[thelist] Linking to a movie - best practice?

[Shawn K. Quinn]

On Sat, 2005-09-17 at 11:42 +1000, Robert Gormley wrote:
> Let me get this straight. You jumped up and down about someone's
> decision to not offer a 'completely free and open' video solution to
> those who choose to set themselves up like this, and the solution you
> offered for their production site: isn't production, isn't beta, but is
> ALPHA??

You read entirely too much into my statements. One, alpha has a rather
different meaning in the free software world. Two, as I mentioned, the
bitstream format is frozen (as of alpha 3), so you can encode today and
it will be usable tomorrow. Case in point: Ogg Vorbis was usable from
the beta stage on (I think Xiph.org froze the bitstream for that at
beta 1), and you can still listen to those files on today's 1.0 or 1.1
decoders. Three, most of the problem with Theora is with the encoder
being a bit slow, especially if you don't have much CPU to throw at it
to begin with (I should know, I made a few Ogg Theora movies on an
Athlon 600, I don't remember details too well but I think I averaged
something ridiculous like 5-10x running time, i.e., a 6 minute clip
takes 30 minutes to an hour to encode). If you've got a brand new box
with 5-6 times the CPU of my vintage Athlon, this is not as much of an
issue.

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