Poor quality

[JohnBAFTA]

Thanks Brian I do appreciate your help.

It does seem that adding this tag is doing the trick, and (touchwood) I don't seem to be getting any instances where the tag is added but the smoothing is still off.

I would be interested to follow any decisions you make re: default behaviour in this regard. It's not a huge problem adding the single line of code at the moment, but needless to say it would be convenient to have the option of setting "true" as the default behaviour so I don't have customise the player each time it's embedded.

One thing I'm still a little confused about, however, is why my site's videos don't trigger the default smoothing for low bitrate encodes? I thought this was supposed to be automatic, but clearly it's not in all cases, as the videos I've been having problems with are all in players with a resolution which should be using encodes of <950 kbps...

...Unless there's an issue with an encode that's actually more than 950kbps being streamed into a player with a smaller resolution: it would actually make sense that I'd be getting this behaviour if the next-encode-up was being streamed and resized. 640x360 on a video I just checked comes in at 804kbps, but the next up, 720x404, comes in at 1203kps: enough to disable the automatic smoothing. Is it possible that the latter encode might be being delivered to a 587x330 player window?

I'm confused.

Anyway Brian, thanks very much for your reply. Just for the record, I've attached a screengrab of the visual issue I was having before I started using the videoSmoothing="true" amendment, in case anyone suspects they have a similar problem.

Yours

John

[JohnBAFTA]

After a bit of further thought I realise that our current default player size is not particularly well suited to the default transcoding resolutions - it's a bit of a weird size, as determined by our current web-layout.

On Monday I might try experimenting with creating a custom encoding resolutions to match the player size exactly, and see if the problem is eliminated.

[BC-BrianD]

Hi John,

Glad I could be of help.  I will try to remember to update this thread or contact you if we do change something with video smoothing, although it's not clear yet when or if this will happen.  It will also certainly be listed on this page: http://support.brightcove.com/en/product-updates

To figure out the encoding issue, I would check out the link I sent in the last email, which is also described in this article:

http://support.brightcove.com/en/docs/debugging-brightcove-players

We print out a lot of information about the current renditions within the logs, and this may help indicate if there is a different encoding than expected.  We also print out some information about the size of the player and how it affects the rendition selection.

[JillD]

Hi Sam,

I've been dealing with the poor quality issue for a few weeks now too. I've had my guys try all the stuff you've recommended here and none of it seems to make a difference. I've uploaded my files which was exported at H.264 1920x1080 and it looks great. Then when we get the BC ID to embed, playback at full screen is really blurry. I see there are four renditions in the file and it even looks fine on the BC site when I preview it, but I'm afraid the smallest rendition is what is being called up to play on my site. I've been told the larger rendition (1024x576) is only for iPads. I'm the video creator, not a developer, so I'm going back and forth between BC and my co-workers to come up with a fix. The video looks especially bad, the wider the shot. Here's a link to one of the videos I'm having problems with:  http://help.aol.com/help/microsites/search.do?cmd=displayKC&docType=kc&externalId=219926&sliceId=2&d...

Please let me know what you think may be happening and how we can resolve it. Thanks.

[BC-SamN]

JillD,

Screencast videos present a challenge to video encoders due to the large amount of text present in them, but there are a few things you can do to improve the final result.

Disabling full screen viewing on your player will prevent a video from being stretched out onto the whole screen.  You can toggle this in the Video Player settings tab for a player in the Publishing Module. 

Leaving the source file as a rendition will help too, as the full size video you uploaded will be shown to the viewer.  With larger files this may present a less than ideal experience however, as larger files take longer to download and may not play as smoothly on older machines. 

Recording the screencast at a lower resolution (closer to the size of the player) can help as well.

Since the text in the video is small relative to the rest of the frame a fair amount of distortion (bluriness) occurs when resizing the video.  Could you try increasing the size of the font on the computer on which you're recording the screencast?

There's more information in this article: http://developer.brightcove.com/en/articles/encoding-tips-screencasts

Hope this helps!

sam

[JillD]

Thanks for the quick reply.

I really don't want to turn off full screen capability if I don't have to. The content is such that people need to see it full screen. I'd be happy to leave the source file, but I am having to go through AOL Studios and am being told only to upload to the ftp and that's that- not to use the tool, so they are managing everything. I had recorded at a lower resolution in the beginning and things were even worse. And I do blow up the browsers when I'm recording them, but sometimes you need to see the whole desktop to know where you are.

It seems when I blow up the image it's crystal clear, it's when I actually am full screen, normal size (as you could see on the video I sent) that it looks its worst. What I don't get is that the video looks great when I play it in BC. That makes me think it's only bringing over the smallest rendition for some reason, and I'm on a high speed connection with a new Mac.

I'm just at a loss and I don't want to post videos that don't look good. I see in the link you sent you recorded 1280x960 and have it in a 480x360 window- it looks great when you go full screen. I am doing the same thing only 16:9 and it's not working. I bet if I could get them to leave my source files I wouldn't have this problem. I may have to go rogue...;0)

[BC-Mikey]

Just a quick follow-up to this thread. Video Cloud Players are now enabling the Video Smoothing filter by default. You can find more information at the following doc:

http://support.brightcove.com/en/docs/video-smoothing