The following checklist identifies core principles and best practices to assist software designers and developers to produce software that stands out in the marketplace.

1. Concepts from the product’s subject domain (for example, systems management) should be central and apparent in the software design – The relationships among user interface objects in products should be accurate, so that users can rely on their previous experience in the domain when learning and using the software.
2. Keep it simple – Give easy access to the features that most users will need most of the time; features used less often or by only a subset of users are placed less prominently.
3. Optimise the design for the most frequent or important tasks – Understanding how users will use the software you are designing is critically important. Designers should use that understanding to anticipate the information, task flows, and features that users require at key points within the user experience.
4. Make the interface accessible and visible to users – Design your Web site or application so that users can view and easily access objects or information within the interface. Choices should be visible to users rather than hidden with cryptic key sequences. When objects and choices are immediately visible, users learn and complete work tasks efficiently.
5. Use proper default values when supporting complex tasks – Use good defaults so that users can complete tasks relatively easily and quickly rather overwhelming them with choices.
6. Be flexible – Let users customise the application to meet their unique needs. For example, specialised users could be given a way to make secondary choices more prominent in the product. Also, don’t limit users by artificially restricting their choices to a “correct” sequence. Flexibility is also enhanced by letting users select options in various sequences and in letting them modify default values.
7. Keep your users informed and in control by providing informative and timely feedback tailored to the current situation – For example, progress indicators let users know that their system is healthy and is carrying out their request. At a minimum, alert users when they take actions that will result in the loss of data. (Ideally, such choices would be disabled or even eliminated when they are inappropriate in a particular situation.) All the information included in the feedback should be meaningful to the average user.
8. Things that look the same should behave in the same way, and an action should always produce the same result – Avoid modes that change the effects of actions. Where modes are unavoidable, make them clear to the user and easy to change.
9. Provide the ability to undo and redo actions – Applications must provide users with the ability to freely explore applications (which includes the ability to make mistakes) without fearing permanent damage.
10. Make your application predictable by using industry standard user interface conventions wherever possible – For example, users should be able to use standard selection models and keyboard equivalents like Ctrl+C and Shift+→ (to copy the currently selected object and extend the current selection one unit to the right, respectively) everywhere they work with data. Use a common set of design patterns and guidelines so that users don’t have to relearn how to perform common tasks.
11. Always keep your target users in mind as the product is designed – Developing personas and identifying and defining the roles your users fulfil can help you understand how various roles will use your product. Designs based on typical workflows and the other software that users might use in conjunction with yours will delight users.
12. Avoid adding features just so they can be ticked off a list – Remember that every additional feature equals a set of choices added to what is likely already a wide array of choices. Too many choices can overwhelm users.
13. Design your user interface so that it can be localised for other geographies without redesigning the interface – For example, don’t crowd form controls too tightly so they can accommodate longer German translations.
14. Consider persons with disabilities when designing your applications – Many users of your product may have impaired vision or physical limitations that affect their ability to use a mouse or a joystick.
15. Design the application so that contextual help is available to users when they need it – Users should not have to refer to Help constantly to complete their tasks.
16. Bring objects to life through good visual design – The goal of visual design in the user interface is to surface to the user in a cohesive manner all aspects of the design principles. Visual design should support the user model and communicate the function of that model without ambiguities. Visual design should not be the “icing on the cake” but rather an integral part of the design process. The final result should be an intuitive and familiar representation that is second nature to users.
17. Create user interfaces that promote clarity and visual simplicity – The following visual design principles help create that effect:
    • Subtractive design – Reduce clutter by eliminating any visual element that doesn’t contribute directly to visual communication.
    • Visual hierarchy – Understand the importance of users’ tasks and establish a visual hierarchy of these tasks. An important object can be given visual prominence. Relative position and contrast in colour and size can be used to convey task importance.
    • Affordance – When users can easily determine the action that should be taken with an object, that object displays good affordance. Objects with good affordance usually mimic actual objects.
    • Visual scheme – Design a visual scheme that maps to the user model and lets the user customise the interface. Do not eliminate extra space in your image just to save space. Use white space to provide visual “breathing room.”

I had lunch with my father the other day, and I explained this series as well as I could to someone who didn’t start programming when he was 11. His immediate reaction was, “Why are there so many different formats? Why can’t everybody just agree on a single format? It is political, or technical, or both?” The short answer is, it’s both. The history of video in any medium — and especially since the explosion of amateur digital video — has been marred by a string of companies who wanted to use container formats and video codecs as tools to lock content producers and content consumers into their little fiefdoms. Own the format, own the future. And when I say “history” — well, it’s still going on. Tried to play a Windows Media Video on Mac OS X lately? The codec and container support is out there, but it’s not baked in. Want to watch movie trailers on Apple.com? Please install QuickTime. And so forth and so on. The only thing that was pre-installed on both platforms was Flash, so when a few startups dipped their toes into the Internet video waters, the ones that used Flash Video won despite it being an objectively inferior codec. (Some revision of Flash 9 added support for H.264 video, AAC audio, and the MP4 container, which is what YouTube HD uses.)

So that’s the politics. But there are also technical barriers. As with all engineering, video encoding is primarily about constraints. I can think of 10 just off the top of my head:

