[thelist] Linking to a movie - best practice?

Christian Heilmann codepo8 at gmail.com
Fri Sep 16 04:25:31 CDT 2005


On 9/16/05, Shawn K. Quinn <skquinn at speakeasy.net> wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-09-16 at 00:48 -0700, Jeff Howden wrote:
> > 99.9999999%
> 
> What is your source for this statistic? This has to be made up.

You reckon?

> > Sometimes restricting what you offer to just the common formats makes
> > for a better experience for joe average user which probably represents
> > just about all your users.
> 
> MPEG-1 plays everywhere. I have yet to hear of a multimedia-capable
> system that couldn't handle it. 

And the filesize / quailty ratio is abysmal. Guess why DIVX is more
common by now than SVCD/KVCD or whatever other format people came up
with. If you offer a movie for download and you got the big servers,
no issue, but in most cases, traffic and filesize IS an argument.
Really big servers offer all kind of formats:
http://www.archive.org/details/DatingDo1949


> Ogg Theora has a codec available for Windows (and *might* play in the
> new Winamp out of the box by now, as I know at one point AOL added
> support for Ogg Vorbis to the default installer). People downloaded
> Flash to watch Flash movies once upon a time, didn't they?

Yes, but that is because Flash gave them a new experience, wheres
downloading yet another codec is a frustrating experience for a lot of
basic users. I got emails asking if xvid is a virus!

It is the same with m4a and mp3, ogg audio and wma, holy wars all over
the place.

I cannot be arsed to read the lot, but I think xineis a completely
free wmv player:
http://xinehq.de/

You can go really safe, but you need Java :-)

http://www.open4all.info/wiki/drazen/Live_ASCII_Streaming



-- 
Chris Heilmann 
Blog: http://www.wait-till-i.com
Writing: http://icant.co.uk/  
Binaries: http://www.onlinetools.org/


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