Which audio / video formats?

[Travis Newbury]

Many developers choose to use development environments that is locked to one
and only one operating system, if instead picking an environment that has been
developed for a multiple operating systems in mind, they will be able with
minor or some cases none code change get the program to work under multiple
operating systems, including all the binaries on a CD will not be a problem.

The OS you encode your video with is completely irrelevant to what OS
the user uses to watch it. And there are plenty of free sites that
will encode your video to FLV format. Google, AOL and YouTube are the
first that come to mind. (And no, you don' t have to have your video
hosted on their sites either)

 

[J.O. Aho]

Well I think they (adobe and Flash 9) have covered a greater majority
of OS's and browsers than any other single medium

If I don't recall it wrong, there is one for Microsoft that supports all the
x86 versions (don't work on PowerPC, Alpha nor Mips versions).

There is two for OSX, but most likely the last one for PowerPC.

For GNU/Linux there is one, but only for x86, but as you may know there are
quite many architectures supported by GNU/Linux as PowerPC, Alpha, Mips, Sparc
and so on.


Sure, if you count all service packs for microsoft as an own operating system,
then you could make the list even longer, but it won't make the binary flash
player any different. Still microsoft is supported, but only x86 version. OSX
is supported, both architectures at the moment. GNU/Linux has only a flash
player for x86. In the end it's still 3 operating systems and 2 architectures
that are supported.

Not to mention NO other media player gives you the ability to interact
with your media the way Flash does.

For a BSD user there is a lot more interaction to use any other media player,
as they lack a flash player, regardless of which architecture they use.

If they did, then all the multi
media sites would be turning to that rather than Flash. And the trend
to move to Flash video is apparent to everyone that watches the
industry.

Industry isn't always smart, just look what happen to BetaMax and what will
happen to BluRay.

 

[J.O. Aho]

The OS you encode your video with is completely irrelevant to what OS
the user uses to watch it.

That depends on the choice of encoding, some encodings are limited to one
platform, which makes the choice of the OS where the encoding is done in a way
affect which OS the user will have to see it.

What I was saying was that developers choose to write application in a such
manner that it's all to much work to port the application to other platforms
than the original, while if they made sensible choices before they start to
write the application, they then can port the application with little work to
quite many other operating systems.

 

[Travis Newbury]

For a BSD user there is a lot more interaction to use any other media player,
as they lack a flash player, regardless of which architecture they use.

Yea, I can feel your (and the other 12 BSD users) pain.... How dare
Adobe not support your OS...

Industry isn't always smart, just look what happen to BetaMax and what will
happen to BluRay.

Actually it seems like you can make that comparison to the other media
formats more than you can with FLV. It seems like they are all losing
ground to FLV almost as fast as LPs lost to CDs

 

[=?ISO-8859-1?Q?G=E9rard_Talbot?=]

James Hutton wrote :

I'm building a day by day history page, and I've managed to get hold of
several audio and video clips from the time. (I've already sought
permission from the copyright holders to host them.) Some of these are a
simple <embed> of youtube videos,

You can improve your markup code with:

Embedding Flash While Supporting Standards by Drew McLellan, November 2002
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/flashsatay

Bye Bye Embed: Embedding a video by Elizabeth Castro, July 2006
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/byebyeembed

Embedding Object with valid code by MediaWiki, March 2007
http://wiki.dreamhost.com/index.php/Object_Embedding

Embedding flash without <embed> by Ian "Hixie" Hickson, April 2004
http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1081798064&count=1


however there are also several

multi-mB .mp3 files and video files currently in .mpg and .wmv formats.

I wonder what the "best" format is,

wmv has to be the worst format: it almost always implies you have to use
Windows Media Player.


and whether media should be

streamed, downloaded into a standalone player, or should I be all
dictatorial and not give the user any choice ;-) !

Imposing your preference (the dictatorial way) is definitely not what a
wide majority of reasonable people would recommend, would propose.