1. CPU capacity for decoding and playing in real time. This is one of the most important constraints, since video is meant to be watched in real time. That sounds simple, but it’s incredibly complex. Every video you’ve ever watched in your entire life had to be decoded and played in real time. Otherwise it stutters and the viewing experience sucks. And we’re talking about video here; if the viewing experience sucks, there’s nothing left. Some codecs are just more complex than others, and that translates into higher system requirements to decode videos in real time. As I’ve mentioned before, some codecs are now decoded by specialized hardware. iPhones have a little chip inside them that understands H.264 Baseline Profile; without that, the iPhone would need a Core 2 Duo processor to play movies, and it would have a battery life of 10 minutes.
2. Codec compatibility. Normal people won’t download codecs or plug-ins just to watch a dog on a skateboard, or even to watch a trailer for a $100 million blockbuster. (Sadly, they will download plug-ins for porn, but those are invariably trojan horses. Or so I’ve read. Moving on…) The phone in your pocket can probably play AMR ringtones, maybe MP3 ringtones, but probably not Vorbis ringtones (unless you have an Android phone) — and you probably couldn’t download new codecs even if you wanted to (which, I must reiterate, nobody wants to). Apple and Real Networks tried for years to corner the web video market, but 99% of schmucks with a browser have Flash, so Flash video won on the web. Meanwhile, Firefox 3.1 will ship with support for the <video> element but will only support Theora and Vorbis in an Ogg container — even if your underlying operating system ships with other codecs.
3. CPU capacity for encoding. Encoding takes a long time. Taking my home movie from iMovie to a DVD used to take 8 hours on a Powerbook G4 laptop. These days you can rip a DVD movie with Xvid in 30 minutes, or you can rip it with a more complex codec with all optional features turned on, and maybe it’ll still take 8 hours. It’ll look better, but will it look 16 times better? If you’re only doing it once, maybe you don’t care. If you’re running YouTube and people are uploading 13 hours of video every minute, maybe you do. CPU cycles aren’t free; at that scale, they’re not even cheap. (That’s a real statistic, by the way; I got it from the page on the Google intranet entitled “What can we tell non-Googlers?” and it’s accurate as of September 2008.)
4. Acceptable delay between recording and delivery. In my own experience, videos I’ve uploaded on YouTube are available within minutes, which is just mind-boggling when you consider the volume. If you’re re-encoding a live stream, even a few minutes delay is probably unacceptable. That means you’ll need a faster encoder, a less complex codec, or lower quality settings.
5. Audience size. It’s not a big secret that lots of video on the Internet looks like crap. Partly that’s because the video uploader uploaded crappy video, but it’s also because most Internet videos are only watched by a few people, and it’s just not a worthwhile tradeoff to spend 8 hours re-encoding it. On the other hand, if you’re mastering a DVD that’ll get sold to 10 million people, you’ll probably use higher quality settings.
6. Screen dimensions. DVDs can’t store high-def 1920 x 1080 video because the standard doesn’t allow for it, which makes perfect sense because it was designed around the screen resolution of standard-def TVs. Blu-Ray ups the limit, but there’s still a limit. Screen sizes vary more for PC video, but there will always be practical upper limits depending on your audience.
7. My bandwidth. If you’re streaming or downloading video, some percentage of your audience is probably living in a third-world country like the United States, with limited broadband access, slow speeds, and monthly bandwidth caps. Larger file size = longer wait to play = fewer videos watched overall.
8. Your bandwidth. Obviously every bit I download is a bit that you upload, and bandwidth ain’t free either. “When I get a little money I buy bandwidth; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.” Or something like that.
9. Hard limits on storage size. As I mentioned before, physical media has upper limits on total size. Commercial DVDs can hold upwards of 9 GB, which seems like a lot but really isn’t. Blu-Ray maxes out at 50 GB, which seems like a lot but really isn’t.
10. Patents / licensing costs. Did I mention that most popular video codecs are patent-encumbered? This is why Wikimedia uses Theora exclusively, and why Firefox can ship a native Theora decoder and but won’t ever ship H.264.

…and that’s the short list.

All of which leads me to the Zen of video encoding, which is this:

There is no right or wrong. There is only what works and what doesn’t.

If you can find even one combination of tools, delivery devices, and target platforms that satisfies your constraints and still accomplishes your goals, congratulations. You’re ahead of 99% of the people who’ve tried.

The first thing you need to know about captions and subtitles is that captions and subtitles are different. The second thing you need to know about captions and subtitles is that you can safely ignore the differences unless you’re creating your own from scratch. I’m going to use the terms interchangeably throughout this article, which will probably drive you crazy if you happen to know and care about the difference.

Historically, captioning has been driven by the needs of deaf and hearing impaired consumers, and captioning technology has been designed around the technical quirks of broadcast television. In the United States, so-called “closed captions” are embedded into a part of the NTSC video source (“Line 21″) that is normally outside the viewing area on televisions. In Europe, they use a completely different system that is embeddable in the PAL video source. Over time, each new medium (VHS, DVD, and now online digital video) has dealt a blow to the accessibility gains of the previous medium. For example:

• PAL VHS tapes did not have enough bandwidth to store closed captions at all.
• DVDs have the technical capability, but producers often manage to screw it up anyway; e.g. DVDs of low-budget television shows are often released without the closed captions that accompanied the original broadcast.
• HDMI cables drop “Line 21″ closed captions altogether. If you play an NTSC DVD on an HDTV over HDMI, you’ll never see the closed captions, even if the DVD has them.

And accessible online video is just fucking hopeless. (And no, it won’t change unless new regulation forces it to change. When it comes to captioning, Joe Clark has been right longer than many of you have been alive.)

So even in broadcast television, captioning technology was fractured by different broadcast technologies in different countries. Digital video had the capability of unifying the technologies and learning from their mistakes. Of course, exactly the opposite happened. Early caption formats split along company lines; each major video software platform (RealPlayer, QuickTime, Windows Media, Adobe Flash) implemented captioning in their own way, with levels of adoption ranging from nil to zilch. At the same time, an entire subculture developed around “fan-subbing,” i.e. using captioning technology to provide translations of foreign language videos. For example, non-Japanese-speaking consumers wanted to watch Japanese anime films, so amateur translators stepped up to publish their own English captions that could be overlaid onto the original film. In the 1980s, fansubbers would actually take VHS tapes and overlay the English captions onto a new tape, which they would then (illegally) distribute. Nowadays, translators can simply publish their work on the Internet as a standalone file. English-speaking consumers can have their DVDs shipped directly from Japan, and they use software players that can overlay standalone English caption files while playing their Japanese-only DVDs. The legality of distributing these unofficial translations (even separately, in the form of standalone caption files) has been disputed in recent years, but the fansubbing community persists.

Technically, there is a lot of variation in captioning formats. At their core, captions are a combination of text to display, start and end times to display it, information about where to position the text on a screen, fonts, styling, alignment, and so on. Some captions roll up from the bottom of the screen, others simply appear and disappear at the appropriate time. Some caption formats mandate where each caption should be placed and how it should be styled; others merely suggest position and styling; others leave all display attributes entirely up to the player. Almost every conceivable combination of these variables has been tried. Some forms of media try multiple combinations at once. DVDs, for example, can have two entirely distinct forms of captioning — closed captioning (as used in NTSC broadcast television) embedded in the video stream, and one or more subtitle tracks. DVD subtitle tracks are used for many different things, including subtitles (just the words being spoken, in the same language as the audio), captions for the hearing impaired (which include extra notations of background noises and such), translations into other languages, and director’s commentary. Oh, and they’re stored on the DVD as images, not text, so the end user has no control over fonts or font size.

