Through A Glass Darkly - Port 25: The Open Source Community at Microsoft

Through A Glass Darkly by admin on April 24, 2006 05:18PM

We are launching the MPEG-4 versions of our interviews today (now linked on the interview pages themselves), and future interviews will be posted in MPEG-4 and WMV simultaneously. This was overwhelmingly the top request for formats from the community. MPEG-4 files are fairly large (our typical interview of 30 minutes is about 70 MB) and will need to be downloaded to view.

I’m interested in getting your feedback on the formats. No doubt you will have feedback on the interviews as well – but those responses are best posted back to their respective posts.

We’ve considered other approaches - for example, we’ve explored posting these as Flash, which is x-platform and streaming by default – but wanted to focus on doing what the Port 25 community has specifically asked for.

Hopefully this solution will work well. If not – what do you think would be better?

Cheers,
Sam

Email Digg It! Del.icio.us SlashDot It!

Comments RSS

rjdohnert said:

Thanks guys, I (at least) appreciate it

posted at 11:24PM 04/24/2006
epyon_avenger said:

I think the mpeg-4 is definately a step in the right direction, however, Flash would be greatly appreciated as well. Perhaps post the streaming videos in Flash and then have mpeg-4 and WMV as download links?

posted at 04:24PM 04/25/2006
fluke said:

Is there anyplace yet to get a x86_64 DLL of the WMV9 codec? It seems like this would be one of the things that would best be able to take advantage of the 64 bits. Instead, I am stuck having to use 32 bit versions of mplayer or xine to be able to use the WMV9 DLL. From what I can tell, the "64-bit edition" of XP just changes kernel space. The majority of the OS is still 32 bit.

It would also be nice to have a freely downloadable Media Player the is implimented in pure .NET.

posted at 03:38AM 04/26/2006
xvasek said:

"MPEG-4 files are fairly large (our typical interview of 30 minutes is about 70 MB) and will need to be downloaded to view."

Not necessarily. Use "mplayer http://some.domain/some_video_file.avi". Mplayer is free and works under Windows too, you should try it, it is very good software. :-)

And if MPEG-4 is too large for you, use Ogg/Theora codec. It is also free. And by free I mean "free as a speech", not "free as a beer. :-)

posted at 07:31AM 04/27/2006