I realise there will be no right or wrong answer, but I'd like to please
"most of the people, most of the time."

James

Choose .mp3, .mpg, .swf. Always identify content-type (content-type of
fetched resource by the link) in the code of links so that the browser
may best choose and start the correct plugin for the associated files.
Always identify the size of each file on the right of links so that way
the users can figure out on their own how much time the download can be.
Don't try to figure this out for them.
Identify your links with the type of needed media player. Overall, help
the users with useful, helpful info and give them freedom, latitude,
flexibility: e.g. don't auto-start streaming media, allow user control
buttons. Don't try to over-excessively control them.

Gérard

 

[J.O. Aho]

Yea, I can feel your (and the other 12 BSD users) pain.... How dare
Adobe not support your OS...

Even if I have once tried BSD and microsoft and a load other operating system,
I do not use it and frankly there are far more than 12 users, but not as many
as microsoft users, what is it nowadays, 21 including you?

Actually it seems like you can make that comparison to the other media
formats more than you can with FLV. It seems like they are all losing
ground to FLV almost as fast as LPs lost to CDs

But FLV is like VHS, the lesser of the options.

 

[Travis Newbury]

But FLV is like VHS, the lesser of the options.

Well time will tell. But until that time arrives though, I am all
aboard the FLV freight train that is taking the WEB by storm

 

[Travis Newbury]

That depends on the choice of encoding, some encodings are limited to one
platform, which makes the choice of the OS where the encoding is done in a way
affect which OS the user will have to see it.

Then that choice of encoding would probably not be a good choice for
trying to reach everyone would it?

What I was saying was that developers choose to write application in a such
manner that it's all to much work to port the application to other platforms
than the original, while if they made sensible choices before they start to
write the application, they then can port the application with little work to
quite many other operating systems.

So let me get this straight, since Flash ports seamlessly to most
mainstream OSs regardless of the OS it was created on, Flash would be
considered good choice for application development.

 

[dorayme]

As I said in an earlier reply in this thread, many of the specialist
programs for writing media files are available only for Windows and
often for Mac- but not always. You absolutely must have a Windows OS
computer for using some of these specialized programs. That is just
how the world is, and it just does not pay for a company to write
specialized programs of limited sales for OSs that are not used nearly
as much as Windows, and sometimes even MAC. However, once you have
encoded your media files, they will work just fine on web pages viewed
using any OSs that will support a player for the type of media you
use.

OK, it will not be the end of the world if I have to do some
things on Windows machine. I have a Windows 2000 box that is very
good (once owned by a website making pro) and I guess I can use
that if I have to or even upgrade it.

 

[dorayme]

The OS you encode your video with is completely irrelevant to what OS
the user uses to watch it. And there are plenty of free sites that
will encode your video to FLV format. Google, AOL and YouTube are the
first that come to mind. (And no, you don' t have to have your video
hosted on their sites either)

oooeee... that's a thought Travis! You mean one can do this
without shelling out the hard earned?

 

[J.O. Aho]

So let me get this straight, since Flash ports seamlessly to most
mainstream OSs regardless of the OS it was created on, Flash would be
considered good choice for application development.

Flash supports a limited set of architectures for two of the "mainstream"
OS's, with other words, not full support for those OS's and the flash players
of same version to the mainstream OS's do not have the same features, so it's
a quite poor option.

 

[J.O. Aho]

Well time will tell. But until that time arrives though, I am all
aboard the FLV freight train that is taking the WEB by storm

VHS didn't get better, and flash in any form won't get better so long as the
flash player won't be released as open source as Adobe won't be supporting all
architectures that an OS does support.

 

[bsa]

Hi Guys,
just to put another video format ... ;-)
VideoVista www.vista.it

regards

bsa

 

[Toby A Inkster]

For GNU/Linux there is one, but only for x86, but as you may know there
are quite many architectures supported by GNU/Linux as PowerPC, Alpha,
Mips, Sparc and so on.