Beyond DVDs, most caption formats store the captions as text, which inevitably raises the issue of character encoding. Some caption formats explicitly specify the character encoding, others only allow UTF-8, others don’t specify any encoding at all. On the player side, most players respect the character encoding if present (but may only support specific encodings); in its absence, some players assume UTF-8, some guess the encoding, and some allow the user to override the encoding. Obviously standalone caption files can be in any format, but if you want to embed your captions as a track within a video container, your choices are limited to the caption formats that the video container supports.

And remember when I said that there were a metric fuck-ton of audio codecs? Forget that. There are an imperial fuck-ton of caption formats (i.e. multiply by 9/5 and add 32). Here is a partial list of caption formats, taken from the list of formats supported by Subtitle Workshop, which I used to caption my short-lived video podcast series:

Adobe Encore DVD, Advanced SubStation Alpha, AQTitle, Captions 32, Captions DAT, Captions DAT Text, Captions Inc., Cheetah, CPC-600, DKS Subtitle Format, DVD Junior, DVD Studio Pro, DVD Subtitle System, DVDSubtitle, FAB Subtitler, IAuthor Script, Inscriber CG, JACOSub 2.7+, Karaoke Lyrics LRC, Karaoke Lyrics VKT, KoalaPlayer, MacSUB, MicroDVD, MPlayer, MPlayer2, MPSub, OVR Script, Panimator, Philips SVCD Designer, Phoenix Japanimation Society, Pinnacle Impression, PowerDivX, PowerPixel, QuickTime Text, RealTime, SAMI Captioning, Sasami Script, SBT, Sofni, Softitler RTF, SonicDVD Creator, Sonic Scenarist, Spruce DVDMaestro, Spruce Subtitle File, Stream SubText Player, Stream SubText Script, SubCreator 1.x, SubRip, SubSonic, SubStation Alpha, SubViewer 1.0, SubViewer 2.0, TMPlayer, Turbo Titler, Ulead DVD Workshop 2.0, ViPlay Subtitle File, ZeroG.

Which of these formats are important? The answer will depend on whom you ask, and more specifically, how you’re planning to distribute your video. This series is primarily focused on videos delivered as files to be played on PCs or other computing devices, so my choices here will reflect that. These are some of the most well-supported caption formats:

• SubRip
• SubStation Alpha
• MPEG-4 Timed Text
• SAMI
• SMIL

SubRip

SubRip is the AVI of caption formats, in the sense that its basic functionality is supported everywhere but various people have tried to extend it in mostly incompatible ways and the result is a huge mess. As a standalone file, SubRip captions are most commonly seen with a .srt extension. SubRip is a text-based format which can include font, size, and position information, as well as a limited set of HTML formatting tags, although most of these features are poorly supported. Its “official” specification is a doom9 forum post from 2004. Most players assume that .srt files are encoded in Windows-1252 (what Windows programs frequently call “ANSI”), although some can detect and switch to UTF-8 encoding automatically.

Because .srt files are so often published separately from the video files they describe, the most common use case is to put your .srt file in the same directory as your video file and give them the same name (up to the file extensions). But it is also possible to embed SubRip captions directly into AVI files with AVI-Mux GUI, into MKV files with mkvmerge, and into MP4 files with MP4Box.

You can play SubRip captions in Windows Media Player or other DirectShow-based video players after installing VSFilter; in QuickTime after installing Perian; on Linux, both mplayer and VLC support it natively.

SubStation Alpha

SubStation Alpha and its successor, Advanced SubStation Alpha, are the preferred caption formats of the fansubbing community. As standalone files, they are commonly seen with .ssa or .ass extensions. They have a spec longer than three paragraphs. They are actually miniature scripting languages. A .ass file contains a series of commands to control position, scrolling, animation, font, size, scaling, letter spacing, borders, text outline, text shadow, alignment, and so on; and a series of time-coded events for displaying text given the current styling parameters. It has support for multiple character encodings.

The playing requirements for SubStation Alpha captions are almost identical to SubRip. The same plugins are required for Windows and Mac OS X. On Linux, mplayer prides itself on having the most complete SSA/ASS implementation.

MPEG-4 Timed Text

a.k.a. “MPEG-4 Part 17,” a.k.a. ISO 14496-17, MPEG-4 Timed Text (hereafter “MP4TT”) is the one and only caption format for the MP4 container. It is not a file format; it is only defined in terms of a track within an MP4 container. As such, it can not be embedded in any other video container, and it can not exist as a separate file. (Note: the last sentence was a lie; the MPEG-4 Timed Text format is really the 3GPP Timed Text format, and it can very much be embedded in a 3GPP container. What I meant to say is that the format can not be embedded in any of the other popular video container formats like AVI, MKV, or OGG. I could go on about the subtle differences between MPEG-4 Timed Text in an MP4 container and 3GPP Timed Text in a 3GPP container, but it would just make you cry, and besides, technical accuracy is for pussies.)

MP4TT defines detailed information on text positioning, fonts, styles, scrolling, and text justification. These details are encoded into the track at authoring time, and can not be changed by the end user’s video player. The most readable description of its features is actually the documentation for GPAC, an open source implementation of much of the MPEG-4 specification (including MP4TT). Since MP4TT doesn’t define a text-based serialization, GPAC invented one for their own use; since their format is designed to capture all the possible information in an MP4TT track, it turns out to be an easy way to read about all of MP4TT’s features.

MP4Box, part of the GPAC project, can take an .srt file and convert it into a MPEG-4 Timed Text track and embed it in an existing MP4 file. It can also reverse the process — extract a Timed Text track from an MP4 file and output a .srt file.

On Mac OS X, QuickTime supports MP4TT tracks within an MP4 container, but only if you rename the file from .mp4 to .3gp or .m4v. I shit you not. (On the plus side, changing the file extension will allow you to sync compatible video to an iPod or iPhone, which will actually display the captions. Still not kidding.) On Windows, any DirectShow-based video player (such as Windows Media Player or Media Player Classic) supports MP4TT tracks once you install Haali Media Splitter. On Linux, VLC has supported MP4TT tracks for several years.

