why do so many gay paysites have such lousy video quality?

okay, i just gotta bitch here. lately more and more straight sites have better and better video quality. even the low quality videos on most of the straight paysites i review have a bitrate of at least in the neighborhood of 500k. yet on SO many gay sites i review, i see bitrates of 300k or LESS for broadband - and while most straight paysites are offering 480x360 or bigger for their best quality videos, a staggering amount of gay sites offer 320x240 or even smaller.

what's up with that? bandwidth is cheap and members might reasonably expect bigger videos than 320x240 now that most people are on 1024x768. i mean, 320x240 is tiny to a member using a higher resolution setting - and it wasn't that big on an 800x600 monitor.

some of the sites seem to have lower quality, smallish videos because they hope to sell their videos - but that seems rather unfair to affiliates AND members. but some sites just have small videos for no reason. i recently visited a site where the "broadband" video was a whopping 180k and was a tiny size and they didn't sell videos. and even weirder, this was exclusive video they were doing this with. and weirdest still, their photos from the same shoots as the videos, were huge - over 250k each - and excellent quality.

what can i say? i want happy members so i'm giving them 720x480 videos at 1.6 mb for our high quality video. after all, happy members not only recur but when they quit they often come back a couple months later to join again.

so what's up with these sometimes expensive gay paysites having small low quality vids?

hey basschick
i totally agree with you ...i don't understand it either ...for a while ,i was a member at falcon studios website ...and i was really deceived by the size of their vids ...most of the time not bigger than a post stamp and even their pics are not that big ...i even remember that some of their models had no more than 3 pics in their section ...i was super deceived ...
and i know i will irritate some but many times a surfer can find more and at a better quality /size by surfing for free ...which means for me that when you propose a paysite you really have to respect your customer by offering big and nice ...

Yeah i totaly agree also all my movies are 640x360 at 1.5mbites/sec my customers love the quality i think almost evrey web master should have 640x360 and 1.5mbites/sec evreyone now a days has broadband anyhow so i don't see the problem and like basschick says bandwith is cheap ..

pierre, i've seen 'em and your videos are definitely the good stuff :)

the funny thing is a full quarter of the gay sites i review actually use lower quality videos than MGPs allow on galleries!

I agree with you too. I don't understand why sites do such low quality when bandwidth is so cheap now. It is also so irritating when sites only have one format avaliable. It is all about the members that is why we offer all formats and 4 different speeds :)

Mark

mark - your new sites have THE best video selection for quality and format that i've seen in any gay site :)

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Originally Posted by IntenseCash.com

I agree with you too. I don't understand why sites do such low quality when bandwidth is so cheap now. It is also so irritating when sites only have one format avaliable. It is all about the members that is why we offer all formats and 4 different speeds :)

Mark

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Originally Posted by basschick

mark - your new sites have THE best video selection for quality and format that i've seen in any gay site :)

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Thanks you so much for the compliment, that means alot to me. I am looking into providing over 1mb videos soon. Have a Happy Easter. :)

Mark

Hi all,

Before I came to work with maleflixxx, I too was surprised at the lack of good quality video. Then I learned that some consumers want poor quality, it goes with the content genre; I believe a panelist at The Phoenix Forum said much the same thing.:cool:

Of course I'll shamelessly plug that maleflixxx encodes at several quality levels. Check us out here.

you know, just because webmasters say members want poor quality doesn't make it so. there's a difference between amateur quality and poor quality videos, and i doubt anyone but dialup users want 320x240.

what bitrates are the maleflixxx videos encoded at and what are the resolutions and video formats you use?

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Originally Posted by maleflixxxjay

Hi all,

Before I came to work with maleflixxx, I too was surprised at the lack of good quality video. Then I learned that some consumers want poor quality, it goes with the content genre; I believe a panelist at The Phoenix Forum said much the same thing.:cool:

Of course I'll shamelessly plug that maleflixxx encodes at several quality levels. Check us out here.

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My 60-some VOD videos are provided through AEBN, X On Demand, Gay Hot Movies and my own white label VOD site.

All linked from http://www.DudeLodge.com .

