High-Quality Video

The techniques I described in my previous post are quickly becoming outdated as they mostly use flash embedded videos. There are several problems with this method of delivery;

• they are usually fairly poor quality and sometimes the sound goes hugely out of sync
• depending on the website they may take hours to load which defeats the whole object of streaming
• they can only be watched once, unless you have a program to save them with (such as the VideoDownloader plugin for firefox) and even then it is not usually worth the effort

DivX, the company behind one of the most widely-used video compression techniques have created a website and embedded web DivX players called Stage6. This requires the users to upload videos in the DivX format, which has proved to be incredibly popular as the encoded videos are much, much smaller than raw footage so means that users can upload videos that are much higher quality, sometimes rivalling DVD quality. The stream is almost always instant, providing you have a good enough connection as DivX has obviously invested a lot of money to provide high bandwidth. Every video on the site has the option to be saved to the computer after streaming.