SAMI

SAMI was Microsoft’s first attempt to create a captioning format for PC video files (as opposed to broadcast television or DVDs). As such, it is natively supported by Microsoft video players, including Windows Media Player, without the need for third-party plugins. It has a specification on MSDN. It is a text-based format that supports a large subset of HTML formatting tags. SAMI captions are almost always embedded in an ASF container, along with Windows Media video and Windows Media audio.

Don’t use SAMI for new projects; it has been superceded by SMIL. For historical purposes, you may enjoy reading about creating SAMI captions and embedding them in an ASF container, as long as you promise to never, ever try it at home.

SMIL

SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language) is not actually a captioning format. It is “an XML-based language that allows authors to write interactive multimedia presentations.” It also happens to have a timing and synchronization module that can, in theory, be used to display text on a series of moving pictures. That is to say, if you think of SMIL as a way to provide captions for a video, you’re doing it wrong. You need to invert your thinking — your video and your captions are each merely components of a SMIL presentation. SMIL captions are not embedded into a video container; the video and its captions are referenced from a SMIL document.

SMIL is a W3C standard; the most recent revision, SMIL 3.0, was just published in December 2008. If you printed out the SMIL 3.0 specification on US-Letter-sized paper, it would weigh in at 395 pages. So don’t do that.

QuickTime supports a subset of SMIL 1.0. WebAIM provides a nice tutorial on using SMIL to add captions to a QuickTime movie.

Further reading

• Multimedia Accessibility (Joe Clark)
• Web Captioning Overview (WebAIM)
• Subtitle formats explained (AfterDawn)
• How to play subtitles (OpenSubtitles)
• Subtitle (captioning)
• Closed captioning
• MP4 FAQ (doom9)
• Adding/editing captions on YouTube videos

Unless you’re going to stick to films made before 1927 or so, you’re going to want an audio track. A future article will talk about how to pick the audio codec that’s right for you, but for now I just want to introduce the concept and describe the playing field. (This information is likely to go out of date quickly; future readers, be aware that this was written in December 2008.)

Like video codecs, audio codecs are algorithms by which an audio stream is encoded. Like video codecs, there are lossy and lossless audio codecs. Today’s article will only deal with lossy audio codecs. Actually, it’s even narrower than that, because there are different categories of lossy audio codecs. Audio is used in many places where video is not (telephony, for example), and there is an entire category of audio codecs optimized for encoding speech. You wouldn’t rip a music CD with these codecs, because the result would sound like a 4-year-old singing into a speakerphone. But you would use them in an Asterisk PBX, because bandwidth is precious, and these codecs can compress human speech into a fraction of the size of general-purpose codecs.

And that’s all I have to say about speech-optimized audio codecs. Onward…

As I mentioned in part 2: lossy video codecs, when you “watch a video,” your player software is doing several things at once:

1. Interpreting the container format
2. Decoding the video stream
3. Decoding the audio stream and sending the sound to your speakers
4. Possibly decoding the subtitle stream as well. (Tomorrow’s article will be all about subtitle formats! I can hardly wait!)

The audio codec specifies how to do #3 — decoding the audio stream and turning it into digital waveforms that your speakers then turn into sound. As with video codecs, there are all sorts of tricks to minimize the amount of information stored in the audio stream. And since we’re talking about lossy audio codecs, information is being lost during the recording → encoding → decoding → listening lifecycle. Different audio codecs throw away different things, but they all have the same purpose: to trick your ears into not noticing the parts that are missing.

One concept that audio has that video does not is channels. We’re sending sound to your speakers, right? Well, how many speakers do you have? If you’re sitting at your computer, you may only have two: one on the left and one on the right. My desktop has three: left, right, and one more on the floor. So-called “surround sound” systems can have six or more speakers, strategically placed around the room. Each speaker is fed a particular channel of the original recording. The theory is that you can sit in the middle of the six speakers, literally surrounded by six separate channels of sound, and your brain synthesizes them and feels like you’re in the middle of the action. Does it work? A multi-billion-dollar industry seems to think so.

Most general-purpose audio codecs can handle two channels of sound. During recording, the sound is split into left and right channels; during encoding, both channels are stored in the same audio stream; during decoding, both channels are decoded and each is sent to the appropriate speaker. Some audio codecs can handle more than two channels, and they keep track of which channel is which and so your player can send the right sound to the right speaker.

There are lots of audio codecs. Did I say there were lots of video codecs? Forget that. There are a metric fuck-ton of audio codecs. These are the ones you need to know about:

• MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3
• Advanced Audio Coding
• Windows Media Audio
• Vorbis
• Dolby Digital
• Digital Theater System

MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3

MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3…colloquially known as “MP3.” If you haven’t heard of MP3s, I don’t know what to do with you. Walmart sells portable music players and calls them “MP3 players.” Walmart. Anyway…

MP3s can contain up to 2 channels of sound. They can be encoded at different bitrates: 64 kbps, 128 kbps, 192 kbps, and a variety of others from 32 to 320. Higher bitrates mean larger file sizes and better quality audio, although the ratio of audio quality to bitrate is not linear. (128 kbs sounds more than twice as good as 64 kbs, but 256 kbs doesn’t sound twice as good as 128 kbs.) Furthermore, the MP3 format allows for variable bitrate encoding, which means that some parts of the encoded stream are compressed more than others. For example, silence between notes can be encoded at a very low bitrate, then the bitrate can spike up a moment later when multiple instruments start playing a complex chord. MP3s can also be encoded with a constant bitrate, which, unsurprisingly, is called constant bitrate encoding.

The MP3 standard doesn’t define exactly how to encode MP3s (although it does define exactly how to decode them); different encoders use different psychoacoustic models that produce wildly different results, but are all decodable by the same players. The open source LAME project is the best free encoder, and arguably the best encoder period for all but the lowest bitrates.

The MP3 format was standardized in 1991 and is patent-encumbered, which explains why Linux can’t play MP3 files out of the box. Pretty much every portable music player supports standalone MP3 files, and MP3 audio streams can be embedded in any video container. Adobe Flash can play both standalone MP3 files and MP3 audio streams within an MP4 video container.

Advanced Audio Coding

Advanced Audio Coding…affectionately known as “AAC.” Standardized in 1997, it lurched into prominence when Apple chose it as their default format for the iTunes Store. Originally, all AAC files “bought” from the iTunes Store were encrypted with Apple’s proprietary DRM scheme, called FairPlay. Many songs in the iTunes Store are now available as unprotected AAC files, which Apple calls “iTunes Plus” because it sounds so much better than calling everything else “iTunes Minus.” The AAC format is patent-encumbered; licensing rates are available online.

