[vintagefilm]

That is excellent, Sam. i will be watching!

I am still assuming that it is a PLAYER feature, though, and not a Streamium feature. Am I correct?

Grace
VFC

[vintagefilm]

I have pulled the links/videos mentioned above, but the basic question remains. Could it be possible in the future in Streamium to display videos from other sources, eg, youtube, jw, vimeo, etc?

thx
Grace
VFC

[vintagefilm]

Sam, just saw your post above on the presets! that is brilliant. A lot of detail on the options. Most everything in your original presets will be perfect with a few tweeks for specialized content. This is the book Doug has recommended http://streaminglearningcenter.com/video-encoding-by-the-numbers.html
It will help in diving deep into the specs. I will be sure to post my choices, as I am sure every one else will, who needs something a little different.

Grace
VFC

[vintagefilm]

Wow, so that’s very cool! I love your house! and the video is good too! <smile> Actually, very very cool video and the house is nice. I tried all the playback speeds. 480 worked well and looked a little soft. 720 looked very good and stuttered a little. And so on. It seems to be a trade-off between playback smoothness and resolution. More resolution = less frames delivered. 4K didn’t play at all, the 2K files did, with lost frames. Keep in mind tthis is still the old Dual Xeon system. One question though. The only thing I saw in the video that was off was the banding on some shots. Is your raw camera file 8bits? You may be able to mitigate that with a little bit of blur, selectively applied. Great Work!

Grace

[vintagefilm]

Sam is working on exposing the custom setups in Elastic Transcoder, based on a comment he made somewhere in the forums. So I think I will be patient and wait for this so I can set up for my own exact requirements. That Jack Carson file looks pretty decent at 1080p in the edit bay and plays fine. Online the requirements are very different, that’s what compression is all about. Which is a jungle, as we have discovered. I notice here that our Roku box, again, not a current generation box, outputs 720P which looks and plays well from Netflix Amazon Youtube and various other sources. You may find that 720P looks and plays well in a 1080p world. And it is not yet a 4K world in the streaming universe. It is really too soon for 4K streaming unless your are the NFL, or MLB, or someone at that same level.

Grace

[vintagefilm]

Sam, yes that is one file- also look at this one https://vintagefilmchannel.com/comedy/jack-carson-1080p/

Sam’s question about which browser got me to thinking. So I have done some more testing this morning.

*Connection speed: 166mbps download and 8mbps upload. So not a problem.
*Browser– my standard browser is Firefox alternate Chrome– I tested both with similar results
*My main PC- is it the problem? Older dual Xeon w/32gig ram- so tested on a newer i5 machine and had much better results
*Cleaned out main PC– removed old software and anything running in the BG: results, much better, but still can’t run 1080p. 720p was much better.
*Looking at the network traffic: got some aborted messages when trying to load 1080p and 720p fragments
*Conclusions: This PC is too old to run 1080p streams and 720p results are not good enough either. The material doesn’t look any different to me regardless of the bit rate, so 1080p is out, 720p is marginal. I do see frame blending in the output file that is not present in the master, probably added during the 24 to 30fps conversion in transcoder.

TTFN
Grace
VFC

[vintagefilm]

Playback of the 720p stream stops and buffers here, and 1080p hardly plays at all. we get good playback from almost everywhere but my own site. I think I am back to 864x486p as my streaming resolution. I agree quality on all three samples is pretty much the same, but playback is much better at 486p. I’m not even sure it’s worth it to do the 360p version, especially if we can get thumbnails at 486 with the coming preset access.

Shoutout to Milwaukee! I was in Janesville once about 50 years ago.

Sam, if you get a chance, I would like your opinion here about the file choices, as well as playback quality in sunny Cardiff.

Thanks Guys

Grace
VFC

[vintagefilm]

I do have an lto6 but haven’t gotten around to the archiving yet. It’s on my to-do list. I just posted three videos on vintagefilmchannel.com. Look for the red V icon let me know what you think. Jack Carson Show 486 720 and 1080 versions…

Grace

VFC

[vintagefilm]

So I am encoding several test files now. I will have links later today to post here. These are all from the same source file. the audio is muxed with the video (yes, that’s what i meant in the earlier post) audio specs for all three mezz files are the same–AAC 44.1 320kbps. One the Premiere timeline (the timeline itself was set up as 1080p23.98) I started with a 864x486p23.98/pillar file and made three separate outputs from Media Encoder. 1080p23.98 720p23.98 and 864x486x23.98. i stretched the file to eliminate the pillar on the timeline.

