Tad's IT Blog
Posts tagged video
Flickr vs. YouTube: Mobile Video Quality
Jul 29th
I just posted on the quality & feature differences between Flickr video and YouTube, saying also that their mobile feature sets were quite similar, though video quality was about the same.
How wrong I just was, with respect to mobile video quality.
Have a look at these two samples, taken on an iPhone 3G, of the same video mentioned in my last post:
Flickr Video: [original video]
YouTube Video: [original video]
For some reason, the H.264 video that YouTube is encoding for the iPhone is of just the absolute worst quality – throughout the video, one can barely even tell what’s happening. Whereas, in contrast, the Flickr video is totally sharp and looks fantastic.
Odd – that was a comparison I didn’t expect. I’d be interested to see if that’s an iPhone-only difference, or if that’s the case on Windows Mobile and Android devices as well.
Flickr & YouTube – Video Quality & Features Comparison
Jul 29th
Flickr has a little known, and not oft-used ability for users to upload videos, as well as photos. As Flickr is primarily a photo site for photo enthusiasts, the purpose of Flickr videos was not to host the latest Shakira music video or Baby Bloopers w/Gangsta Rap soundtrack – but rather to augment one’s photographic exploits with moving pictures as well. Thus the reasoning behind Yahoo! putting a 90-second limit on Flickr video.
But, as photo display quality is such a hallmark of Flickr photos, I decided to do a little comparison on video quality, and compare it to the 900lb Gorilla, YouTube.
Following is a video I took of the first mountain bike ride on my new mountain bike, taken yesterday. It’s got a lot of full-screen motion, a worst-case scenario for the Flash Video encoders both at Flickr and YouTube. Here’s how they look:
FLICKR:
YOUTUBE:
Interestingly enough, it appears to me that the YouTube video is a bit crisper and has better motion details than the Flickr video. YouTube used to have positively the worst video quality, but it looks like they’ve definitely made some improvements of late.
But then, in terms of a features comparison, let’s take a look at the way these two services display video, to get an idea of which would be the better context to display such video clips in:
Video Tools:
YouTube is obviously the hands-down winner here. They offer annotations, audio change-outs (so you can swap out my grunting and “whoa nelly” with Crystal Method or whatever), the ability to change out the displayed thumbnail, closed-captioning, etc. Flickr offers no such tools – just the ability to upload, and then edit the caption, title & tags just like any Flickr Photo.
Display Context:
Probably the best reason why one would want to display your videos on Flickr is the display context of your video. If you’re in the middle of a camping trip, and you take 10 photos and 2 videos with your digital camera, it makes the most sense to be able to display all of those items in the same place. Displaying just the photos on Flickr or Photobucket or Facebook, and then putting the videos on YouTube doesn’t allow you to simply send someone to one page, and have them be able to see your trip.
To wit, see this set of my recent cross-country trip, which has a number of videos interspersed with the photo content – but the photo content all kept in order and in context.
Also, Flickr gives you the ability to display all your photos on a map, which gives yet another option for display context.
Mobile Capabilities:
Now this is an area where I would have expected YouTube to be in the lead completely, but Yahoo! has been putting quite a bit of work lately into their mobile sites. If you browse to this video on Flickr using an iPhone browser, you’ll see the page reformatted for the iPhone, complete with working video links. Clicking on the video then pulls up an H.264 version of the video that is playable on the iPhone. Slick!
Getting ATI Radeon HD Drivers to work on a Linux laptop – the Saga
Jun 13th
I never thought I’d be switching to Ubuntu — but I can’t believe how painless this Ubuntu 9.04 install just was.
After years on RPM-based distros, I was stymied just now, trying to get Linux back up and running on my HP Pavilion dv7 laptop, running in to all sorts of dorky installation issues that I never seemed to have difficulty with in the past. I’ve always stuck to RPM-based distros (Fedora, RHEL, CENT, OpenSUSE) just because they were what I knew, and always shied away from Ubuntu since I didn’t want to have to learn a new package manager.
That was a pretty dumb reason to stay away from what’s turned out to be an amazingly slick distro and installation process. Just staggeringly smooth, actually.