AAC was designed to provide better sound quality than MP3 at the same bitrate, and it can encode audio at any bitrate. (MP3 is limited to a fixed number of bitrates, with an upper bound of 320 kbs.) AAC can encode up to 48 channels of sound, although in practice no one does that. The AAC format also differs from MP3 in defining multiple profiles, in much the same way as H.264, and for the same reasons. The “low-complexity” profile is designed to be playable in real-time on devices with limited CPU power, while higher profiles offer better sound quality at the same bitrate at the expense of slower encoding and decoding.

All current Apple products, including iPods, AppleTV, and QuickTime support certain profiles of AAC in standalone audio files and in audio streams in an MP4 video container. Adobe Flash supports all profiles of AAC in MP4, as do the open source mplayer and VLC video players. For encoding, the FAAC library is the open source option; support for it is a compile-time option in mencoder and ffmpeg. (I’ll dive into all the different encoding tools in a future article.)

Windows Media Audio

Windows Media Audio…a.k.a. “WMA.” As you might guess from the name, Windows Media Audio was developed by Microsoft. The acronym “WMA” has historically referred to many different things: a lossless audio codec (“WMA Lossless”), a speech-optimized codec (“WMA Voice”), and several different lossy audio codecs (“WMA 1,” “WMA 2,” “WMA 7,” “WMA 8,” “WMA 9,” and “WMA Pro”). It is also (incorrectly) used to refer to the Advanced Systems Format, because WMA-encoded audio streams are usually embedded in an ASF container. Roughly speaking, the lossy audio codecs (WMA 1-9) compete with MP3 and low-complexity AAC; WMA Lossless competes with Apple Lossless and FLAC; WMA Pro competes with high-complexity AAC, Vorbis, AC-3, and DTS.

All the different codecs under the “WMA” brand are playable with Windows Media Player, which comes pre-installed on desktops and laptops running Microsoft Windows XP and Vista. Portable devices like the Zune and the ironically named “PlaysForSure” devices can play WMA 1-9; stores that allow you to “purchase” WMA files generally encrypt them with a Microsoft-proprietary DRM scheme. The open source ffmpeg project can play WMA 1-9, and Flip4Mac offers a commercial QuickTime component to encode and decode WMA audio on Mac OS X.

WMA 1-9 support up to 2 channels of sound; WMA Pro supports up to 8 channels of sound. All WMA formats are patent-encumbered; licensing information is available from Microsoft.

Vorbis

Vorbis…known to many as “Ogg Vorbis,” although for some reason that pisses off both Ogg and Vorbis advocates. (Technically, “Ogg” is a container format, and Vorbis audio streams can be embedded in other containers.) Vorbis is not encumbered by any known patents and is therefore supported out-of-the-box by all major Linux distributions and by portable devices running the open source Rockbox firmware. Mozilla Firefox 3.1 will support Vorbis audio files in an Ogg container, or Ogg videos with a Vorbis audio track. Android mobile phones can also play standalone Vorbis audio files. Vorbis audio streams are usually embedded in an Ogg container, but they can also be embedded in an MP4 or MKV container (or, with some hacking, in AVI).

There are open source Vorbis encoders and decoders, including OggConvert (encoder), ffmpeg (decoder), aoTuV (encoder), and libvorbis (decoder). There are also QuickTime components for Mac OS X and DirectShow filters for Windows.

Vorbis supports an arbitrary number of sound channels.

Dolby Digital

Dolby Digital…a.k.a. “AC-3.” AC-3 was developed by Dolby Laboratories. AC-3 is most well-known for being a mandatory format in the DVD standard; all DVD players must be able to decode AC-3 audio streams. It is also mandatory for Blu-Ray players, and many digital TV broadcasts send AC-3 audio streams as well. AC-3 supports up to 6 channels of sound and bitrates of up to 640 kbps, although its most popular application — audio on DVDs — is officially limited to 448 kbps. (Blu-Ray discs may use the maximum 640 kbps.)

There are open source encoders and decoders for AC-3, including liba52 (decoding), AC3Filter (decoding), and Aften (encoding). ffmpeg has a compile-time option to include liba52, which will allow all ffmpeg-based players and plugin chains (like GStreamer) to play AC-3 audio streams. However, the AC-3 format is patent-encumbered; licensing is brokered by Dolby Laboratories.

AC-3 is rarely seen in standalone audio files; it is designed to be embedded in a video container. Other than DVDs and Blu-Ray discs (which use a video container format I haven’t talked about yet), you can embed AC-3 audio streams in MKV, AVI, and — just standardized earlier this year — in MP4 files (discussion). Apple’s AppleTV set-top box is the only hardware device I know of that supports AC-3 in MP4; you can encode AppleTV-compatible AC3-in-MP4 videos with HandBrake, or manually insert AC-3 audio into existing MP4 files with this Windows-only fork of mp4creator.

Digital Theater System

Digital Theater System…a.k.a. “DTS.” As you might guess from the name, DTS is designed for real-life movie theaters. Like WMA, “DTS” is a brand name for a family of different audio formats. The “core” DTS format supports up to six channels; later extensions like DTS-HD support up to eight channels. There is also DTS-HD Master Audio, a lossless variant by the same company. Core DTS is designed for high bitrates (up to 1536 kbps, which is virtually indistinguishable from being there in the first place). DTS-HD Master Audio bitrates can go even higher, although at some point even audiophiles will wonder why they should bother.

Core DTS was not originally part of the DVD specification, so early DVD players did not support it. Most recent DVD players support natively decoding core DTS audio or passing the audio stream through to an external speaker system which decodes it, but relatively few DVDs include a DTS stream due to size constraints. Core DTS is a mandatory part of the Blu-Ray specification, and many Blu-Ray discs include a DTS audio track — sometimes the exact same stream that was originally played in the movie theater. (DTS-HD Master Audio is an optional part of the Blu-Ray specification, but few Blu-Ray discs include it due to — you guessed it — size constraints.)

DTS is patent-encumbered; licensing is brokered by DTS, Inc.

And so forth and so on…
As with everything else in this series, this article barely scratches the surface. (Really!) If you like, you can read about other audio codecs: ATRAC, Musepack, MP2, RealAudio, AMR, ADPCM, and so forth and so on. Wikipedia has a comparison of common audio codecs, HydrogenAudio has lots of technical details, and wiki.multimedia.cx is always your friend too.

