According to my tests, MainConcept has the highest quality H.264 codec, with a number of well heeled licensees, like Adobe, Rhozet, and Sorenson. So it was pretty natural that I would chat with the Germany-based company about their plans for H.264 SVC, for Scalable Video Coding. What’s that, you ask?

Let’s start with the problem. As a streaming producer, you want to customize your streams for the connection speed and playback capabilities of your viewer, as well as changing line conditions. There are a number of proprietary technologies for doing this, including Multiple Bit Rate video (MBR) and Smooth Streaming from Microsoft, Dynamic Streaming from Adobe and Adaptive Streaming from Move Networks. H.264 Scalable Video Coding is an extension of the H.264 standard that does the same thing, but is a couple of years behind in development and deployment. You can read all about it here.

Briefly, SVC creates customized streams using a lowest common denominator “base” layer, incremented by additional resolution, quality or frame rate by “enhancement layers.” In the photo, I’m showing three video streams from the same SVC file. The smallest player is the base layer only, the next largest is base plus one enhancement layer, the largest the base plus two enhancement layers.

To make SVC work, you need an encoder, which MainConcept has, a streaming server of some kind, and playback compatibility from players like the Adobe Flash Player or Microsoft’s Silverlight Player. At least for Adobe, who I asked, support for SVC is not on their short term roadmap, and I would assume the same for Microsoft since they’re pushing Smooth Streaming as the solution for this problem.

Nonetheless, to paraphrase John Couger Mellancamp’s “Authority” song, when a proprietary technology fights a standard in the streaming world, the standard always wins, especially when devices like set top boxes and cell phones are in the mix, as they are here. May take awhile, but IMHO, SVC will be the ultimate solution, and MainConcept will be one of the most important codec vendors.

On a completely different subject, MainConcept will also be selling versions of their codec that you can use in Apple Compressor as a QuickTime Export Component, and as a plug-in for Adobe Media Encoder (AME). Prices aren’t firm yet, but they sound like they’ll be in the $500-700 range, available sometime during the summer. This is a huge deal for Final Cut Pro producers, because the Apple codec is slow and has much lower quality than the MainConcept codec.

Though the AME already uses the MainConcept codec, because it takes so long for codec enhancements to flow through Adobe’s quality control and release functions, the codec MainConcept releases this summer could be a year or so ahead of that in AME, and much more configurable. I hope to get a copy of the plugin for testing before it’s generally available, so stay tuned.