I have a question regarding the loss of picture quality when I view my videos through the JW Player.
To demonstrate the problem I created a picture that compares how my video plays with 3 different players.
The link is found at: www.cpnc.org/test.jpg
1. The original video was created as an AVCHD file with a pixel aspect ratio of 1440 by 1080.
2. I used Handbrake to convert the video to an MP4 file with their (x264) video codec at a constant bit rate of 500k. I changed the aspect ratio to 960 by 540 (Anamorphic: None) in order to force the video to show up as 16:9 when I click the full screen button in the JW Player.
I also selected Web Optimized and Two Pass encoding with Turbo first pass.
3. When you look at the picture there is a slight quality loss when I go from Windows media player to the JW Desktop Player. When I view the video hosted on our Wowza Media server through the JW Player the quality becomes even less sharp. This is most noticeable when you look at the detail in the wooden pulpit.
Does anyone have some suggestions for what I may be doing wrong? Lastly, when I encoded the video at 1000K constant bit rate the difference in quality was minimal compared to the 500k.
There is a flashvar smoothing, which is true by default. Setting it to false may sharpen your video in the JW FLV Player.
Based upon a lot of testing that I did, it seems like Flash or the JW FLV Player, I'm not sure which, doesn't handle anamorphic H.264 video in the MP4 container. The JW FLV Player does correctly handle anamorphic video in the FLV container.
The big advantage of H.264 for Internet applications is the improved quality at lower bitrates, and for Flash-based players, lower CPU usage during decoding.
See Jeroen's post about the encoding profiles in this thread: http://www.longtailvideo.com/support/forum/Bug-Reports/14466/Incredibly-Inefficient-MP4-H-264-RTMP-S...
Achieving the best encoding is still a bit of a "black art" because it depends on the nature of your video (amount of motion, details like text, which must be sharp vs. scenic views which can be smoothed) and the playback components such as flash, the player, the CPU & graphics capability of the client, etc.
Anamorphic video will never be as good as full resolution video because basically, it's a way of "cheating" — delivering fewer pixels and stretching them to fill the same space as the full resolution video.
The three best sites for video encoding info & help are:
http://www.afterdawn.com/
http://forum.doom9.org/
http://www.videohelp.com/