So I’ve been playing around with compression schemes this week after noticing how washed out the color was in 301 — in the original footage it’s vibrant and on Vimeo it’s almost monochrome in some sections.  After reading up a bit on how H264 handles color I ran some tests with our trailer:


Check that out. The bottom right is the original, the bottom left is the copy which is on Vimeo right now, the top right is a version of it compressed to 720p (instead of 1080p) and the top left is 720p at a higher bitrate. Going from 1080p to 720p at the same settings produced a video which a.) looks identical (and crappy) and b.) is actually a larger file size. That makes no sense.

Doesn’t matter though, as clearly the 720p at a higher bitrate (top left) is our winner for today. The files will be a bit bigger but they should stream exactly the same way on Vimeo. Now to try replacing 301 with that!

You run a nice video hosting service.  My favorite, by far.  I have but one, teensy tiny complaint:

FIX YOUR GOD DAMMED VIDEO UPLOAD SYSTEM.

I have stared at this progress bar 3 times already today.  Considering that it takes me a half hour to render an 11 minute episode, roughly 6 hours to convert it to H264, 45 minutes to upload it and another 45 minutes to convert before it’s ready to play, I spend a minimum of 8 hours just watching progress bars before every episode is live on the site.  IT WOULD BE NICE IF YOUR UPLOADER DIDN’T FAIL AT 100% COMPLETE EVERY TIME.

Also, it would be nice if you could prevent this from happening EVERY TIME I STAY UP ALL NIGHT TO GET AN EPISODE LIVE AS EARLY AS POSSIBLE.

Thanks,

Jed

P.S: 301 is on the way.

So, Episode 203 is finished and uploaded, but you may have a little trouble seeing it (or any of our content) at the moment as Vimeo ate the big one at some point this morning. Hopefully they’ll be back up before the end of the day, but until then just hold tight.