The most important consideration in video encoding is choosing a video codec. A future article will talk about how to pick the one that’s right for you, but for now I just want to introduce the concept and describe the playing field. (This information is likely to go out of date quickly; future readers, be aware that this was written in December 2008.)

When you talk about “watching a video,” you’re probably talking about a combination of one video stream, one audio stream, and possibly some subtitles or captions. But you probably don’t have two different files; you just have “the video.” Maybe it’s an AVI file, or an MP4 file. These are just container formats, like a ZIP file that contains multiple kinds of files within it. The container format defines how to store the video and audio streams in a single file (and subtitles too, if any).

When you “watch a video,” your video player is doing several things at once:

1. Interpreting the container format to find out which video and audio tracks are available, and how they are stored within the file so that it can find the data it needs to decode next
2. Decoding the video stream and displaying a series of images on the screen
3. Decoding the audio stream and sending the sound to your speakers
4. Possibly decoding the subtitle stream as well, and showing and hiding phrases at the appropriate times while playing the video

A video codec is an algorithm by which a video stream is encoded, i.e. it specifies how to do #2 above. Your video player decodes the video stream according to the video codec, then displays a series of images, or “frames,” on the screen. Most modern video codecs use all sorts of tricks to minimize the amount of information required to display one frame after the next. For example, instead of storing each individual frame (like a screenshot), they will only store the differences between frames. Most videos don’t actually change all that much from one frame to the next, so this allows for high compression rates, which results in smaller file sizes. (There are many, many other complicated tricks too, which I’ll dive into in a future article.)

There are lossy and lossless video codecs; today’s article will only deal with lossy codecs. A lossy video codec means that information is being irretrievably lost during encoding. Like copying an audio cassette tape, you’re losing information about the source video, and degrading the quality, every time you encode. Instead of the “hiss” of an audio cassette, a re-re-re-encoded video may look blocky, especially during scenes with a lot of motion. (Actually, this can happen even if you encode straight from the original source, if you choose a poor video codec or pass it the wrong set of parameters.) On the bright side, lossy video codecs can offer amazing compression rates, and many offer ways to “cheat” and smooth over that blockiness during playback, to make the loss less noticeable to the human eye.

There are tons of video codecs. Today I’ll discuss five modern lossy video codecs: MPEG-4 ASP, H.264, VC-1, Theora, and Dirac.

MPEG-4 ASP

a.k.a. “MPEG-4 Advanced Simple Profile.” MPEG-4 ASP was developed by the MPEG group and standardized in 2001. You may have heard of DivX, Xvid, or 3ivx; these are all competing implementations of the MPEG-4 ASP standard. Xvid is open source; DivX and 3ivx are closed source. The company behind DivX has had some mainstream success in branding “DivX” as synonymous with “MPEG-4 ASP.” For example, this “DivX-certified” DVD player can actually play most MPEG-4 ASP videos in an AVI container, even if they were created with a competing encoder. (To confuse things even further, the company behind DivX has now created their own container format.)

MPEG-4 ASP is patent-encumbered; licensing is brokered through the MPEG LA group. MPEG-4 ASP video can be embedded in most popular container formats, including AVI, MP4, and MKV.

H.264

a.k.a. “MPEG-4 part 10,” a.k.a. “MPEG-4 AVC,” a.k.a. “MPEG-4 Advanced Video Coding.” H.264 was also developed by the MPEG group and standardized in 2003. It aims to provide a single codec for low-bandwidth, low-CPU devices (cell phones); high-bandwidth, high-CPU devices (modern desktop computers); and everything in between. To accomplish this, the H.264 standard is split into “profiles,” which each define a set of optional features that trade complexity for file size. Higher profiles use more optional features, offer better visual quality at smaller file sizes, take longer to encode, and require more CPU power to decode in real-time.

To give you a rough idea of the range of profiles, Apple’s iPhone supports Baseline profile, the AppleTV set-top box supports Baseline and Main profiles, and Adobe Flash on a desktop PC supports Baseline, Main, and High profiles. YouTube (owned by Google, my employer) now uses H.264 to encode high-definition videos, playable through Adobe Flash; YouTube also provides H.264-encoded video to mobile devices, including Apple’s iPhone and phones running Google’s Android mobile operating system. Also, H.264 is one of the video codecs mandated by the Blu-Ray specification; Blu-Ray discs that use it generally use the High profile.

Most non-PC devices that play H.264 video (including iPhones and standalone Blu-Ray players) actually do the decoding on a dedicated chip, since their main CPUs are nowhere near powerful enough to decode the video in real-time. Recent high-end desktop graphics cards also support decoding H.264 in hardware. There are a number of competing H.264 encoders, including the open source x264 library. The H.264 standard is patent-encumbered; licensing is brokered through the MPEG LA group. H.264 video can be embedded in most popular container formats, including MP4 (used primarily by Apple’s iTunes Store) and MKV (used primarily by video pirates).

VC-1

VC-1 evolved from Microsoft’s WMV9 codec and was standardized in 2006. It is primarily used and promoted by Microsoft for high-definition video, although, like H.264, it has a range of profiles to trade complexity for file size. Also like H.264, it is mandated by the Blu-Ray specification, and all Blu-Ray players are required to be able to decode it. The VC-1 codec is patent-encumbered, with licensing brokered through the MPEG LA group.

Wikipedia has a brief technical comparison of VC-1 and H.264; Microsoft has their own comparison; Multimedia.cx has a pretty Venn diagram outlining the similarities and differences. Multimedia.cx also discusses the technical features of VC-1. I also found this history of VC-1 and H.264 to be interesting (as well as this rebuttal).

VC-1 is designed to be container-independent, although it is most often embedded in an ASF container. An open source decoder for VC-1 video was a 2006 Google Summer of Code project, and the resulting code was added to the multi-faceted ffmpeg library.

Theora

Theora evolved from the VP3 codec and has subsequently been developed by the Xiph.org Foundation. Theora is a royalty-free codec and is not encumbered by any known patents other than the original VP3 patents, which have been irrevocably licensed royalty-free. Although the standard has been “frozen” since 2004, the Theora project (which includes an open source reference encoder and decoder) only hit 1.0 in November 2008.

