

Reddit: Why is Vimeo so much better/smoother than youtube?  - pshapiro
http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/gmrsg/why_is_vimeo_so_much_bettersmoother_than_youtube/

======
radley
There's a few reasons. The main difference is that Vimeo uses a higher data
rate than YouTube: ~2.6Mbs vs ~2.1Mbs -- about a 20% difference.

Then there's the source. First, Most Vimeo content is produced by creative
professionals so the content itself is meant to look amazing. In contrast,
YouTube does bulk video, most of which is homemade. Vimeo looks better on
content alone.

Second, the Vimeo video is directly encoded from the creator. YouTube's
creative content tends to be commercial work posted via distributors and
agencies. It's likely that the content shown on YouTube has been encoded twice
- first by the creator for the distributor, then again by YouTube's uploader.

There's other things. It's probable that Vimeo is using 2-pass encoding,
allowing for more accurate VBR. It takes longer, but looks much nicer. YouTube
users want speed, so one-pass may be standard.

~~~
randall
As an aside, have you personally witnessed better quality using 2-pass
encoding? At ~2mbps, I've never really noticed anything in terms of quality...
but in the 6-8 neighborhood, I can def tell a difference.

~~~
radley
Of course! If it's just a "talking head" then two-pass is useless. But for
anything that changes between action and static content (like movies), two-
pass is necessary to get useful VBR: extra data overhead from the low-action
can be passed on to the action sequences while maintaining the same average
data rate.

Generally, the first pass is to determine which sections are static vs. which
are busy. The second pass then takes advantage and can adjust the rate. So for
long talking head scenes, it may drop the data rate to 1.2 Mbps, and action
scenes can be ramped up to 3Mbps+ so the action doesn't look blocky.

~~~
randall
I guess since I tend to shoot more talking-headish stuff, that's why I haven't
noticed a diff. Good perspective.

------
bradleyland
Coincidentally, Vimeo also recently released their iPhone client app:

<http://vimeo.com/blog:398>

YouTube has been so slow to load on my iOS devices lately that I'm loath to
watch any video content from YouTube at all.