I’ve got quite a bit more I want to catalog on this, but I’ll give you the overview of what I’ve just experienced with this, just in case you’re running into the same:
My laptop is a pretty new HP Pavilion dv7 17″ — a total steal I picked up for $650. It’s an AMD Turion x2 based system with 4GB RAM, with an integrated ATI Radeon HD 3200 graphics controller (which has turned out to be just the achilles heel of the RPM-based Linux setups I’ve tried). It’s got 2 SATA hard drive bays, one that I have Vista loaded on, and another that I’ve got just for Linux.
My HP Pavilion dv7 17"
Figuring that this is a pretty straightforward configuration (much more so than some of the hot-rod desktop configurations that I’ve thrown together) I thought that getting Linux up and running on these would be simple. Oops.
Fedora 10: The first time I installed Fedora 10 x86_64, the install worked beautifully — all of the way up to where I was to naive as to install the Linux video drivers from AMD so as to get 3D support. The system then bailed completely, and when rebooting I couldn’t even get a text terminal to come up. As soon as that kernel module loaded, the system was toast. I tried 3 more times, baking the system and re-installing, using the i686 and the x64 versions, and finally the way I was able to get 3D drivers to work was by following the instructions on the Fedora FAQ and using the packages he suggests there.
Now, while that allowed me to get Compiz Fusion to work, I was never able to get Google Earth to work — the one app I NEED as I am doing development work on a number of on-line mapping sites.
Fedora 11: I downloaded this as soon as it was available, and it was a total bust, as far as this laptop was concerned. The display, on the install and on the final install, has a set of vertical bars on it that just will not go away no matter what. Also, I could not find anyone who had Fedora 11 packages ready for fglrx, and none of the instructions or FAQs I could find would make me a system that worked.
OpenSUSE 11.1: As I had good luck with OpenSUSE back when I had an nVidia card, I tried the x64 version out. This installed beautifully, and came right up — just with no sound. I then used the 1-click install for ATI, which looked like it was working beautifully, until I rebooted afterward and the system was totally locked with no virtual console or keyboard at all. I tried again, baking & re-installing, and no joy.
OpenSolaris 2009.06: I know it’s not Linux, but I figured I’d give this a go, since it just came out. The installer went extremely smoothly, and the system installed and came right back up without a hitch. However, I got stymied even before trying to install the graphics drivers — nothing I would do would let me get my wi-fi adapter to work, so I had no network interfaces. So, that pretty much stopped me right there — didn’t even get to see if my ATI 3200HD would work with OpenSolaris — though I did see some positive blog posts to make me think it might have worked.
Ubuntu 9.04: So, this morning I downloaded Ubuntu and installed it on my laptop. The installation was totall painless, and was significantly faster than any of the above. Booting afterwards gave an odd error — looks like the installer didn’t set any partition as “active”. But, pressing escape boots the machine. And boy, does it boot fast. Matt Cutts was not lying — it really does boot in about 8 seconds. Even on a somewhat midpack Turion x2 machine like mine.
But then, here’s where things were magically different from the installs above:
- Video drivers just worked: After booting up, I then went and downloaded the ATI Radeon HD 3200 Linux driver from AMD. I installed it, rebooted, and it was working. Blam — just like that. Compiz Fusion was immediately working.
- Flash install: Another source of pain on any x64 Fedora, the clickety-click “install the plugin” dialog in Firefox actually worked. I know for any Windows type person, you’d be wondering what the big deal is, but I don’t think on Fedora, I’ve EVER had Flash work without having to manually do the nspluginconfig thing or manually move around the .so files. This was something I could have talked my grandma through on the phone.
- Package management: As I said earlier, I was a bit turned off of going to a new package management system, as I was already familiar with RPM. However, I was astounded at how polished the clickety-click version of their package manager was. Skype, Google Earth, etc all just installed by downloading and double-clicking on the download file. I.e. just the same user experience as you get on Windows.
Anyhow, I’m taken aback actually on how simple and painless this setup was. I don’t know if I just have the worst hardware that Fedora people have never ever tested on or something, but I’m now quite taken in on how good this Ubuntu install experience was.
Thank-You for Carr Subaru — Our Cross-Country Trip
Jun 5th
This is a thank-you for the guys at Carr Subaru, who set us up with our 2006 Subaru Impreza that we used to haul all of our gear across the country.
