What is less demanding on PC? (Vimeo or playing native file?)

J

jonE5

Veteran
I am screening a film tonight for a class, and i have it in 3 forms. A 500 mb .mov, a 230 mb .mp4, and the mp4 uploaded to vimeo.

These arent beefy machines at the school, just dell mini towers. Connection speed is very fast.

Am i better off trying to play the .mp4 file off my flash drive, copying file to PC's hard drive, or just playing it off vimeo?

I tried playing the file on my work computer (which is also a dell mini tower), and it gets a little jerky at times.

jon!
 
.mov and .mp4 mean nothing, they are just containers.

The answer to this question lies entirely on what codec and bitrate was used.

In general, a local file will play better because stand-alone players like VLC are often more efficient than running flash inside your browser. The thing is, Vimeo compresses the video to a decent bitrate appropriate for streaming and uses the H.264 codec. A local .mp4 might have a bitrate too high for the local machine to handle.
 
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so I assume the .mov is the raw h.264 off the camera, then?

that's pretty high bitrate and CPU-intensive, so I wouldn't pick that one. I'm not sure what settings you used in streamclip- again, mp4 is just a container! You could have an mp4 at 46,080Kbps or encode down to a web streamable 600k or 1,000kbps- there's no way for anyone to tell how CPU intensive your files are from the information given.

But if those are the only choices you have available, I'd say your best bet is the mp4 (whatever format its in actually) with a good local player like VLC. Flash player or WMP might choke on it a bit, especially if you didn't optimize the stream for low CPU playback and it is an older machine.

Codecs and containers are important to know in this industry, I suggest you read up on them.
 
+1 for MP4 transferred to the internal HD. Quicktime X is lightweight which might help if they are low on RAM, VLC is good and light also.

h264 (probably what you have it in) is a processor intensive codec but small file size, so it's not great on slower PCs.
 
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