Bat Out of Encoding Hell. That’s what Meatloaf wanted to call his album originally, I’m sure of it. What’s this all about? Well, for the last couple of weeks I was back in “Encoding Hell”. What put me there was the discovery that the majority of my screencasts were chipmunking (when the audio sounds like Alvin and The Chipmunks) on a freshly installed ubutnu Gutsy system with mplayer. They didn’t seem to be chipmunking in anything else. For instance VLC and Totem played the videos all the way through with no funky audio. I confirmed this behavior on all of my ubuntu based systems (ubuntu Dapper, xubuntu Dapper, and ubuntu Feisty). Why didn’t I notice this before? It’s because they played a-ok on my Windows XP and both of my openSUSE boxes with mplayer, the systems that I am on the majority of the time. I’m sure that is why I never noticed it.

What really got me frustrated was that I was trying to upload a few of our screencasts to ShowMeDo.com, a brilliant screencasting web site, and they were not working. After countless dead ends, almost abandoning mencoder for ffmpeg out of desperation, and many a thought wasted, it finally came to me after having a conversation with Richard last night. Something wasn’t right about the 15 second intro audio track when I looked at it in Audacity (thanks Richard for suggesting that I do that). It had 2 channels. My screencast only had 1. Hmm. So I removed the second channel and put all audio on one track and married it back up to the video. Voila! Fixed. No more chipmunking sound.

This morning I re-encoded the sound tracks to all of my videos and uploaded all of them to our web site. Richard’s videos were not affected. If any viewers out there were experiencing the chipmunk effect, I am very sorry. I didn’t realize it was a problem before. Everything should play normally now. Of course I only have a limited amount of PC’s to test these on so if you are having problems please send us an email. Encoding audio/video is the worst part of a screencasters’ life. But that doesn’t mean that I take that important step lightly.