Google Videos = really low resolution

I’ve been uploading the IWMW videos into Google Video at 640×480 (H.264 MPEG-4), a reasonable resolution suitable for Apple TV, and was shocked to find it streamed back at me at 320×240 – half the resolution. This is fine for an iPod where you expect to be squinting, and for your average home video this might be reasonable, but for side-by-side video of presenter and screen on a laptop it looks blurry and cheap.

Apparently if you download from Google Video you get slightly better resolution. Still not the original quality though. More like what you’d get on a iPhone/iPod Touch. Unfortunately, though I’ve specified that these videos can be downloaded, am I getting a download link? Not on your nelly. The sooner we implement interactive screen/presenter switching on our streams, and get people to see what we’ve recorded at full quality, the better.

H.264 + FMS is the future of video streaming

Adobe has announced Flash Media Server 3. Flashcomguru point to a cool recorded session discussing it at the anouncement. Find the FMS presentation by Kevin Towes. This follows the recent announcement of Flash Player 9.

Seriously those recorded sessions are cool! Nice to see the interactive switching between presenter and screen, something I’d like to do with our videos. Google video will never do that!

FMS3 and Flash Player 9 will do H.264 and better security. Long story short it’s game over for ON2 VP6 and Real Helix, I think.