What codec works best for web?

I'd say H.264 is the best looking codec. It takes some time to encode but it gets you a very nice looking piece of video for the web.
 
allahkaram said:
What codec can be used to preserve the quality to at least somewhat extent.
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Hi,

Web comes to a lot of folks in a lot streams of different flavors and tastes. It's balancing act. Some like it thin and fast, some like it rich and colorful. If content is rich, you might want Flash or H.264, but if you want if fast and thin and ubiquitous you might go for Windows Media or MPEG1.
 
I encode everything in H.246 for my site only because I have spent the most time with it and I am very happy with my file size to quality ratio. The QT player also integrates well with my site. WMV 9 is a strong codec and can no doubt be used just as effectively but I do not feel like currently investing the time to learn it as I have QT.
 
24fps4ever said:
thats pretty good stuff there, does it end up being h264 though?
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It is... sorry I didn't mention that.

The size and quality I use ends up being about 6 megs a minute.

HOWEVER... I used to make the size much smaller and then scale it in iWeb... the h.264 codec is amazing at 2x or even 2.5x scale. So you can get it down to 3 or even less and still maintain a good size viewing.

CaptM
 
For best I use H.264, for quick and dirty I use MPEG 4 as it encodes very fast but maintains decent quality for the file sizes.
 
The Flash 8 encoder looks OK if you tweak it, and it's installed on more computers than any other codec. The good news is that Flash 9 supports h.264, so that will probably be the codec of choice in the near future...love that h.264!

It's important to tweak in any case: crush the blacks when appropriate, use the minimum frame rate that still moves OK, adjust the sound for the minimum
acceptable data rate, etc.

les
 
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