At Revision3 we pride ourselves on getting our rich, wicked cool programming onto anything with a screen. (OK, maybe not those new-fangled refrigerators…yet!) This, of course, means that we support quite a few video formats (also known as codecs, which is short for COding/DECoding). When you start counting the distinct video codecs in existence (VP8, WMV, H.264, etc), however, and then multiple that by the number of screen resolutions there are (1080i, 720p, 720i, 320×480, etc etc) and then multiple that by the number of bitrates needed to support mobile vs. wired internet vs. wifi… it’s…uh… a lot.
Supporting all of these codec and resolution offerings is a complex process, so every so often Revision does a little spring housecleaning. We look into who is really using them, which ones are popular, which aren’t, how many of them are there, etc. The last time we did this was back in January, and Jim Louderback let everyone know. Well, it’s that time again.
We took a look at codecs across the board to find out what was the least popular – aside from a couple of odd little strays at the bottom (20 people watch Theora Ogg format from our archives over the last 90 days), it turns out that WMV is used by less than 2% of the population. After doing a bit of research, we discovered a couple of factoids:
- at the resolutions we deliver, MP4 looks significantly better than WMVs
- With two exceptions (noted below) all Microsoft enabled devices support MP4 natively, including Windows Phone 7
- The two exceptions are the First and Second generation Zune devices…and even then, Zune Marketplace will take a MP4 file and transcode it to WMV before depositing it on those early Zunes
- Removing WMV from our codec lineup decreases our total transcode time for our shows, and simplifies our encoding workflow – all of which allows us to get our programming to you sooner.
With all of that in mind, we felt it prudent to turn off WMV encodes and place MP4 in your favorite show feeds instead.
Again, we do not feel this will impact anyone unnecessarily. If anyone is having issues reading MP4 on their Microsoft powered devices, please contact us at support@revision3.com
