Richard and I will be encoding and uploading new AVI’s and replacing our SWF’s with FLV’s for the next few days. Unfortunately, our AVI videos have grown in size since we have to encode them differently now. We are trying to do things as efficiently as possible by reducing the amount of extra encoding. We have determined that if we encode our AVI files a certain way then they lend themselves to be converted quite nicely into FLV files for our streaming version.

So far I have updated episode 002. I wanted to re-record this episode for sometime. This was my very first screencast and back when I originally recorded it, I recorded my entire screen rather than just Inkscape itself. Live and learn, right? Since we resize our videos to 800×600px, resizing this particular screencast from 1152×864px to 800×600px made things a little difficult to read. My new version is much better. I will leave the original on YouTube for now.

Moreover, episode 002 is our very first episode to have an FLV file as the streaming format.  It’s a prototype of sorts. So you be the judge regarding quality and functionality. Personally, it plays great on all of my computers.

By the way, I have removed the 10% loading limit too. These new FLV’s will start to play instantly, however, they play the best after you have downloaded a certain percentage. Since the FLV’s are a quarter of the file size that the SWF’s were, you should be able to download them much faster now. Also, I have chosen to use a different streaming media player. The controls will be simpler now.

So you have been warned. We hope our changes are better for everyone and we will try to minimize any disturbances to our website while we are updating things.

Now go draw something…