Alright. We have brought the voting to a close. Only 60+ people cared to vote. That’s a small turnout, although, that isn’t a bad thing. It just tells us that most people didn’t care what format we put our videos in and maybe chose not to vote…or maybe we only have 60+ viewers. Or maybe they were in prison and didn’t have access to a computer. Or maybe they were on safari and were running from the lions after their vehicle broke down. Or maybe Scut Farkus and Grover Dill had captured them on the way home from school. Or maybe…ah…nevermind. Whatever the reason I think Richard and I gathered enough information to make a decision.

It looked like this thing was going to swing MP4 at the start of the poll but enough of you were concerned about that container due to it’s larger file size and perhaps because that format was harder for some of you to re-encode into something else. Typically, MP4’s are smaller than comparable AVI’s but since we could not encode them the same way as our AVI files, due to iTunes/Quicktime compatibility, we had to throw out the b-frames which increased the size of the file.

I think Richard and I leaned on MP4’s for several reasons which we think are still valid. We may want to revisit this issue again in the future when some things mature a little more. I think if we can tackle file size and actually get them lower next time then maybe it will give everyone more of an incentive to switch to this format. As far as re-encoding MP4’s into something else, Richard and I aren’t masters but we know our way around encoding video (thanks to our friends in the community) and we can always lend a hand if that’s what some of you need.

In the meantime we are back to making AVI’s with H.264 video and MP3 audio for download and FLV’s for streaming. That’s what you have asked for and that’s what we’ll continue to deliver. Thank-you for helping us with our experiment. We appreciated your feedback. The links on our last blog post will remain so that the curious can experiment. However, we will be changing episode 062 from MP4 to AVI on our episode page. Everything will be back to normal soon.

In the words of Officer Barbrady, “Move along people, there’s nothing to see here.”