I have not found a post that really answers the "which video codec is best to use in PD?" question. By best I mean what will allow me to run the most amount of video while retaining some quality. I tend to use Motion-Jpeg(usually A) with the quality set to 100%. Also the H.261 seems good. Has anyone had any good experiences with anything else? Anyone found any good(hopefully free) 3rd party stuff online? I am running OSX 10.4.11. on a G4 powerbook.

Thanks.

I'd love to see an answer to that too. If you don't get a solid answer, it may be that there hasn't been an empirical test done yet, so if you started one, that'd be a great thing. Meaning, take your video, encode it many, many different ways, and compare the results.

One thing that makes a difference is what you're using the video for - specifically, whether you do a lot of rapid frame-accurate seeks, switching between forward and reverse, etc; or if you're playing long clips straight, perhaps switching between clips occasionally or blending them, etc. Most codecs use temporal compression, so most frames are stored as differences from previous frames. The more sophisticated the codecs get, the more sophisticated this temporal compression is, which gets you higher levels of visual quality at smaller file size. The tradeoff is that if you want to jump to a specific frame, you often have to first jump to a keyframe near where you want to go, and then seek forward, accumulating the frame differencing until you get to the target frame. So for an application involving random access, the keyframe setting may have more of an effect than the actual codec.

Other factors include stuff like your hard drive. Say you have some nice high-res video. If you compress it a lot, each frame doesn't have too much data in it, but it takes a lot of processing power to decode; so if the rest of your patch has a high cpu load, that can slow it down. You can use less compression, so less computation, but if your hard drive is not that fast, at some point it can't get the data off the disk fast enough to display it either.

So there's a lot of variables, which is why maybe an empirical test suite would be a good thing.

btw what do you mean about free stuff online? Do you mean free codecs, like ogg vorbis/theora, or free encoding software, like ffmpeg and mencoder?

Just quickly,

The Photo-Jpeg codec at 100% quality seems to be the best bet. Beware of going under full quality as it quickly turns your video into garbage. At 100% it looks pretty good I think. CPU seems to like this best.

Also don't forget to create your video in RGB color space so you don't have to do any in-program converting. pix_rgba kills cpu.

Again it depends on what your personal variables are but this is what I will be encoding my vids into from now on.

good luck!

I just started using PD after using MAX/Jitter on and off for 5 or 6 years. I LOVE IT>
I am using pix_record to capture my video for a hi-def DVD art project. So far, this is working wonderfully. I must admit, I am using a beefy mac (with 2 x 3 GHZ quad core intel xeon). This thread is a year old, but I just want to let it be known out there in PD-land that a beefy Mac can handle this type of hidef recording. I am chromakeying 2 videos 1280 x 720 and recording it and so far, no serious issues.
I use the photo.jpg codec....and these videos look great in quicktime.
Let me just note, on my second G5 mac at home, with lesser specs, I get vastly different results on the same patches. The hardware really matters.
good luck to you!