[thelist] Linking to a movie - best practice?

[Shawn K. Quinn]

On Fri, 2005-09-16 at 10:25 +0100, Christian Heilmann wrote:
> On 9/16/05, Shawn K. Quinn <skquinn at speakeasy.net> wrote:
> > 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, 

I disagree. Pretty much it lets you watch cheesy movies and lets
advertisers make ads that don't stop immediately when I hit Escape the
way animated GIFs would (back in the days before I deinstalled the Flash
player if it somehow found its way onto my system and before I knew what
Privoxy was).

> wheres downloading yet another codec is a frustrating experience for a lot of
> basic users. I got emails asking if xvid is a virus!

So? Tell them it isn't.

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

Which Ogg audio? Vorbis, Speex, or FLAC? (They are all "Ogg audio"
formats, though the most often used is Vorbis because it is positioned
as an MP3/MP3Pro replacement.)

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

Which still (at least for Windows Media Video 8 and 9) relies on
Microsoft's binary-only codec which is only compatible with i386
architecture PCs. I'm surprised Microsoft hasn't done something about
the fact they support version 7 natively.

> You can go really safe, but you need Java :-)
> 
> http://www.open4all.info/wiki/drazen/Live_ASCII_Streaming

Seen this, and it scores points for the novelty, but that's about it.

-- 
Shawn K. Quinn <skquinn at speakeasy.net>