It looks to me like there are plans to expand their UNIX support. There is
a beta that supports Solaris on x86 and Sparc. Surely more is on the way...

--
Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
Contact Me ~ http://tobyinkster.co.uk/contact
Geek of ~ HTML/SQL/Perl/PHP/Python*/Apache/Linux

* = I'm getting there!

 

[Travis Newbury]

Travis Newbury wrote:
Flash supports a limited set of architectures for two of the "mainstream"
OS's, with other words, not full support for those OS's and the flash players
of same version to the mainstream OS's do not have the same features, so it's
a quite poor option.

The overwhelming majority of the world has the ability to use Flash.
Please feel free to live in denial and proclaim Flash is nothing more
than beta-max.

 

[Travis Newbury]

oooeee... that's a thought Travis! You mean one can do this
without shelling out the hard earned?

Yes. Upload your video (quite a few formats are acceptable), wait
about a day for them to encode it, then download it from their site.
There are a ton of tools that let you download (or just grab the full
URL of the video on their servers) My kids use something called
"Ook", it is a FF extension that will either download the FLV or give
you the URL of the FLV to use. Both my 22 year old son and 11 year old
daughter do this all the time for videos on their MySpace. (Their dad,
a self proclaimed Flash god, built them custom video players for
MySpace so they don't have to use that nasty YouTube player)

There are also several freeware, shareware, and commercial options for
encoding the video yourself. But they are obviously OS specific.

 

[Travis Newbury]

VHS didn't get better, and flash in any form won't get better so long as the
flash player won't be released as open source as Adobe won't be supporting all
architectures that an OS does support.

Your argument is based on 2 fallacies:

1. You to be open source to be successful
2. You have to support every flavor of every OS in the world to be
successful

Bob Montgomery built Career Builder, (the largest Job posting site in
the USA?) with a simple premise. "If you can please 80% of the
market, you will be the market leader." Flash has done that, and, as
Bob predicted, they are fast becoming the market leader in Web based
video.

But you know what, like most "which is better" arguments, this one is
now going no where. We disagree.

 

[Toby A Inkster]

Yea, I can feel your (and the other 12 BSD users) pain.... How dare
Adobe not support your OS...

Arguably BSD is the most used operating system after Windows. Darwin,
which forms the core of Mac OS X, is a flavour of BSD.

--
Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
Contact Me ~ http://tobyinkster.co.uk/contact
Geek of ~ HTML/SQL/Perl/PHP/Python*/Apache/Linux

* = I'm getting there!

 

[Ben C]

Arguably BSD is the most used operating system after Windows. Darwin,
which forms the core of Mac OS X, is a flavour of BSD.

Is Mac OS X more widely used than Linux?

 

[Travis Newbury]

Arguably BSD is the most used operating system after Windows. Darwin,
which forms the core of Mac OS X, is a flavour of BSD.

Since Adobe Flash supports OSX, I guess it could be said that it does
in fact support some flavors of BSD?

This brings me to one of the issues I have with moving to a *NIX
platform. ESPECIALLY one of the free open source ones. Since software
compiled on one flavor/brand of *NIX does not neseccerally run on a
different flavor/brand How in the world can you expect companies like
Adobe to support every flavor and brand of an OS? It is jst not cost
effective for them to do so. They have to look at the market place,
and decide which OSs have the best bang for the buck, and they support
those.

Not to pick on Adobe, but if you are an Adobe Photoshop fan and run
LINUX, you are shit out of luck (I believe they have stopped
supporting most flavors of *NIX since version 3 or so?) Adobe decided
that if you are going to buy their mega$$$ software, then you either
already own a computer it will run on, or you can afford to buy
one.

Their decision to do this does not seem to have hurt their standing in
the imaging industry. On the other side of the coin, they have decided
that supporting several flavors of *NIX with their Flash player is
worth it. I am sure they have statistics and marketing experts locked
away in a small room making decisions about what OS to support with
what application. And based on their standing in the industry, they
seem to be making some good decisions. (YMMV)