One thing I have already discovered is that Premier and my Blackmagic Multibridge hardware don’t work well with my 864x486p23.98 files. And they also don’t like 720p23.98 timelines using the BMD hardware setups. This knowledge has me re-thinking the choices I had thought were settled. 23.98 is native to 1080p but not to 720p, so I may need to master these standard def files to 1080p just to keep them usable in the future. Bummer-they files are roughly 6 times bigger making the hard drives costs soar.

G
VFC

[vintagefilm]

Hi Jamie, I am planning to make a few more test files this afternoon. I will post the links here. Just spoke with a friend, dougw, who is working with bubble as well, and he is reading Jan Ozer’s book on compression. He will have some recommendations later, when he finishes.

BTW, it is not my master that is interlaced but the captured file from the telecined tape. My master is 23.98p with the pulldown removed.

grace
VFC

[vintagefilm]

I can fairly easily make 1280x720p23.98 master files from the 720x486p23.98 files already mastered, and from those 720x486i29.97 files captured from tape but not yet mastered files in Adobe Premiere or Media Encoder, if everyone thinks this is better. I know the files need to be uprezzed somewhere, whether in my edit suites, during bubble encoding, or during playback in the TV, computer, or mobile device. My master audio is 48k uncompressed. However, we are not uploading these master files to bubble. It seems wasteful of bandwidth and storage to do so. We create an intermediate/mezzanine file for upload. This file can be anything we choose, and for the SD files it is an h264 between 2-4mbps with audio at 48K- must check the specs, not sure at this moment. For 720p this would surely be a higher bit rate.

My audio is from film prints, and is severely compromised, just like the picture. So preserving as much as possible is a highly desired outcome.

Jamie, from what you are saying about the audio, 44.1 is a better choice, and bit rates above 320kbps are preferred. Should this choice be made at the mezzanine level or left to the elastic transcoder. I think the ET is the better choice, as I expect it changes anything thrown at it and wouldn’t pass-through a file, video or audio, even if the specs were identical.

Sam, I love that you will be exposing the full list of presets, including our own custom ones, this will make tweeking the outputs very easy, and it will solve this workflow issue completely.

I didn’t see a setting in your preset above about fragment size. i have read that it should be a ratio of the framerate, so for our 24p/23.98p files we would choose and 8 second fragment. Where is this choice available?

I am also assuming that the presets preserve every frame and don’t drop any during the encode. Can you confirm? I ask because I am noticing choppy playback and drifting audio sync on some files.

Thanks Guys, this is a very valuable discussion!

Grace
VFC

[vintagefilm]

my best case, if we cannot modify the carousel to handle the images at a smaller size(864×486 is ideal for us) is to eliminate it completely. It is so big on most displays that only one row of thumbnails is visible before scrolling down. the look of it seems out of proportion. Have a close look at netflix on a roku. they are showing 95% of the 16×9 image, with a very thin fade on the left into the text area. this allows enough room at the bottom for two rows of thumbnails, which is very desirable. The other cool thing with netflix on Roku is that the previews autoplay in the top area where the carousel is. but they don’t do that on their website only the roku app. I haven’t looked at it on Chromecast yet, not sure what that looks like.

Good luck on solving the paywall workflow. that will be a major improvement.

Best,
Grace
VFC

[vintagefilm]

I wanted to give a little followup feedback this morning. First, I like the changes to the template, and really appreciate that video you made explaining the set up. The membership link in the thumbnail is very interesting. I managed to screw up the membership plugin settings, but I think I can work through it. The inline/popup preview of the films is interesting as well. I like it popping up the preview without loading the player page. This all looks like and feels Netflix online. My normal Netflix viewing in through a roku, which is different than Netflix online. This change seems to work just like Netflix online if I enable auto-play. Except Netflix online, at least here in the US, there is no header image carousel. Is there a way to completely eliminate the carousel in Streamium?

And here is a completely separate question related to our chosen Paywall. The back-end workflow seems really clumsy if every purchase has to have direct admin approval before the purchase is complete. Is this possible to automate, within Subscriptio, or perhaps with a different Paywall?

[vintagefilm]

yes, that’s the right page. I had previously deleted those two files/entries, but they re-appeared. Will delete again from within bubble and see what happens.

[vintagefilm]

I love that! yes I would love it if you could apply the changes. you need admin access right? where can I sent it? the site is vintagefilmchannel.com. oops, of course, you already know that.

Could I ask another template question? when you visit my site you will see that Streamium is not kind to my images. can you give some guidance on how to how to adjust the size of the rotating banner so my images are not destroyed? Also, the video playback pages– I would love it if there were ioptions to open the player at the video resolution instead of full screen, so it is viewers choice about playback size. these old films can scale sort of, but sometimes it is not pretty.

Grace
VFC

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