Video killed the in-house newspaper

If you are not using online video as part of your internal communications mix then you are probably missing out. It has become so much easier to stream video on corporate intranets and it needn’t cost the earth to produce either.

But start to look at streaming video and the myriad of different formats and jargon can bamboozle you. So what do they all mean and what should you choose? And do your end users have the right Codec?

Codec stands for coder/decoder and is the software that enables your media player to understand the various formats used for streaming video.

If you try to view a video and don’t have the required Codec the video will either not play or you will be prompted to download it. This is why it is important to run compatibility tests with your IT department before releasing your streaming video masterpiece on the world – only to find that no one can view it.

Let’s start by taking a look at the most popular formats available and their pros and cons.

Windows Media
This is probably the most common format for people using PCs. You can virtually guarantee that most PC users will have a copy of the requisite Windows Media Player installed on their machine. But unfortunately it isn’t that easy. There are various versions of Windows Media files (.WMV) and they are not all compatible.

Corporate intranets are notorious for not keeping their software up to date so the chances of your employees having the latest version are slim. If you are counting by the way the latest version is nine. WM9 gives an approximately 20 to 50 per cent improvement in quality compared with Windows Media Video 8.

QuickTime
Generally found on Apple Macintosh machines QuickTime is a good format, but the QuickTime player isn’t usually found by default on PCs. This makes it a difficult choice for corporate environments. But don’t despair, the Macintosh and OS X are an excellent environment for creating and editing videos, thanks to the bundled iMovie in the iLife suite of software. Upgrade your copy of QuickTime to QuickTime Pro (it only costs £20 to upgrade) and you can convert your QuickTime videos to many other formats including MP 4 and Windows Media.

MP4/MPEG- 4
You may be familiar with the ubiquitous MP3, as used for compressed music files, but MP4 or MPEG 4 is fast becoming one of the video standards that you can’t afford to ignore. Technically, MP4 is a “container”. That is, it is a standard format that can contain videos that have been encoded in a number of different ways using different Codecs such as H.264, XviD, Div X and others.

I like MP4 and not without good reason. The quality is superb and the file sizes are quite small. H.264 offers fantastic quality with none of the awful squiggly artefacts you used to get with low bit-rate Windows Media files.

Now this is where it gets confusing. H.264 is a video format, but it can be contained within an MP4 file. QuickTime also uses the H.264 standard, so when you talk about wanting your videos in the H.264 standard you also have to say what format you want it in – Quicktime, MP4 or Flash. Which leads me to….

Adobe Flash
Adobe Flash has come a long way since it was first introduced by Macromedia. It certainly offers a great way to view video as you can build the Flash player right into the web page, complete with fast forward, rewind and stop buttons. You can also include a volume control.

But once again it can get sticky. The latest version of Flash is version 9 and if you encode your videos to the Flash 9 standard people using Flash 8 or earlier won’t be able to view them properly. This means it is important to find out what version of the Flash plug-in people actually have.

Flash is rather like MP4 in that it is a “container” – you can embed videos encoded to the H.264, MPEG 4 or Windows media or other formats.

Flash is probably the most end-user friendly of all the formats and is the one you see most often on the net. You can always tell if a video is Flash-based – when it is playing just right-click over the image and it will tell you if it is a Flash file.

Conclusion
There are other video formats out there, including Real Media as beloved by the BBC, but for corporate use I think Windows Media and Flash are the way to go. As always, talk to your corporate techies before deciding on anything.

posted by Steve Nichols @ 10:54 AM Comments: 0