What is an appropriate format for encoding video for archiving and for steaming?

[ddod]

We in the process of moving all of our our media services online (IP TV, Video on Demand, etc.). I have always gotten great advice from the expertise in the forums in the past and thought I would try it again.

I have been perusing the forums again for the past couple of weeks trying to glean as much information as I can about the latest in video and audio encoding. However I believe I am starting to get overloaded especially trying to keep all the advice relevant for today (i.e., I'll read one thing from a post a year ago that is contradicted in a more recent post). So I am looking for some advice about the approach we are taking with this project.

It looks like our broadcast feeds will be converted to to an h.264 transport stream using optibase hardware. We also have a large amount of media from our library (dvd, vhs, old films, etc.) that needs to be digitized for making available online (VOD).

We are trying to determine two main things, what is an appropriate format for encoding the video for archival (master copy), and then what will be appropriate for streaming. The streams will be currently limited to on-campus (local LAN). We do have to worry about making some of the streams too accessible (based on copyright restrictions of some of the material).

I have seen lots of suggestions for encoding tools, settings and avoiding potential issues. Many have caused concerns that I didn't have before (quick time claims to support MP4 but many say there are issues playing MP4 in quick time if certain encoding restrictions aren't followed which makes me think quick time is not yet fully MP4 compliant).

Basically I wanted to open up this topic to the general expertise of the group to see what direction you all would approach our problem from. Which codecs would you use? Which encoders? If there are any opinions on streaming I would love to hear those as well. In short I was hoping to get advice that was relevant to the standards and practices as they are implemented today. (for example all of the comparisons (from like 2006) I can find for the VP6 codec show it as being superior to H.264, yet it appears that modern opinion would disagree).

Thanks in advance. I appreciate your opinions.

[feedback]

You may get more responses if you change your thread title to something like...What is an appropriate format for encoding video for archiving and for steaming? At least something a little more descriptive of your inquiry. I believe those were your two main points.

Also, where are you going to be archiving the video...on Hard drives, DVD's...?

Furthermore, is lossless compression for archiving a requirement or does it matter what the compression rate is for your archiving?

Regards,

[ddod]

You may get more responses if you change your thread title to something like...What is an appropriate format for encoding video for archiving and for steaming?

Duly noted and applied, thanks...

Also, where are you going to be archiving the video...on Hard drives, DVD's...?

Large Capacity HD arrays (in short)

Furthermore, is lossless compression for archiving a requirement or does it matter what the compression rate is for your archiving?

That is yet to be determined. Space savings is an important factor but then again so is quality. In short there is currently no specific directive. I am simply weighing the pros and cons at this time.

Thank you very much for your response.

[*.mp4 guy]

You could probably get good results using H.264 for everything, it scales mostly linearly from "bit-perfect" to "ugly tetris" quality wise and does it pretty efficiently aswell, the only problem you could run into is spotty support until the standards start to mature a bit. For lossless archiving Lagarith is (imo) the obvious choice, its fast enough to be conveniant and gets the best keyframe-only lossless compression that I am aware of, its also reliable and opensource.