The developers of video compression and publishing software DV Kitchen make a bold claim . . . they call it the best solution in the world for publishing professional quality video on the web.
So how does it measure up?
First, DV Kitchen uses the highest quality H.264 encoder on the planet. Being an open source codec, H.264 has spawned a number of variants, and x264 has emerged a clear winner among the contenders. While DV Kitchen also encodes to flash (.flv), windows media video (.wmv) and 75 other formats, the makers are rightly proud of the fantastic x264 sample clips they make available for download on their site.
Next, DV Kitchen is the only software on the market that includes tools to help you determine the ideal encoding settings for your video. The brilliantly designed SampleLab allows you to easily compare encoding receipes and quickly zero in on the ideal encoding settings for each video you encode. It’s an extremely valuable tool you’ll find yourself using everytime you encode video . . . and you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it.
The Bitrate Budget Calculator will give you a bitrate in kilobits per second to keep your videos under to save bandwidth costs and avoid having your viewers wait unnecessarily.
DV Kitchen also works great for encoding audio.
But the encoder for mac os x is only part of the story . . . DV Kitchen will also upload your videos and audio to your server automatically when it has finished encoding. You can store as many remote folders as you want and select them with one click. There’s even an integrated FTP browser that makes choosing directories, creating folders and deleting files on your remote server as easy as on your local hard drive.
DV Kitchen also has a media publishing room that generates html code for embedding your videos in a web page, forum or blog. It will even generate complete web pages with titles, captions and poster frames with either Quicktime or flash players.
What about still images?
DV Kitchen will automatically import, rotate, resize and upload still images . . . and write html code for those too!
DV Kitchen also features TimeFreezer . . . the world’s best enviroment for exporting high quality still frames from video. With TimeFreezer, you can export stills – deinterlaced if needed – then upload them and generate html tags in seconds.
DV Kitchen is the ultimate 21st century media professional’s power toolbox. To see this great x264 encoder in action, watch the official mac video encoder demo.