I'm always keeping an eye out for the next big video platform. Nintendo's Wii never really caught my attention since Nintendo doesn't even mention its video capabilities in its marketing campaign. So when I bought a Wii for my daughter's birthday I thought it would be just another toy that the kids abandon after a few weeks. But within a few hours of the console's debut every single member of my household had used the device and an unruly line had formed next to the TV. When I heard my mother-in-law shouting "Die! Die! Die!" at the screen in Korean I knew I had a hit on my hands.

Can this addictive little device be used to deliver video? Read more to find out.

Here at Green Screen Cinema we've been around the block with a number of of web technologies (going all the way back to our Atari 800 and its 1200 bps modem). The technologies we really like these days are adCenter, Adwords and Feedburner. But since Google would not initially return our domain name when people searched for our domain name we had to set up accounts at Digg, Current, reddit, Vimeo, Metacafe, emPivot and every site that has the word "film" in the title, just to help people find us. It's not been an easy road. Minutes after joining Vimeo we received fishy email from a variety of sources. The reddit site might have been programmed by monkeys. And Metacafe still has not gotten back to me on the upload errors that my videos throw.

Needless to say we've taken the walk of shame home after locking lips with these guys. And these sites are not the worst offenders out there. There's one flack blog site we've said we'll never join. Never ever. Not if we were the last two websites standing and we had to repopulate the species together. Well, we're gonna have to eat our words since they own the 12th spot in a Google search result we're trying to break into. Pucker up, baby, because today we joined the Technorati.

I don't know about you, but I have been eagerly awaiting the video revolution. When the first consumer videocamera came out I thought, this is really an improvement on film: you don't have to wait for the lab, the viewfinder shows you exactly what the final image is going to look like. This is going to change the industry! But here we are more than two decades later and only now are high definition videocameras finally coming onto the market at a reasonable price point.

I don't know what derailed the revolution, most likely it was the high margins that all the new gear commanded when it first came out. The revolutionaries got fat and complacent. But in the last two years some low cost, high quality gear managed to break through the party apparatus and is now in the hands of consumers.

For this shoot-out we are going to compare one of the old guard, high margin video cameras (the Sony HDR-FX1) to a truly revolutionary camera (the Canon Vixia HV30).

So it turns out that there is a great encoding staff at Current.com and they do actually care about video quality. Here is the reply I got from them regarding the frame loss in the video I submitted to their site:

Mario from Current.com here. We're aware of our transcoder woes, and sadly I have to correct one thing: we actually lower the framerates on uploads to (ducking in shame) a shocking 15 frames per second (/ducking in shame).

From the perspective of high quality video transcoding, this is obviously not something to be terribly proud of. We went this route to accommodate some of our users with much lower bandwidth, but we recognize the impact it's had and are working on a releasing a fix in the very near future. In the meantime, we re-processed your video and it is now running at the full 29.97 fps.

Now the video looks really great. Almost as good as MSN and Yahoo Video. Check out the link and see for yourself:

Al Gore Fixed My Video

I knew there was a reason I voted for that guy. Thanks Al!

It's not often that an ex-Vice President decimates your lovingly prepared video from 29.97 interlaced frames per second to a gruesome 25 full frames per second. But that's exactly what happened when I submitted my video to Current.com, the website funded in part by Al Gore. Current.com produced the worst transcode I have seen thus far among the video upload sites. It's so bad the Nobel people might actually ask for their prize back. Here's the link so you can decide for yourself:

Al Gore Decimated My Video.

If you read my video upload shoot out, you know that Yahoo didn't even get to the finals since they can't handle Windows Media 9 Advanced Profile (either interlaced or frames). WM9AP is my preferred codec as it makes my content look great, much better than the grainy result you get from software MPEG2 encodes. Well, I decided to give Yahoo another shot. I came up with the best MPEG2 encode I could fit into their ridiculous 150 MB limitation, and low and behold the results were gorgeous. Almost as good as the WM9AP interlaced encode that MSN Video is running right now. Here is the Yahoo link so you can decide for yourself:

Yahoo encode from MPEG2 source.

This article describes some of the optimal encoder settings for the various video upload sites.

Holy cow do I love my Canon HV20 high definition video camera! Since it's last year's model you can get it for as little as $700 and the image quality is amazing. I have viewed the HD image on a number of HD televisions and it's so good you will want to cry. After you're done crying, you can then remember that you only paid $700 for the thing and laugh yourself silly. It's quite an emotional roller coaster ride.