I know all 4 of my VOD providers offer a variety of sizes and formats.

On AEBN, my movies have had 430,803 minutes viewed in the past 8 months.

Hey, Jay,

Sorry we missed meeting in Phoenix, but AJ talked to probably every other Maleflixxx representative there and finally got somebody to pay attention to us. Hopefully we'll get to meet you next time around :)

I didn't see the seminar in question, but I'd suspect that the "poor quality" being referred to might refer to production values (scenes that are a little rough around the edges, editing is a little rough, that sort of thing) rather than videos that are *really* poor quality (shaky camera, horrible lighting, grainy video due to inadequate light, out-of-focus, etc), or videos that are, as Basschick's speaking of, encoded at really low bit rates so they are not very watchable.

I know that Doggone Video rejected something like 3/4 of AMVC's catalog because the stuff was so shitty as to be unwatchable, and AEBN likewise rejected a large quantity of it for the same reason. If there were *truly* a demand for really crappy content, I think it would spill over into DVD sales, and you don't see lots of DVDs on the market with either terrible production values or terrible resolution.

I'll have to watch the seminar, 'cause now I'm curious who said it :)

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Originally Posted by maleflixxxjay

Hi all,

Before I came to work with maleflixxx, I too was surprised at the lack of good quality video. Then I learned that some consumers want poor quality, it goes with the content genre; I believe a panelist at The Phoenix Forum said much the same thing.:cool:

Of course I'll shamelessly plug that maleflixxx encodes at several quality levels. Check us out here.

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Originally Posted by basschick

what bitrates are the maleflixxx videos encoded at and what are the resolutions and video formats you use?

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One thing that did really impress me in talking with the Maleflixxx staff is that they prefer not to use DVDs as source data for their encoding process; their preference is DV or DVCAM. None of the other PPV providers made even the slightest mention of getting anything other than DVDs.

Given that DVDs have highly compressed MPEGs as their video source, which is a very lossy compresssion method, I could totally see how the Maleflixx product would end up being much higher quality if they start from a much higher quality source. I will be very interested to see how our products look on Maleflixx as compared to the other PPV providers that we're working with.

i have so little DVD experience it's not even funny. as you know, i am working off my original mini DVs, and most of the other experience i have with video is working from MPGs, WMVs and quicktimes. i have never yet even ripped a DVD.

somehow i think of DVD content as higher than a lot of what i see on the web - is that not correct? what resolution is the average DVD movie?

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Originally Posted by boyfunk

One thing that did really impress me in talking with the Maleflixxx staff is that they prefer not to use DVDs as source data for their encoding process; their preference is DV or DVCAM. None of the other PPV providers made even the slightest mention of getting anything other than DVDs.

Given that DVDs have highly compressed MPEGs as their video source, which is a very lossy compresssion method, I could totally see how the Maleflixx product would end up being much higher quality if they start from a much higher quality source. I will be very interested to see how our products look on Maleflixx as compared to the other PPV providers that we're working with.

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DV video is 640x480 , or 720x480, or 960x720.

(I shoot 720x480 or 960x720).

DVD video extraction software does a good job of ripping and exporting 720x480 .movs from my DVDs.

With my white label VOD provider, I send them harddrives with 720x480 .movs . Today's harddrive is yesterday's floppy disc!

I think AEBN, Gay Hot Movies and X On Demand as brands wouldn't be pulling the numbers they are for me, if the digitized video quality was bad.

Hey, Nick,

Keep in mind image size is only half of the equation. Bitrate is the other half. A 720x480 video file encoded at a bitrate of 500KBps will look like crap, while one encoded at 1Mbps or 1.5Mbps will look much, much better. And the codec you use for encoding, as well as the source file also make huge differences in the quality of the finished product.


Basschick, DVDs are encoded using the MPEG-2 codec at somewhere between 3000 and 8000 Kbps; the reduction from .AVI or mini-DV (both pretty much the same source resolution) is somewhere around 1:8 to 1:20 depending on the final MPEG bitrate.

