The Right Profile

I didn’t spend a lot of time analyzing the customizable parameters available for the new codecs, but some were obvious (like noise reduction) and some fairly opaque with technical definitions that don’t suggest usage scenarios. Hopefully, between upcoming application support and additional guidance from Microsoft, these parameters will be tied to specific types of footage and specific problems.

For now, however, you’re on your own. While I believe there is "gold in them thar hills" for Windows Media producers, you’ll have to find it and mine it all by yourself. To help get you started, in the online version of this article, you can download the batch file used in these tests. Between that and the documentation available on the CitizenInsomniac site, you should be able to get a running start.

Let’s summarize what we’ve already covered before going forward. The key points so far are as follows:You should definitely obtain the latest WMV codecs for production.

There is little qualitative reason for using the Advanced Profile unless you intend to customize your encoding parameters, whether you are video command-line encoding or changing the Windows Registry.

Customizing your encoding parameters can produce substantially higher quality, but there probably isn’t any one-size-fits-all script.

With this as background, let’s jump to the next topic, which is whether the improved quality produced by the command-line options changes the balance of power in the codec world.

Who’s Number One?
Some background before jumping in. In the original codec comparison I prepared for StreamingMedia.com, I tested five different categories, from 56Kbps postage-stamp video to 500Kbps 640x480 video. For this article, I duplicated those testing procedures, but only for the 500Kbps category, primarily to save time, but also because the 500Kbps category was both highly relevant and challenging from a compression perspective.

In my study, RealNetworks’ RealVideo rated the highest in all tested categories. However, in the survey I mentioned at the top of this article, I visited more than 40 sites, and found no RealVideo streams. This doesn’t mean that RealVideo isn’t out there, but the company has refocused on consumer sales, along with sales of servers, broadcast hosting, and content delivery. For example, in their last reported quarter (Q3, 2006), Real’s revenue from consumer products was $82 million compared to $11 million from technology products. Throw in the $761 million antitrust settlement received from Microsoft in October 2005 and Real appears to be doing quite well, thank you very much. But RealVideo is on very few short lists for codec selection. For this reason, I did not include RealVideo in this comparison, though I have little doubt that they would have won again.

Instead, I compared the Windows Media Video Advanced Profile file produced via Ben Waggoner’s batch file with a Flash file encoded with On2’s Flix Pro and an H.264 QuickTime file produced with Apple Compressor. I also included a legacy Windows Media Video file from the first survey for comparison purposes.

The test file contains categories for business, high motion, and entertainment. I rated each codec on a scale of 1 to 4 (1 being the best possible score, 4 being the worst) based upon four criteria: still-frame quality; color quality; temporal quality, which assessed motion-based artifacts; and smoothness, which essentially looked for dropped frames. In calculating the total ranking in each category, I gave full weight to still-image and temporal quality, and half weight to color and smoothness, reflecting my belief that viewers find still-frame and motion artifacts more noticeable and objectionable than dropped frames or color fading.