[PLUG] Q: comparison of video formats

[Kevin Theobald]

I'm having difficulty finding the answers to my questions via the
standard channels.  Most of my Google searches give me sales
websites.  There isn't much on the PLUG archives, except for some
discussion of MPlayer about 6 months ago.

So what I'm trying to do is offload the contents of several DV tapes,
and make a combined video of probably about 45 minutes to an hour,
which would go on a CD-ROM to be copied and distributed to a few dozen
people.  There might be other material on the same CD (e.g., JPEGs
from still pictures, and text).

So what I'm trying to decide is the format I should use.

The DV camera uses IEEE 1394 ("Firewire"), so I was kind of limited on
choice of machines.  My lab has a Windows box with an IEEE 1394 port,
so I just plugged in the camera to see what would happen.  The PC
brought up Microsoft Windows Media Maker, and I was able to download
the movies.  The tool also looks fairly capable.  The biggest downside
is it only produces the proprietary Microsoft WMV format.

Then I installed a CD that came with the DV camera, with its own
tools.  Then I had the choice of producing either AVI or MPEG-1
files.  One annoying problem was that it saves the files in raw DV
format, which is about 25Mb/s, and once the file reaches 4GiB, Windows
(XP) thinks there's no more space, and the program stops downloading
and starts converting what it's got, the result being that my movie is
broken into 19-minute chunks.  Presumably I could merge them back once
they are converted into MPEGs.

So I produced both MPEG-1 and WMV files.  These were fairly low
quality settings.  Both had tons of Moire patterns, jaggies and other
artifacts, but I couldn't see a significant difference between them.
The WMV audio was noticeably worse -- crowd noises seemed to have
strange resonances which I associate with low-bitrate MP3s; maybe some
fiddling with quality settings could fix this.  But what is
significant is that the WMV file was about 20 times smaller!  A 12
minute clip was 9MB in WMV and around 200MB in MPEG-1.

I wouldn't even think about using WMV, as some of the intended
recipients are non-MS users (Linux, Mac or otherwise).  But then I
heard that MPlayer can play WMVs as well.

So my questions are:

1. Does anyone else have experience with WMVs as compared to other
video compression formats?  Is WMV really that much better (in terms
of compression ratio)?  Or am I missing something?  (Perhaps the
Windows Media Player converts the MPEG-1 into WMV before passing it to
the WMV render engine, so they look the same to me, but a native
MPEG-1 decoder would look better?)

2. Are there patent issues with WMV?  Would the Gnuistically-correct
thing to do be to avoid it altogether?

3. If I go with the WMV (for the better compression), how badly am I
screwing my non-MS friends?  Should I just tell them to get MPlayer?
(I've heard differing opinions on how hard it is to get running,
though it seems to have improved.)  Is WMV supported on Macs (or do
they play the same game and just support Quicktime)?

4. Does anyone have experience with Moviex?  I found a website that
mentioned this -- it is MPlayer combined with a minimal Linux setup
that you can use to make a bootable CD-ROM for about 8MB.  (Then
again, people are less likely to bother watching the video if they
need to reboot.)

5. If I stick with MPEG-1, is there a way to make a VCD with "extra
content" (the JPEGs and text files) so that someone can pop it into a
DVD player that understands VCDs, and see the video, but if they pop
it into a computer, they can access the other stuff?

Thanks for your help.

Kevin

(BTW, I'm new to the group -- I went to my first meeting last month.
I'll be speaking on LaTeX when there's a free spot.)