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I'm looking to generate web videos from movies taken with my digital camera. What formats should I generate, and at what resolution and bitrate to ensure playback on mobile and desktop devices?

Here's what I was thinking:

Input format: AVI, MOV

Output format: webm, ogv, mp4 Output resolutions: 1080p, 720p, 320p

ensnare
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2 Answers2

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Not really a programming question but I will answer it anyways:

WebM can be ditched completely. Very few devices support it. mp4 is the most common format that all devices support. Low end phones support 3gpp format instead [cousin of mp4]. If you have it you should be fine for 90% of the devices.

mp4 with h.264/aac is the most common and for devices that don't support those mpeg4 with mp3 will suffice.

How many devices do you have are 1080p resolution. Better to ditch the 1080p and get one SD resolution 480p in there.

Bitrates depend on the encoding profile and content. Just ensure do two pass encoding using ffmpeg and libx264 to get the best quality.

av501
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Most mobile devices can display "HD" content fairly well, these days. However, if you're looking to save on bandwidth on peoples data plans, a good resolution would probably be 852x480.

now, depending on if you need near lossless quality, or if you can accept minor artifacts in your video will determine your bitrate. for 1080p and x264, you can get near lossless with about 15mbps, but you could have watchable video with 10-11mbps. im not sure how well the other codecs compare, so you may have to try a couple test runs with a short video.

if you do 720p, you can most certainly get away with 4-6mbps.

with 852x480, you may be successful with as low as 1.5-2mbps.

480x320, or maybe even 320x240 may be a good option, if you suspect people will be watching this on lower end devices or on really slow connection, or very limited bandwidth. you could probably get away with 500kbps for 320x240, and 1mbps for 480x320.

these are all starting points, as each codec and selected encoding options will increase/decrease the quality. but i believe these to be good starting points.

monkunashi
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