‘H’ Category

H.264 Video Compression

January 1st, 2008

H.264 is an industry standard algorithm used for compressing video for use on the web, mobile phones and digital television.

Video files contain very large amounts of data in comparison to other types of documents found on the web and there is a more video being delivered over the networks that ever before. This includes services and products such as IP TV, film downloads, mobile video calls as well as traditional video as viewed on a web site.H.264 is capable of maintaining the broadcast quality of professional video for use on the web and in digital television while reducing the amount of data that has to be transferred to the viewer.

The Adobe Flash player and Apple's quicktime are both capable of playing video content compressed using H.264.

The H.264 standard also goes under the names MPEG-4 Part 10, MPEG-4 AVC or simply Advanced Video Coding.

Heat Map

January 1st, 2008

A heat map is a picture of a web page that shows where users click when they visit a particular page.

web site heat mapThe areas that are clicked most often appear in red (hot spot), while the areas clicked least often appear in blue or with no colour at all.

Heat maps are a tool used by web developers as part of their website usability testing routines.

Understanding how your visitors behave when they visit your web site is crucial to improving its effectiveness.

A variant on the heat map of mouse click is an eye tracking heat map which gives an inidcation of what catches most peoples' eye when they visit pages on your website.

You will require special third party software or an third party service if you wish to create a heat map of pages on your web site as they are currently not a standard part of analysis and statistics packages for tracking web sites.