies which do have the right to do the same for their part, earning money for their hard work and intellectual property. You have various options to license the VP6 in your products as a company that also in the future probably would like be competitive and earn money, like alot of big and small companies did, and still doing.
#3 H.264 vs. VP6/7
Why Adobe chose VP6 over H.264? You have to ask them, but I would have done the same, if you seriously look at all the licensing issues and several companies asking for royalties. There is so much confusion going on, with H.264 and the future is questionable, look at AT&T’s recent efforts to ask for additional royalties, threatening to sue companies, and yes, Apple, too! If the quality/bandwidth ratio of H.264 would rectify all these issues, but several reviews and benchmarks have shown that VP6 is even superior to those. So why make life complicated.
Since you agree nobody is forced to use H.263 then you also should agree that nobody should be forced to use VP6. You seem to imply the opposite in your first comment…
H.263′s quality is quite good for most applications - after all the world “survived” with it till recently when there was no VP6. With broadband becoming more and more common, this difference in compression should make less and less difference since quality can be comparable between the two codecs by increasing bandwidth when using the H.263 codec.
Sure there are issues with H.264 as there are issues with many open standards but I don’t think they are serious enough to kill it. In fact, my opinion is that sooner or later, Macromedia/Adobe will wake up and go back to the right track which is choose an open standard.
Technical-minded folks often forget that having the latest and greatest encoder is not everything for everybody. Most people are looking into other important things like interface ease of use, included features and price. For instance I believe anyone who spends 5 minutes with Flix and then with Turbine Video 2 will strongly favor the latter, which has a polished UI, while flix appears to have been designed somewhat “in a hurry”.
On2 appears to be milking their Flix acquisition by simply throwing in the codec: as I see it they’re wrapping an inferior desktop product with a (in practice) monopolistic encoder and trying to shove that into people as inevitable.
I guess Adobe-Macromedia is ultimately the responsible for choosing a proprietary video codec with the usual end-user consequences. Is this the same company that promoted the Flash format as an open format in the past. No way!
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