Technical details on video limits

From Doc

Phanfare accepts video clips up to 10 minutes in length or 2GB in size. Video clips must meet both criteria to be accepted. This means that if a video is more than 10 minutes in length, but less than 2GB, it will not be accepted. Nor will will we accept a video that is less than ten minutes in length but larger than 2GB in size.

Phanfare keeps two versions of your video. We compress your video to DVD quality MPEG 4 and keep it on our servers to accomodate future improvements in Internet bandwidth. The second copy is compressed to 1 Mb/second in the Flash7 codec, which is suitable for viewing on the web.

The technical details:
The DVD quality MPEG 4 video that Phanfare keeps is encoded at 4 megabits/second and stored in an AVI file. Physical DVDs are actually 3-7Mb/second but encoded in MPEG-2 a previous generation codec.

We only compress or re-encode your video for the "DVD" quality version if it comes to us at greater than 4 Mb/second. If it comes to us at less than 4 Mb/second we keep your original video as the "DVD" quality version. If you want us to keep your video in its original form, you must give it to us at less than or equal to 4 Mb/second. For a ten minute file, that means that the file size must be less than 300 Megabytes to avoid re-compression of the original for the "DVD" quality version.

Video sharing in Phanfare is designed to accomodate digital camera shot using still cameras and solid state video cameras. Such cameras do not produce more than 4 megabits/second of significant information. If the files are greater then 4 megabits/second, then it is because of poor compression. The compression we do for the DVD-quality version will not be noticable in most cases if the video clip comes from a digital camera.

What does it all mean?
Phanfare keeps your video in its original quality (to allow for future improvements in Internet bandwidth) but re-encodes to a lower bitrate suitable for today's internet bandwidth limitations.