Well, our initial website launch has been going well. Traffic to our website has not been phenomenal but it is achieving steady growth. I suspect by this time in 6 months we’ll be bigger than Google. I think I remember Richard saying something about world domination…I don’t know…I really wasn’t listening.

Richard and I have been trying to make a few changes to our site as rapidly as we can. It has been suggested that we alter a few things for the better and we are trying to implement those changes where we can. Getting some feedback has been great.

One of the improvements that we intend to make very soon is the switch over from XviD AVI files to H.264 AVI files. H.264 allows for better quality video in a smaller file size. Although, Richard’s H.264 AVI’s tend to be slightly larger for some reason. That doesn’t make sense but I’m sure we’ll figure it out in the end.

Making the switch to H.264 took very little arm twisting. I was pretty much sold on XviD for our AVI’s. I did notice, though, that my videos were a little on the blurry side and a little dark. I just figured that I wasn’t doing something right. Besides, the flames from “encoding hell” were starting to burn my ass and I was looking for the exit door.

It was suggested that I give xvidenc and h264enc a try. Microchip, the creator of these scripts, suggested that I go with the H.264 format…and boy, was he right. xvidenc and h264enc are two Linux shell scripts that walk you through the process of encoding your videos with MEncoder. When you are all done answering the questions that it asks, you have the option to review and save the MEncoder script to file before it starts the encoding process. I use the saved copy of the script to cut-n-paste into the terminal when I want to encode other videos at a later time, exactly the same way, keeping all of my videos consistent. Thanks to Microchip’s hard work we MEncoder novices can create some pretty decent videos.

I’ve added Episode 024 to the site. This screencast is a simple one, showing how to get a neon sign type of effect using Inkscape. It’s actually very very simple as you’ll see. Hope you enjoy it and find it somewhat useful.

As heathenx so eloquently put in his fantastic first post, we hope you enjoy the blog and are patient while we figure things out. Feel free to comment on any of our posts here. Whether you want to stroke our egos, slam our skills, or just have a good chin wag, we’d love to hear from you.