Theora video can be embedded in any container format, although it is most often seen in an Ogg container. All major Linux distributions support Theora out-of-the-box, and Mozilla Firefox 3.1 will include native support for Theora video in an Ogg container. And by “native”, I mean “available on all platforms without platform-specific plugins.” You can also play Theora video on Windows or on Mac OS X after installing Xiph.org’s open source decoder software.

The reference encoder included in Theora 1.0 is widely criticized for being slow and poor quality, but Theora 1.1 will include a new encoder that takes better advantage of Theora’s features, while staying backward-compatible with current decoders. (Info: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, source code.)

Dirac

Dirac was developed by the BBC to provide a royalty-free alternative to H.264 and VC-1 that the BBC could use to stream high-definition television content in Great Britain. Like H.264, Dirac aims to provide a single codec for the full spectrum of very low- and very high-bandwidth streaming. Dirac is not encumbered by any known patents, and there are two open source implementations, dirac-research (the BBC’s reference implementation) and Schroedinger (optimized for speed).

The Dirac standard was only finalized in 2008, so there is very little mainstream use yet, although the BBC did use it internally during the 2008 Olympics. Dirac-encoded video tracks can be embedded in several popular container formats, including MP4, Ogg, MKV, and AVI. VLC 0.9.2 (released in September 2008) can play Dirac-encoded video within an Ogg or MP4 container.

And on and on…
Of course, this is only scratching the surface of all the available video codecs. Video encoding goes way back, but my focus in this series is on the present and near-future, not the past. If you like, you can read about MPEG-2 (used in DVDs), MPEG-1 (used in Video CDs), older versions of Microsoft’s WMV family, Sorenson, Indeo, and Cinepak.

You may think of video files as “AVI files” or “MP4 files.” In reality, “AVI” and “MP4″ are just container formats. Just like a ZIP file can contain any sort of file within it, video container formats only define how to store things within them, not what kinds of data are stored. (It’s a little more complicated than that, because not all video streams are compatible with all container formats, but never mind that for now.) A video file usually contains multiple tracks — a video track (without audio), one or more audio tracks (without video), one or more subtitle/caption tracks, and so forth. Tracks are usually interrelated; an audio track contains markers within it to help synchronize the audio with the video, and a subtitle track contains time codes marking when each phrase should be displayed. Individual tracks can have metadata, such as the aspect ratio of a video track, or the language of an audio or subtitle track. Containers can also have metadata, such as the title of the video itself, cover art for the video, episode numbers (for television shows), and so on.

There are lots of video container formats. Some of the most popular include:

• MPEG 4, usually with an .mp4 extension. The MPEG 4 container is based on Apple’s older QuickTime container (.mov). Movie trailers on Apple’s website still use the older QuickTime container, but movies that you rent from iTunes are delivered in an MPEG 4 container, although Apple likes to use the .m4v file extension instead of .mp4.
• Advanced Systems Format, usually with an .asf or .wmv extension. ASF was invented by and is primarily used by Microsoft in their Windows Media Player and their handheld Zune media device.
• Flash Video, usually with an .flv extension. Flash Video is, unsurprisingly, used by Adobe Flash. Prior to Flash 9.0.60.184 (a.k.a. Flash Player 9 Update 3), this was the only container format that Flash supported. More recent versions of Flash also support the MPEG 4 container.
• Matroska, usually with an .mkv extension. Matroska is an open standard, unencumbered by any known patents, and there are open source reference implementations for doing everything you might want to do with MKV files. It is primarily used by Free Software-loving hippies and, oddly enough, pirates who rip high-definition movies and television shows and release them in The Scene.
• Ogg, usually with an .ogv extension. Like Matroska, Ogg is an open standard, open-source-friendly, and unencumbered by any known patents. Like Matroska, it is used primarily by Free Software-loving hippies, but that may begin to change once Mozilla ships their Firefox 3.1 browser. Firefox 3.1 will support — natively, without platform-specific plugins — the Ogg container format, the Ogg video codec (Theora), and the Ogg audio codec (Vorbis). On the desktop, Ogg is supported out-of-the-box by all major Linux distributions, and you can use it on Mac and Windows by installing the QuickTime components or DirectShow filters, respectively.
• Audio Video Interleave, usually with an .avi extension. Also known as “the crappy, obsolete format that just won’t die.” The AVI container format was invented by Microsoft in a simpler time when the fact that computers could play video at all was considered pretty amazing. It does not officially support many of the features of more recent container formats; it does not officially support any sort of video metadata; it does not even officially support most of the modern video and audio codecs in use today. Over time, various companies have tried to extend it in generally incompatible ways to support this or that, and it is still the default container format for popular encoders such as MEncoder.

This is the briefest of overviews; there are literally dozens of other container formats in use today. DV, NUT, 3GP… the list goes on and on. And there are many others littering the landscape of failed or obsolete technologies, from companies that tried to corner the nascent digital video market by defining their own formats.

Wikipedia has a good roundup of video container formats.

While there is no silver bullet when it comes to ensuring the success of an online community, recent research by Sequentia Environics on Digg and Reddit, two of the most prolific online communities, have highlighted the following elements as necessary for designing or managing a community that will thrive:

1. Optional anonymity. The ability for users to remain private helps shift the focus onto issues rather than individuals. Anonymity is also critical to help promote collective action within a community setting.
2. Democracy. The basic need for community is driven by a desire for collective action and a change in the balance of power.
3. Earned authority. While authority is tolerated in communities, it must be earned rather than appointed.
4. A strong sense of purpose. Every community needs a purpose or collective agenda, whether implicit or explicit. This purpose needs to go beyond products, services and tactical activities.
5. Transparency in operation and intent. The heart of an online community involves its relationship to a countercultural agenda. Transparency in operation forms a critical piece of that approach.
6. Inclusive ownership with scale. Every community should provide a mechanism for members to take ownership of certain areas of interest. This is especially important as a community begins to grow, as it allows for the development of collective identities.

To read more, download the report from Sequentia Environics.

According to Facebook, 30 billion pieces of content (web links, news blogs etc) are shared each month on the social network, with no sign of slowing.

But how can you manage the flood of information? Here’s is a list of tools and services available, which help you manage your websites and blogs. If I’ve missed any obvious ones, or indeed obscure ones, please feel free to leave a comment.

