Whenever I searched about H.264, there is plenty information about video-encoding, media-container so forth, but why I can not find any effective source to explain what is meaning of 26 in H.26{1,2,3,4,5}?
Among other H.26x are H Series recommendations of ITU-T (ITU Telecommunication Standardization Sector), series on Audiovisual and multimedia systems.
H.261 Video codec for audiovisual services at p x 64 kbit/s
H.262 Information technology - Generic coding of moving pictures and associated audio information: Video
H.263 Video coding for low bit rate communication
H.Imp263 Implementors' Guide for ITU-T Recommendation H.263
H.264 Advanced video coding for generic audiovisual services
H.264.1 Conformance specification for ITU-T H.264 advanced video coding
H.264.2 Reference software for ITU-T H.264 advanced video coding
H.Imp264 Implementors' Guide for ITU-T Recommendation H.264
H.265 High efficiency video coding
H.265.1 Conformance specification for ITU-T H.265 high efficiency video coding
H.265.2 Reference software for ITU-T H.265 high efficiency video coding
However there are lot of others there so 26 alone does not have any special meaning.
ITU-T Recommendations by series gives another view on how the recommendations are structured:
Related
I've got a website and I've been looking for ways to embed a 24/7 webcast. I've looked at options such as Ustream and Justin.TV however, these do not work on mobile devices, which is what I really need.
I don't have that much knowledge on how streaming works but I've read that the streaming Engine Wowza is another option. I also found that HTML 5 player works cross platform and on any mobile device aswell.
If I were to use Wowza would it work with HTML 5 player? And am I even going in the right path with how I can do this. I also have a home dedicated server for streaming to a cloud wouldn't be required.
I'm very amateur just trying to broadcast my television program on my website for viewing. Any advice would help here. Thanks
Wowza can packetize video as http live streaming (HLS) which, although an Apple invention, works on most HTML5-capable browsers except IE11: http://www.jwplayer.com/html5/hls/ . Many players will fall back to using Flash for browsers which don't support native HLS or H.264 encoding. Flash uses http dynamic streaming (HDS) rather than HLS, so you would add that as another packetizer in wowza. (Wowza calls these packetizers "cupertinostreamingpacketizer" and "sanjosestreamingpacketizer" respectively.)
You would then point your preferred HTML5 video player (jwplayer, flowplayer, etc) at the URL http:// your-wowza-server.com:1935/live/yourstreamname/playlist.m3u8 [1]. For Flash fallback in flowplayer you can use the f4m resolver and the http-streaming plugin, as in the first example here, to access the subtly different URL http:// your-wowza-server.com:1935/live/yourstreamname/manifest.f4m. I'm sure something similar applies in players like jwplayer and others.
The main problem with Wowza is how much it costs: for your own server you're looking at around $55 per month per channel [2]. At least during testing, you may find it cheaper to get Wowza on Amazon EC2 devpay: $5/month rental plus an extra couple of cents per hour on your normal EC2 instance costs.
[1] Assuming you're using Wowza's default /live/ application on port 1935
[2] A channel is roughly the number of streams you're sending to the server to be re-broadcast
We developped a custom HTML5 player which we wanted to make compatible with HLS and fragmented mp4 for LIVE events. We started on Zencoder but realize they were not able to do genrate fragmented mp4.
I would like to explore the flash fallback solution and the wowza( probably on AWS) for the packaging.
Would you be available to consult on this project?
We use www.bitcodin.com for event-based or 24/7 live transcoding and streaming. It generates DASH - which can be playback natively in HTML5 using the bitdash MPEG-DASH players - as well as HLS for iOS devices. You can find an example here: http://www.dash-player.com/demo/live-streaming/
Thanks to html5 it's very easy to stream a video to the customer by just adding it to the page with the -tag.
Anyway lots of big services (you-tube etc.) are still using streaming servers and flash to stream videos.
What's the benefit of this technologies?
Does it make any performance difference or difference for users perception? How does html5-video handle many request at a time?
At the moment the main benefits of flash are:
Easy to add Ads
Browser compatibility
No need to support many different codecs
So if you need any of this you might choose Flash
I want to automate a transcoding workflow to h.264 in the adaptive streaming containers for HLS and Microsoft Smooth Streaming and wonder what my options are.
Ideally, there's Expression Encoder Pro with the Expression SDK that I could use to do just that. However, Expression Encoder pro is no longer for sale and the non-pro version can't do h.264.
There are other h.264 encoders, in particular with x264 there's an encoder proper that's gpl-licensed. x264 really just gives a pure stream output without the container though, let alone the adaptive streaming containers I need.
I found one reasonably priced encoder called Sorenson Squeeze that appears to have all I need (and in fact can use x264 for that part of the job), but I wonder if I have other options that make more sense in terms of spending money on licenses.
I already have licenses for Adobe's Media Encoder through Creative Cloud subscriptions, but Media Encoder can't work from the command line and I don't see any support for adaptive streaming with my desired containers.
Does anybody have more ideas?
FFmpeg and/or libav can transcode to h264 and support Smooth Streaming and HLS, and run on the command line. There's a bit of a learning curve (you in practice need to have an understanding of the container formats used, GOP and fragmentation/segmentation) but they do have the features you need.
If your media is on your local machine, and you have small amounts, buying one of the tools you mentioned might be your best bet.
However, if you have lots of media and you store it on the cloud, look at cloud offerings such as Amazon Elastic Transcoder or encoding.com.
That way you get out of the box support for formats like HLS, and you don't need to worry about licensing. it is all included in their pricing which is "per use". No subscription or upfront costs.
For e.g. MPEG-DASH adaptive bitrate content you can use either tools such as x264 + MP4Box, or cloud-services like bitcodin.
I'm new to video compression; but I see many of the terms repeated over and over again.
I'm wondering what's the difference between x.264 and libx264 and H.264?
H.264 is video encoding method, an alias name for MPEG-4 AVC compression, also known as MPEG-4 Part 10, defined in joint ISO/IC and ITU specification "Information technology — Coding of audio-visual objects — Part 10: Advanced Video Coding".
The specification is freely available here: http://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-H.264-201304-I/en
x264 is a library implementing video compression and producing H.264 compatible stream.
See also:
What is ffmpeg, avcodec, x264?
What is the best solution to display multiple live streams from a surveillance camera (so low latency is a requirement) in a web application (VideoWall-like)?
Personally I'm thinking about two possible solutions, but I can't choose between them:
1) Develop a custom Firefox plugin that uses ffmpeg to acquire and decode the video streams
2) Rely on HTML5 inserting a layer between the cameras and the web application that transcodes/restreams the video streams (probably using http live streaming)
The requirements are compatibility with H.264 over RTSP and Mpeg-4 over RTP and, of course, low latency and no loss on video quality.
Thanks
Andrea