The bitrate you encode at is dependent on the total program length and what format of DVD you're producing; DVD-5 (single layer) can hold only about 4.5 gigs of data, while DVD-9 (double layer, single sided) can hold a bit over 7 gigs, so a 60 minute program with few extras will easily fit at a very high bitrate (6500-8000) on a DVD-5, while a 120 minute DVD with lots of extras (previews/bloopers/etc) will need to be compressed much more, maybe as low as 3000-3500, or will have to go on DVD-9 which is both more complicated to author and more expensive to manufacture.

Most of our DVDs are encoded at between 4500-6000Mbps, which looks decent even on a 42" plasma TV; if you get below about 3500-4000, you typically start to see artifacting on a big screen TV. (It also depends on the program; video shot against a white wall will compress much better than video shot with a bunch of leaves and branches in the background blowing in the wind)

Transcoding from MPEG-2 to any other compressed format will undoubtedly cause artifacting because MPEG is already a very lossy format, so any artifacts introduced by MPEG compression will be amplified by re-encoding to another media. So transcoding to anything (WMV, Real, Quicktime, Divx, etc) from ripped DVDs will never produce as good a quality as transcoding from either AVIs, full-resolution Quicktime files, or DV video.

i would think a 720x480 MPEG-2 with a 3000k bitrate should look okay as a 480x360 WMV at 1100k. the shrinking would hopefully take care of the artifacting for the most part.

i did once try one of our videos as an MPEG-2 and when i changed it to a WMV at full size it looked a little off but then i'm not a fan of MPGs anyway. WMVs stream for most people so you don't have to wait for the video to download before you watch it. and although some webmasters still believe that WMV is an inferior video format, my 1600k WMVs look very close to our uncompressed videos where at 2200k there's no visible difference.

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Originally Posted by basschick

i would think a 720x480 MPEG-2 with a 3000k bitrate should look okay as a 480x360 WMV at 1100k. the shrinking would hopefully take care of the artifacting for the most part.

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It will probably work, but you'll have to try it... I've seen some very strange artifacting even of WMV converted from MPEGs encoded at 4500-5000... it seems to be an additive problem; the MPEG codec throws away about 90% of the data, so there are very few keyframes with the full image (can't remember exactly), so when WM goes to encode, it's keyframes may not match up exactly, and if you have a busy background, then it starts to do stuff like lose definition in the face so it has more data to record the background info. What I noticed most was artifacting during movement; it sometimes would be come very "blocky."

Don't get me wrong, we've definitely encoded WMV from a DVD source, and at smaller sizes, it is acceptable, but nothing compared to encoding direct from an AVI or full-res Quicktime.

Hey Guys,

Mary from Maleflixxx here. I've been wandering through this site for quite a while, but haven't posted before.

Basschick asked: what bitrates are the maleflixxx videos encoded at and what are the resolutions and video formats you use?

Maleflixxx streams in both Real Player and Windows Media. We encode for bitrates from 56kbps (for those lost in dial-up) right up to 1100+

This allows users to get near DVD quality on their computer screens and anything from a 2x2 window to a full screen depending on their broadband provider. Users also get to adjust their own settings (either themselves or using our testing tools) so they can be sure that they are always getting the best streaming they can.

And, yes, we'll take a DVD from a studio in a pinch but we prefer the DVCams so that we can maximize the quality of all of the videos on our network.

Check us out: www.maleflixxx.tv and PM me if you have any questions.

I have experimented over and over adjusting the compression etc and really need to find a professional to handle the work for our videos. OR I need to get some help on making them look as good as possible. Makes me nuts to see how clear and beautiful the movie trailers on apple site work in quick time and can't seem to get ours there regardless of how large the files are.

Any ideas?

Alex

yup - encode at a higher bitrate directly from your originals. your videos can't be as clear as you want them at 500k. at the size your videos are, if you want 'em to look beautiful try 768k or better. there are some more things you can probably do - what program are you using to edit and render your videos?

and don't forget - part of how a video looks is lighting - that you can only change during shooting.

I didn't want to hijack your thread so I started another but then thought it was relevant here so:

http://forums.gaywidewebmasters.com/...ad.php?t=16459

PS I have already taken on board everything in this thread too....thanks for all the input guys

xx