I figured that most of the people who buy cars from you either (a) never hear from again, or (b) only hear from them again when they come in to bring the car into the shop for repairs. So, I figured I’d give you some feedback that the car performed perfectly despite the fact that we loaded it up to the limit in terms of towing capacity (around 2000lbs in tow), and hauled it over a 6800’ pass in the Oregon Cascades, a 7200’ pass in Arizona/Nevada, and a 10,600’ pass in Colorado.
And – I might add, we got an average of 20mpg, despite towing!
So, despite the fact that it’s the base 173hp engine and not the WRX, it performed like a champ. Here’s a couple of photos for you: [and a map of our trip is here]
In the middle of the Cascades |
 At a snow-park in the Oregon Cascades |
 Near Diamond Peak in Oregon |
 At our Hotel in Las Vegas |
 [video] Going through a windy pass in Arizona |
 In the middle of the rain in Utah |
 At the summit of Vail Pass at 10,603’ in Colorado |
 Vail Pass, Colorado |
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 [video] Nasty rain storm in Kansas |
 The 4000th mile of our trip, in Virginia |
So, thanks guys! The car is great!
The Country Road is Taking Me Home
May 30th
I’ve had a few admonishments for no blog posts over the last two days – sorry about that. I had an awful Internet connection which [gasp] I couldn’t debug, and couldn’t make work for me. So, I had to wait until tonight, when I’ve finally made it to Virginia (Lexington, VA, in the bottom of the state) with a mercifully good Internet connection, so as to update my photos and such.
Yesterday and today were a gorgeous change from the flatness of the midwest that we’ve had for the past few days, as we veered off of the Interstate to instead go on state roads through the Ohio River Valley.
They twist and turn and have great scenery along the way – from all of my various road trips, I’m real surprised that I haven’t yet been here.
I’m going to figure out a good way of depicting my trip through here so far, as I still haven’t found a good way to annotate a Flickr Map. So, I’ll leave the mapping to a future post, and for now leave you with this:
And here’s a map of our recent West Virginia & Ohio River Valley Photos:
Lesson on how you KNOW if you’re Actually at 10,600 feet
May 26th
When driving on the I-70 toward Colorado, if your Subaru is buff enough, you will finally come upon Vail Pass, at a breathtaking 10,603 feet.
Now, anyone who’s been mountain climbing in the Cascades knows that at about 10,000 feet, you see snow and ice and Glaciers and you lose your breath and have to start wearing gear and all sorts of things.
So of course, I see that sign, and had to verify, for myself, if they really meant it, and if this pass was indeed at 10,600 feet above sea level.
Parade of Videos of our Trip through Utah/Colorado
May 26th
While my wife & I are on our way across the country, I finally was able to stop at a place that’s got wifi, so I’m finally able to upload and work with some of the photos & video that I’ve been taking over the last 48 hrs. (Sorry, yet another opportunity for me to dig on one of the iphone’s only faults — no video).
We’ve been driving through Utah, Colorado and Kansas over the last 2 days, and have gotten to travel on what I feel are the most breathtakingly beautiful stretches of U.S. Interstate highway that there is.
Here’s a little sampling:
This was a rest stop in Utah on the I-70, not even marked as a “scenic turnout” or “vista” or anything. Just a bathroom stop.
And this is Glenwood Canyon in Colorado, part of what is the newest stretch of I-70, completed in 1996. Unfortunately, I left my wide-angle lens in the car!
And then here’s driving through the Eisenhower Tunnel on the I-70, at around 9,500 feet in altitude:
Breathtaking Ride through Nevada/Arizona
May 23rd
I’m stopped at a Burger King in St. George, UT right now, and mercifully they have wi-fi. I’m spending most of my time, however, reviewing all of the photos we took on our slice through the Yellow Knolls near the Arizona/Nevada/Utah border. I kept my eyes on the road as Kathryn snapped pics. Really quite something.
Hopefully this video will do it a little bit of justice:
Soon as I have a bit more time, I’ll stick these on a proper Flickr slideshow.
Panorama Video of Mt. Hood & Mt. St. Helens
May 1st
This is a panoramic video of Mt. Hood and Mt. Saint Helens taken from the Upper Terminal of the Portland Aerial Tramway. Really quite a breathaking little trip for only $4.00.
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