Video resolution and client performance

I'm trying to encode a short 1 minute clip using QuickTime Pro 7.1 and I'm having trouble getting Second Life to have a decent framerate when viewing videos. While no videos are playing I am sustaining 60fps in the area in the sky that I'm testing videos.

Basically with a video at 320 x 240 I get 20fps which is reasonable but very blurry. With a video of 640 x 480 I get good quality but about 4fps which isn't acceptable. The reason I want a crisp picture is because the main focus of the video is hover-text above an object that I want to be visible. The video is also recorded with the new UI scale feature maxed.

Here's a link to an early version of the video but it will give you an idea of why I would like it to be clear: video.

I've tried many different codecs and codec configurations like mpeg, h264, 3gp (which I've had the best results with so far), sorenson 3 and standard .mov output - possibly more but I can't remember them since I've been experimenting ALL day.

Sometimes I experience what seems like frames failing to render - like it will get stuck on a frame and then all of a sudden it will resume a few seconds later, skipping some of the movie.

Also, is there any codec that seems to play faster (put less load on your computer) than the others?

As a side note I'm streaming from a Darwin Streaming Server from Dreamhost.

Thanks to anyone that can offer me some help!

Hi Stylez,
I checked your video at my home location.
Without your video I get about 20fps if the viewer prim covers most of my screen. As soon as I start your video the client fps drops down to about 12 fps. The image update time kicks up from 5ms to about 35ms during playing the video (see ctrl-shift F9, debug fasttimers).
A test with your video and the external quicktime player uses up to 5% cpu. So decoding of video and playing of your video is done quickly here (and configuring the qt player for direct3d hardware accelerated to software GDI increases the peak cpu use to about 9% - although I dont know if this change also affects sl performance).
If you still think its your video you might try the provided videos in the freeview player on your machine how they perform so you can compare. The quickest decoded video is the one with the least compression. Here your H.264 works fine, mpeg 4 has less complexity and should work ok on most machines. I recognized that your video uses a total peak bitrate of 1800kb/s. This is the value the client has to pump through the qt decoder. A high value has of course better quality but with H.264 a lower value shouldnt spoil it much. For mpeg4 encoding (which is of less quality) I use about 1200kb/s + audio (with roughly the same resolution) and that is already really much.

Its difficult to say why your system drops its framerate massively (as I dont know how sl exactly blends the video onto the prim - e.g. if it is possible and used in sl/opengl to do somewhat hardware acceleration of video display - depending on the used graphics card).

And here also a footnote: I use quicktime 7.1 standard, a dual -core opteron based system and a 7600GT with current drivers of the 9x series.

Well I finally found a compromise for my problem. I recorded the video from Second Life again but this time I made the actual Second Life window (in windowed mode) smaller. So with the new UI scaling the SL window shrunk but the UI stayed the same size, making the text show up much better after recording with Fraps.

Then I ran it through VirtualDub to save it as an uncompressed avi resized to 640x480 and cropped the SL interface out, loaded that video up in Premiere, jazzed it up, rendered it back out as uncompressed avi, THEN ran it through QuickTime Pro saving it as a 3gp file using h264. *deep breath*

You can see the final result (640x480 for website use) here.

The 320x240 version is for SL use and isn't available to view yet in-world.

Thanks for the help!