From 1998 to present my job duties entail gobs and gobs of multimedia production (filming/editing/encoding/etc.) and I have "seen it all" so to speak. My biggest criticism of people using PCs to encode videos with is that there are too many codecs out there. I am soooo sick of downloading videos encoded with "brand X Divx-compatible" codec from "Joe Schmoe" and running into issues with playback and/or editing. The last time I checked, there were roughly 20 or so Divx variants out there. The compatability between these variants is pretty laughable as well. Then there's Microsoft's wanna-be-Divx-compatible "solution" (hahahah) to top it off with, and there are also MPEG4 problems galore. Then there's the versioning issues of different builds of Windows Media Player, which causes even more problems. Then there's the audio playback issues - sometimes the AC3 codec is used, sometimes AAC, sometimes MP3 (more common but causes problems on some systems, believe it or not!), etc. you get the idea. People will hack the code for "brand A" codec, rearrange a few deinterlacing or colour space subroutines, or some sort of psuedo macrovision disabler, then re-code it, and release it to the public, and then someone will use it to encode something with and then hardly anyone will be able to get it to work properly on their system (not to mention that only 15% of people will be able to see the multimedia encoded with that masturbated
* codec).
I wish that there was some sort of international standards committee in place to regulate the codecs out there, and only agree upon the ones that are deemed to be fit for use in cases of distribution by electronic means (via internet, etc.) to the public, because I am one of the guys who is always called upon to try and troubleshoot people's PCs for them and each time I am disgusted with my findings. Back when the Macintosh was the sole platform for computer-based multimedia production there were never any issues.
Woohoo! I ranted!
* masturbated as opposed to
created - two fundamentally different techniques.
