In Episode 053 I demonstrate how to draw an abstract wallpaper. This was a viewer request so I thought I would get it out right away. At first I wanted to wait for this one so that I could do it in the new version of Inkscape, 0.46, that is yet to be released. That could be for sometime and I didn’t want to leave our viewer hanging. It’s a rather quick wallpaper. If you spend some time on it then you can probably duplicate an OS X type wallpaper quite easily.

Richard has been working pretty hard lately on a new Blender intro for our videos. He’s still hammering out some things but for the most part it is finished. I included it with this screencast, however, we’re going to keep refining it until we’re satisfied. We are still trying to figure out what is the best frame rate for our videos. Our videos have been encoded at 25 fps in the past but we’re thinking that we might be able to get that down to 20 fps. That is closer to what we screencast at and it will reduce file size just a tad. Also, playing around with b-frames on our avi’s has yielded some interesting things. Too many b-frames screws up the audio/video sync. Too few and the file size grows substantially.

Also, I updated our flash player and included a new start up image so that I could tell where I updated it. Nothing will be different in terms of watching our streaming videos in flash format but we are starting to ready everything for future mp4/aac streaming. We will probably stream mp4’s with an flv fallback so that we do not close the door on the flash 7 and flash 8 folks. Eventually though, I would like to eliminate flash files. That might be a ways down the road though.

I have run some tests on streaming mp4’s with the latest flash plugin (version 115). The streaming mp4’s look awesome! They are much clearer than the flv’s. The mp4’s will have a bigger file size at first but we’ll get better at encoding those in time. We’ll probably end up doing away with our h.264/mp3 avi’s as well and just move everything to one h.264/aac mp4. That will be offered for download and streaming. Those will be Quicktime and iPod compatible too. Although, watching our screencasts on an iPod doesn’t make a whole lot of sense but whatever.