Strong Support for AVI and FLV
June 18th, 2008 by heathenxAlright. 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.” 
June 18th, 2008 at 11:42 am
I’m an apple’s fan but i prefer flv so that right for me.
note : i did not vote so you can increase your meter ….
note 2 : i write in english like a school boy, sorry i’m french
June 18th, 2008 at 12:04 pm
…note 2 : i write in english like a school boy, sorry i’m french
I’m not exactly sure what I found funny about that but it did make me laugh out loud.
Cheers to you mate.
June 18th, 2008 at 11:28 pm
… Weird, when I read your comment I had an image of you giggling like a little girl.
OK enough of that, on to a couple of points I’d like to make.
What I have no opinion on.
I’m not sure about the ipod, itunes or whatever newfangled gizmo is currently available because I’m always a generation or two behind the latest and greatest anyway. And I’ll recuse myself on the steaming stuff since that seems like a waste of bandwidth to me, especially if I need to watch it a few times.
And a caveat, I don’t know beans about making a screencast so maybe I’m blowing smoke.
But to me, size does matter, at least in the download department, sort of. I’m on broadband but maybe there are those who aren’t. On screen display is another matter. I really don’t think you’re playing the - my screencast is bigger then your screencast - but 912×864 (Richard’s quoted size)? I think 800×600 would be plenty big enough - as long as the quality is there, and I’m on a 20′ widescreen (1680×1050). This paragraph assumes you don’t necessarily want folk to view your screencasts fullscreen and you can save download size by making them smaller.
How I view your screencasts.
First I’ll watch the complete screencast without pauses as an overview to see where you’re going. Then with Inkscape open, I’ll play a section of the screencast, pause it, then mimicking what and why you’re doing what you’re doing, if that makes sense. So you can see that I want Inkscape open and the screencast too. And boy does that screencast window get squeezed down, usually to around 600×500.
Anyway, I thought I’d throw a spanner in the works and hopefully urge you not to abandon unnecessarily a good, future proof video format, even though I voted AVI.
As the inimitable Admiral David G. Farragut cried out… “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead”!
Good luck and all the best in your endeavors.
June 19th, 2008 at 7:12 am
@Jaws
I understand where you are coming from. We really do care about file size. We want them as small as possible but only if the clarity of the video and audio does not suffer. However, because of some things it’s getting more difficult for us.
One: Richard and I have opted to move our resolution to 912×684 because we cannot get Inkscape 0.46 down to 800×600 without hiding icons and toolbars. Actually we couldn’t do this with 0.45 either. 0.46 has gotten a little worse due to the extra icons on the verticle row on the left. And recording at a larger size only to scale down during encoding rottens up the video (it actually makes the video blurry). Our goal is to do no scaling whatsoever or at least as little as possible during the final encode of the video. I would love to get back to a standard 800×600 but I don’t see it happening until Inkscape allows for us to drop individual icons in an attempt to make the window smaller. I don’t think Inkscape was meant for an 800×600 window anyway. How many of you want to draw in a window that small? I certainly don’t. It’s only important for screencasting.
Two: The content that Richard and I are screencasting is getting more advanced. That means that our videos are getting longer because it takes us longer to achieve what we want to show you. This is why we had to get off of YouTube (although I just read that YouTube might abandon this limit soon). Plus we rather not rush the video by talking and drawing quickly. That’s not very helpful to foreigners who have a hard time with the english language. Anyway, compare our later videos to our first videos in terms of video playing length and you’ll see what I mean. There are many things that Richard and I would like to show but opt not to since we might end up with an hour long video that might be 600MB when we’re done with it (and don’t even mention splitting up the video in several parts).
Regarding watching our videos full screen. We don’t discourage it. Some people have bad eye site. If you want to watch it full screen then go right ahead. I watch our flash videos full screen sometimes when I’m watching them online. Things do get a little fuzzier but it’s clear enough. I rarely ever watch an AVI full screen though. I like watching those 1:1 so that the video is as crisp as possible. Some videos are sharper than others. That’s usually caused by several variables that we cannot always control.
Nevertheless, there is always room for improvement. If there are things that we could do better than you can be sure that we’ll try to implement those. Right now we have a pretty good middle ground between quality and file size.
Thanks for the feedback, Jaws.