• Blog Grader shows you how effective your blog is at marketing your brand and see how you stack up against other blogs out there.
• Blogtronix is an advanced social networking tool and micro-blogging site, which helps people in a community, company or group exchange short multimedia messages across the web. Blogtronix is best suited for internal communities, such as companies who are looking to help their employees connect, ask and answer questions, and share work and content.
• Disqus is a social-commenting tool. Disqus allows your readers to include media such as YouTube videos in their comments, receive alerts when their posts have been responded to, and reply directly from their email.
• FeedBurner is a popular analytics package, now owned by Google, which allows you to analyse, optimise, publicise and monetise your RSS feeds.
• Google Analytics, although not specifically for social media, it can provide invaluable insight into which social media channels are driving traffic to your site. In the latest version Google now provide scripts and reports to track Facebook Likes, Twitter “tweet this” and Google +1.
• IntelBuilder Social Media Platform is a service that allows you to manage your website or blog by automatically updating your social networks when you update your website content, distributing to RSS feeds, submitting to bookmarking sites and tracking your readership.
• IntenseDebate, much like Disqus, is a comment system that enhances and encourages conversation on your blog or website.
• Janrain is a tool that allows visitors to your site to easily share your content across their social networks. Janrain also lets visitors sign in to your site with their Facebook, Twitter or other social accounts and tracks their behaviour to help you provide a personalised experience for each visitor.
• Sharetronix is run on the same platform to Blogtronix but is more suited to external communities. In addition to being a micro-blogging site, Sharetronix integrates with Twitter, Facebook and RSS feeds, allows for one-click publishing and is SEO optimised so that your content will be easily found by interested parties.
• Twitterfeed is a tool that monitors your RSS feed and updates your Facebook and Twitter accounts when you have a new blog post.

Here’s is a list of tools and services available, which help you create and integrate content. If I’ve missed any obvious ones, or indeed obscure ones, please feel free to leave a comment.

• Context Optional is best for marketers with multiple team members, brands or geographies, this platform helps develop applications for Facebook and Twitter communities and monitor and analyse the conversations taking place on these platforms.
• Crowd Factory’s Social Campaign lets you embed social elements into any marketing experience including videos, emails, ads and more.
• ePrize allows you to create promotions specifically tailored to your social media channels.
• Involver Applications, the creator of the popular “Get Satisfaction” website, Involver provides applications that allow you to easily add polls, RSS feeds, quizzes, music, contests and more to your Facebook or Twitter pages.
• KickApps is a self-service website that allows you to develop and manage social content such as branded communities, widgets, 3rd party plug-ins and social applications.
• Lithium Community Platform can be used to create a social community on your website that provides a place for your brand advocates to converse, tools to spread the word about your product through social channels and generate ideas for innovation.
• North Social can be used to enhance your Facebook page by creating custom applications that allow your brand to do things such as integrate with Google Maps or Yelp, post HD videos, run sweepstakes and more.
• Sprout (not to be confused with Sprout Social) is a cloud based service which creates interactive ads and applications perfect for bringing social content to the web and mobile devices.
• Storify is a tool that lets you collect photos, videos, tweets and other social media content to create a single, integrated story that you can embed anywhere.
• Wildfire Interactive is a web application that helps you to integrate your traditional promotions such as sweepstakes, contests and giveaways with interactive sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

While participating in social media is good, it can be difficult to track how you’re performing. Are you actually reaching your target market? How is your brand perceived? What are people saying about you and your products?

In a previous post, I talked about Quantitative Social Media Monitoring and Qualitative Social Media Monitoring. To continue along the same theme, here’s is a list of tools and services available for comprehensive social media monitoring. If I’ve missed any obvious ones, or indeed obscure ones, please feel free to leave a comment.

• Avenue Social does a lot! In addition to monitoring and publishing to your social networks, Avenue Social builds Facebook applications, fan pages and mobile apps, and analyses the effects of all of your social media efforts.
• Direct Message Lab helps you not only manage multiple social media channels, but it also allows you to create and monitor campaigns across social networks, desktop and social media applications, and mobile.
• engage121 is a comprehensive platform that provides monitoring, one-click publishing, follower and fan management and analytics. It has a customisable interface and with packages tailored for small to medium businesses, corporations, enterprises or local stores.
• Jive Social Media Engagement is a service that pulls data from over 100 million online sources to find out the buzz about your brand. Within the same console you can aggregate and respond to Facebook and Twitter posts, create team workflows, and access key metrics and analytics.
• MediaFunnel is a platform that aggregates, manages and monitors your social media activity, with a focus on hard numbers and measurable outcomes. They also have a few interesting features including their Tweet-to-Lead tool, which allows you to turn all tweets into new Salesforce leads and a mobile component that allows you to receive SMS updates or even text updates to your accounts.
• MutualMind is a service that allows you to listen to what people are saying about your brand, but cuts out all of the noise that may be irrelevant to you. MutualMind helps you manage your campaign with one-click publishing and a framework for multiple team members through which to coordinate.
• Pop.to has a social dashboard, segmentation tools, widgets, social gestures, feed marketing and analytics all in one place.
• Postling is good for small businesses. Postling helps organise and update your social media accounts, alerts you when your accounts are active, searches Facebook, Twitter, Yelp and more to see who is talking about your brand.
• ScrOOn allows you to monitor and manage multiple social media channels, add social components like customer reviews, games and surveys to your existing digital properties and drive people from your social media accounts to your website.
• Sendible is another tool that does it all from aggregating posts, monitoring sentiment, and analysing results. Sendible sets itself apart with their integration with SMS and email newsletters.
• Shoutlet is a one-click publisher that helps you throughout the whole process, from building your presence, engaging with your consumers to measuring your impact. Shoutlet also features e-commerce for Facebook, email marketing and mobile solutions.
• SocialVolt helps create and monitor campaigns and social buzz, manages workflow amongst your team, and helps identify and organise influencers based on what channels they are active in and their interests.
• Sprinklr is professional-grade social media management company. Sprinklr is a one click publisher, social listening tool and analytics team all rolled into one. They help agencies, B2C companies and B2B companies identify prospects, acquire loyal customers, measure social impact and optimise social media campaigns.
• Strongmail Social Studio is a platform that helps you identify and leverage your brand advocates and create direct response campaigns on Facebook and Twitter. Additionally, they have a proprietary social sharing tool that makes it easier for your fans, followers, email subscribers and website visitors to get the word out about your brand.