Thanks a lot for the offer! However, the screencasts (and site) will be in spanish, so I doubt that your visitors would benefit from the link… wouldn’t make much sense. We are doing it in spanish because there’s a huge deficit in documentation/screencasts for drupal in this language. Again, thanks!

@heathenx

About the vote, I voted for avi, but I guess i jumped into the vote too quickly… my vote would be now with mp4 after geting more information on the issue. Just thought I should mention this for what is worth!

@fwolf

Ha!, don’t worry. Either MP4 or FLV you’ll still have a streaming version to watch online while you’re at work. We’re not taking that away from anyone. Just watch ep062 online and see how it streams for you. Should work the same as flash if you have the flash-plugin v9.0.115 or above. And…since we are streaming the MP4 it shouldn’t tax your cpu like flash does. That’s another benefit of streaming MP4′s that we forgot to mention.

Ah yes, choosing encoder can be a real headache! Specially streamlining the whole process so that we don’t loose all our free time in the process… heh. Me and some friends are trying to put together a screencasting site for the CMS Drupal, so I can relate to what you guys are going through here.

I personally am very grateful that I found your site, you guys do an outstanding job to the Inkscape community, and to the design world as a whole I would say. And the screencasts themselves are fun to watch, easy to follow, and practical examples, wich in my opinion is the best way to learn the workflow of a program. The least I can do is help out with my “priceless” input (lol), since now thanks to you I can make nice icons and even site mockups on Inkscape, and I think i get there faster than in other packages.

Inkscape is probably one of the packages with most potential in the free software world, it’s amazing how powerful and flexible is … yet it’s still at 0.46 (stable)!! I can’t even imagine how it’ll be like when we finally get to Inkscape 1.0

But I’m digressing here, best of luck to Heathenx on the task, and keep on doing a great job guys!

Greetings from Barcelona

Don’t worry, I was initially misguided about the size increase too. Although heathenx is the one doing all the heavy lifting right now in terms of trying out different encoding tests, so I’d like him to weigh in regarding the filesize issue.

Geez, 38 comments and counting. I’m always bad for not reading through too. It’s great that at least we’re hearing from our viewers.

Then i was misguided by the filesize of this episode, my apologies on that heheh
The quality of the video is very great, even in fullscreen, i can handle a 10% increase in filesize, helps see the gradients etc bettter.

I guess I should’ve read all comments before posting… but there’s truely a lot to read hehe – hot topic.

I’m ok with mp4 then i guess, <3 screencasters -

Thanks.

As heathenx stated above, the equivalent avi file for this episode would have been about 130MB. So it’s less than a 10% increase in filesize. Like he says, most of our episodes are about 60MB, so that would mean an increase to about 66MB. I’m not so sure the increase is as big as it looks at first glance. I’m thinking posting a 140MB sample maybe wasn’t the best thing to illustrate the difference, but it’s a great episode so what the heck! And if we are able to implement b-frames in the mp4 files, then we actually might be able to reduce the filesize from what it is now.

And remember, that posting an mp4 file doesn’t mean you need to use iTunes or an iPod (I use/own neither – or actually anything from Apple for that matter), it just gives this capability to those who want to.

@fwolf

The main benefit in terms of workflow for us is that we’d be able to use the same mp4 file for both streaming AND direct downloading purposes. We will be providing a streaming version no matter what, the change would mean that we only have to host one file instead of two and we would have eliminated a whole encoding step from our workflow (encoding the flv file sometimes takes a hour on my lowly P4 system so this is not a small thing to me either).

Thanks for the comments people!

So, PLEASE stick to the flash, but I really dont care whether you use AVI or MP4 for download and archiving purposes.

cu, w0lf.