StreamWorks uses a derivative of MPEG-1 while VDOLive uses a proprietary wavelet algorithm. And while the algorithm is proprietary, VDOLive's operating environment isn't. The company wisely chose to work within Microsoft's Video for Windows .AVI specification, so VDOLive will have access to a mature suite of capture and editing tools such as Adobe Premiere, Intel's Smart Video Recorder, and Ulead Systems' MediaStudio Pro. While the future will bring innovations, these two tools embody your current choices for authoring video on the Web. It will be interesting to see how effective each approach proves to be.
Video is a much more demanding medium than audio, both technically and artistically.
How We Tested Streaming Video Analysis written by Jay Munro Our tests of streaming video products were less formal than our tests for audio products. Our goal was to see how well each product was able to adjust video and audio playback quality for a variety of connection speeds. We ran tests in a controlled networked environment and against production sites on the Internet. The StreamWorks server resided on a Silicon Graphics Challenge Series server. We tested the VDOLive encoder on a Gateway 2000 P5-133, which we used to stream the video directly to the VDOLive player.