At this time Technology Evangelist owns nothing. We own no video or audio gear, no lighting... nothing. When I want to go out and shoot an HD video I must rely on my contacts in the traditional television industry. At that point we take what we can get and more often than not we get HDV cameras. I think by now everyone knows that I'm not a fan of HDV, but I will use HDV over DV in a heartbeat. While there is risk of loosing media with HDV (which has happened to us), I believe the risk is worth the extreme bump in quality. From time to time I get lucky and am able to use a Panasonic Varicam (my second favorite camera of all time), and I have yet to be lucky enough to use my all-time favorite camera, the Sony CineAlta 950 (1080p native). For the first and second episodes of The Innovators we used a JVC HD100U 720p HDV camcorder along with a Shure boom mic and a Lowel light kit. There was nothing in this shoot that I would have actually purchased for myself, I was very disappointed in the gear... But beggars can't be choosers, and at least it's HD, so we made it work. The reason we don't have cameras yet is the camera we want has no way to effectively store HD video on it. As soon as we can get the camera to put HD on tape or hard drives, we'll be getting one of those bad boys. I'll cover the gear we want tomorrow. The point is, when we have the means necessary we will be moving to DVCPRO HD via the HVX200 camera. Until then, we use what we can get even if that's HDV.

Now for the format. We are actually encoding everything as h.264 files as opposed to Windows Media 9, Flash, or any other CODEC. By doing this we allow users to be able to view our media on a very wide range of products, including the site itself. I can have our HD content download into iTunes, Sony PSPs, Video iPods, QuickTime Player, VLC Player, HD-DVDs and BluRay players, I can even embed h.264 in a JAVA applet from IBM. Knowing this, let me break down each HD format for you:

Flash
This was the big contender, and I may yet still use it. Flash would be a really good 'watch now' platform where you simply click on the video and it starts to play. Where Flash seriously falls down is in quality, full-screen playback, and distributing to third party devices. Flash video, for the most part, is browser only. Want to play our videos on your Video iPod? Not with Flash. How about your PSP? Nope. You play Flash video in a browser... or... well, a browser. Flash video can go full-screen with a simple authoring trick, but it looks like garbage. I mean it's absolutely awful. Add to all of that the inefficiencies of the VP6 CODEC that Adobe (Macromedia) went with, and now we have much larger file sizes. The biggest advantage here is that most users already have what is needed to play SD Flash video without issue. Flash Video is great for small little intro videos, but for a 25 minute interview... Not so hot anymore as the file size would be ginormous!

Windows Media 9
Microsoft has the Windows Media 9 CODEC (and the 10 player), which can do HD. Problem here becomes devices again. One can watch Windows Media 9 HD encoded content on a PC, but not a Macintosh or Linux box. The VC1 CODEC (basically WM9 without any of the extras) is a proposed part of the HD-DVD and BluRay spec, but to date the only content I have seen authorable is h.264, not VC1... So I'm not sure that's quite ready yet, but then again HD-DVD and BluRay is not ready yet either. Want to play your Windows Media 9 HD files on a Video iPod or Sony PSP? Nope; however, there is support for Windows Media 9 in other portable devices, which makes it a bit more attractive than Flash. Biggest problem here is a flaky player, no iTunes support, and insane high system requirements for playback (and the future of WM9 is not as bright as h.264, in my opinion).

QuickTime
Believe it or not, we're not a QuickTime shop. The media we encode is MPEG 4 Version 10, also known as AVC or h.264. It just so happens that the most prominent player for h.264 is QuickTime 7, which is why a lot of users think we're a QuickTime shop. The big problems with QuickTime are system device compatibility, can't play QT files on Linux (although there are some hacks to make it work), won't play on Sony PSP's nor will they work in HD-DVD players or BluRay players. QuickTime also has some serious stability problems and of all the players appears to be the one riddled with the most bugs.

Divx
This was a hard choice too, but this one came down to quality. Divx is the standard for underground TV and movie file sharing, but the quality is always a bit lacking. Don't get me wrong, the files look great, but when compared to h.264 content, Divx looks soft. In addition, Divx is not nearly as widely distributed as h.264 enabled players are, which makes it more of a challenge getting our content to people. Then we get into the whole discussion of devices that Divx will and won't play on. It's a great CODEC, but it's not right for us. I will say that the CPU requirements for Divx are far lower than h.264, which did make it harder to dismiss.

MPEG 4 Version 10 - AVC - h.264
This is the format we chose for everything but the embedded player. When you syndicate content you're actually pulling a .mp4 file from our server. Apple's iTunes, Video iPods, Sony PSP, Windows, Linux, Macintosh, HD-DVD's, BluRay discs, and many, many other devices and platforms are able to play the 480p, 720p and 1080p files we post. This format is not tied to a player, so you can use QuickTime 7 or VLC or any other h.264 player to view the content. Since there's no MPEG4 web player yet, we do wrap one version around QuickTime (which is the prominent h.264 player out there) and embed that into the site. This is a temporary fix until some form of standard h.264 player surfaces (which will hopefully be more stable and support full-screen playback) but I don't expect something to come along for a while. Since we encode as h.264 files, we are able to swap out players the moment a new one comes out, and not have to re-encode anything. This format is the next universal standard for video distribution, and we're excited to deliver it to you.

There are other formats as well such as traditional MPEG 2 and whatnot, but after we found the sweet spot for h.264, it was just the logical choice. Today not every system is able to play back our 1080p content, in fact very few can. Expect that to be changing rapidly in the next couple of years as special h.264 code is added to processors to help speed up the encoding and decoding of this content. I would expect to see Apple at the front of this march, with Intel not far behind. When looking down the road to the future, it's clear to me that h.264 will be the winner.