I know it has probably been blogged to death, what is up with online video? I remember in 1998 when RealPlayer G2 came out. The video quality was very good, even over 56K DIAL UP! Fast forward 10 years later, computers are about 100 times faster, broadband is common (100 to 1000 times faster), and online video looks the same, or even a little worse.
Flash video quality, frankly, sucks. It was designed to make web pages interactive, not deliver video. Windows media sucks at buffering and real time streaming. Quicktime is still way too fat for practical streaming. Realvideo looks great, but the company behind it loves gloatware. Bittorrents are not meant for online streaming and are hit and miss. Come on people!
My Netflix streaming movies vary from almost DVD quality to VHS, with no rhyme or reason why one transfer looks better than another. YouTube reminds me of when televisions first came out and everyone is huddling around a 4″ screen to watch blurry video. What’s the point of playing it full screen? On a 21″ monitor it looks like garbage. Even the ‘high quality’ setting still looks worse than what I saw in 1998.
This is 2008. When is decent streaming video going to arrive? I think DVD’s/BlueRay have quite a bit of life ahead of them.