Howdy y'all,

Looking to clear a couple questions re smugmug video.

1.
I create a Windows Media Video 1080 60i video with Pinnacle Studio 14. Then, the post-upload processing fails to smugmug. (It successfully uploads to youtube, for comparison.) Next, I render a Windows Media Video 720 60p, it uploads and processes to smugmug just fine. Why is this?
Perhaps it's a victim of this from the FAQ:
"WMV files may contain some form of Windows Media Video, which we do not support. However WMV is a container. It can contain a number of different codecs (both audio and video), some of which we can support, others we can't. Plenty of WMVs are being uploaded just fine." -- ?

2.
Is 720 and FullHD 1080 playback included in the Pro user level account?

3.
Is 3.2mbps the maximum smugmug-saved playback rate?

4.
When the FullHD 1080 is played back, is it always in activeflash or quicktime?

5.
I'll start playing a video, then put it into full screen mode, watch for a few seconds or minutes etc... then hit the 'esc' key while it's still playing to go to back to non-full-screen and the audio keeps playing, but the video in completely blacked-out. In FF or IE does the same thing. Is this a bug or normal? Or is it just 'my' pc...(?)

Thanks in advance!

To answer your questions

1) Don't use WMV which is problematic but upload H.264 MPEG4 video as that is what it will get converted to in any case.

2) 1080p is permitted for a Pro account

3) The bit rate for 1080p is a bit over 7Mbps. For 720p the bit rate is about 3.2Mbps.

4) All videos are converted to H.264 MPEG4. For SmugMug Galleries Windows playback uses the Flash Player & Macs use Quicktime. Embedded videos always use the Flash Player.

5) It's probably your PC or maybe a slow network.

Here are some examples from my galleries of 1080p video taken directly from the Canon 5D Mk II & converted to a lower bit rate before uploading using MPEG Streamclip (a screen shot shows my settings) http://www.barkersvideo.com/HD-demos...93388225_SQ6VP

A couple additional comments...

Originally Posted by nigelbb 2) 1080p is permitted for a Pro account

I did get a MPEG4 uploading as well yesterday, and the FullHD finally showed up in my smugmug, it must take 10-24 hours to process to 1080 or so.

Originally Posted by nigelbb 4) All videos are converted to H.264 MPEG4. For SmugMug Galleries Windows playback uses the Flash Player & Macs use Quicktime. Embedded videos always use the Flash Player.

And now that I got a FullHD working, it appears, Flash is used on my PC for up to HighDef720, and Quicktime Plugin is used for playback of the FullHD1080 version.

Thanks for you insight nigelbb!

Originally Posted by binarywheels I did get a MPEG4 uploading as well yesterday, and the FullHD finally showed up in my smugmug, it must take 10-24 hours to process to 1080 or so.

That is excessive. Normally when I upload a 2-3 minute 1080p video it is ready within an hour or two.

Originally Posted by binarywheels And now that I got a FullHD working, it appears, Flash is used on my PC for up to HighDef720, and Quicktime Plugin is used for playback of the FullHD1080 version.

That's interesting. You are quite correct. I just checked on a Windows 7 system with IE8 & an XP system with Firefox. I didn't know that it used QT for 1080p or whether that has always been the case as I rarely use Windows for viewing my SmugMug galleries.

Originally Posted by nigelbb That is excessive. Normally when I upload a 2-3 minute 1080p video it is ready within an hour or two.

I was doing a lot of uploading/testing, so I'm probably off on that time a bit and just didn't see the processed FullHD until the following morning, so I was partly guessing. And since then, I've uploaded and see the FullHD for a 1-min clip within 20 minutes.

Thanks again, cheers!

Originally Posted by binarywheels 5. I'll start playing a video, then put it into full screen mode, watch for a few seconds or minutes etc... then hit the 'esc' key while it's still playing to go to back to non-full-screen and the audio keeps playing, but the video in completely blacked-out. In FF or IE does the same thing. Is this a bug or normal? Or is it just 'my' pc...(?)

I've run across this as well, but only on certain pc's that I use, and then it's still random. I think it's related to memory usage of the browser on the system, but I'd rather just re-start the video than try to debug a system issue.

Does anyone know a good WMV to H.264 MPEG4 converter? I tried everything and I can never tell if SM will accept my WMV video or not. It is really frustrating. I tried Any Video Converter and one video with same specs works while the other does not, and SM rejects it. I have pro account so 1080 should not be a problem. All videos are under 10 minutes. Some videos are 25fps some 30fps and some 60fps.

For example, here is a screen shot of my spec that SM rejects:



As we speak, I am trying another video which I hope will be accepted by SM and I will report back.
The MPEG Streamclip 1.2 tool SM suggests is not compatible with WMV.
Also some users suggest using Windows Media 9, which is the output saved by older version of WMM. But WLMM is the only version that supports 60fps (which I like to save some of my videos in) and I am aware SM pulls it down to 30fps. Older versions of WMM does not support 3gp or AVCHD source videos either.

Two tools I use regular to convert all sorts of stuff. One is x-avidemux (http://www.winpenpack.com/en/download.php?view.734), and the other is FFMPEG (http://ffmpeg.org/). FFMPEG is the most powerful, but it is also the most hard to use. For x-avidemux, I use AVI, Divx and it seems to work fine.

Any Video Converter uses ffmpeg in combination with mencoder as background processor of video, it is simply a GUI for ffmpeg, which I always had sucess with, on all my mobile devices. For some reason SM does not like the output even after I run it through ffmpeg. I will try using divx instead of x264 codec. The worst part is having to wait 3 hrs for HD video to upload, then receive an error message that upload failed (with Send to Smugmug) or "Incomplete" message with SM Uploader.