boxee transcode specs?

[metapede]

My company is working on a Boxee app template for customers of our online video platform. Scouring the dev wiki and this forum a bit, I'm not finding anything that lays out some basic transcode guidelines.

Most of the transcoding we do is optimized for flash players embedded on web pages, or for viewing on mobile devices. These transcodes (obviously) look like crap at "boxee" size. But we have the original media, and we can set up additional transcodes for customers who want to publish on boxee.

We'll do some experimenting, but it would be nice to get some guidance from the boxee team around this. For example, what's the best codec to use, and at what point of bitrate, size, etc do the returns start to diminish sharply?

[ekristen]

Boxee is just more a less a front end player for media, I have yet to find any type of media it can't play. The size and quality of the video is strictly up to you and up to the capabilities of the device that Boxee is installed on.

[jeepsterryan]

I don't know the length of the files you are palying, but media that plays on the apple TV has to be hinted (metadata at the beginning) with the audio and video interleaved. We encoded our media to h.264 (mp4 containter) out of some Adobe editing software that has interleave turned off and SD files longer than 30 minutes would fail. All HD files would fail.

We have been the rounds with encoding. If you can give me the format your original media is in, I might be able to point you in the right direction. Encoding is tricky though. It depends on your source, the length of the videos, the kind of content in the video, and a thousand other things. You just have to mess around with bitrates until you get the best possible quality at your lowest acceptable bitrate.