Encode and Upload
July 11th, 2007 by heathenxRichard 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…
July 14th, 2007 at 7:03 am
Has anyone else run into audio problems with ep018? The intro music sounds great.. but after that, nothing.
I am not streaming but attempting to watch the tutorial after download. When I initially tried to watch, windows media player (on XP) cried that I didn’t have the right codec. Downloading and installing ffdshow seemed to solve that problem, but after the intro number, silence.
The youtube version showcases voice in ep018 so I know it’s not supposed to be a silent movie. :). I tried downloading ep025 and the audio works for me on that one. I can hear heathenx (or Richard.. not sure who’s doing the talking) fine.
Anyway, thought I’d throw it out there. If I’m the only one with issues.. meh. If not, maybe something went wrong during encoding.
The video looks great btw. Keep up the good work!
July 14th, 2007 at 1:16 pm
Hi,
Glad to hear you’re liking the videos. Not so glad to hear you’re having trouble with the sound.
That voice you’re missing in ep018 would be heathenx’s. - so you’re not missing much!
- I just downloaded the avi here and it played fine all the way through. However I’m running Linux and played it in the Totem movie player app. I haven’t had a chance to try playing it on Windows Media Player yet. I may be able to do that later today. I’ll let you know how it goes.
In the meantime, you might want to try downloading and installing VLC which might play the file. I use it both on Linux and Windows and find it to be a pretty good at playing videos created with a wide variety of codecs. You can get it at :
http://videolan.org
I’ll leave another comment when I get a chance to play it on WMP11 later today.
RQ
July 14th, 2007 at 4:58 pm
Hey,
I’ve done a little testing here at work on my Windows box, and got audio throughout the screencast, only the latter portion was at double-speed. Not Good. I’ve done up another blog post to better summarize the situation.
Thanks for pointing out the problem.