I spent some time the past few days fiddling around as I made some videos available for the web; a keynote address with full-motion video as well as video of slides with voiceover.
What I find truly amazing is the amount of work it takes to encode these files so they can been seen on all three major systems: Linux, Macintosh, and Windows. If I convert the files to the proprietary "Flash" format used on YouTube and elsewhere I have no problems. But once I start to create a "standard" movie file I immediately run into deep trouble. The format of the file is standard — it's like a standard-sized shipping box. But the contents of that shipping box aren't standardized. You can choose from dozens of different methods to encode the audio and video.
Macintosh's QuickTime, out of the box, isn't very friendly at all to standard ("avi") movie files. After a great deal of fiddling around I discovered that if I encode the movie using a particular video encoder and a particular audio encoder I can both see and hear the movie with QuickTime. Finding the right combination literally took hours of my time.
As for Windows... well, what can you say about Windows, especially when children may be reading this blog? I believe my current settings will work, but frankly I was not certain at first. Fortunately, no complaints so far.
This problem is a textbook case of what happens when you have disaggregation but insufficient effort on making the pieces useful again afterwards. Disaggregation of the video and audio coders — the contents of the movie — from the box they came in — the standard "avi" file format — led to many useful and innovative coders with a wide range of cost versus quality. But Windows and Macintosh don't seem to have much incentive to provide compatible decoders; as a result movies visible on one system may not be visible on the other.
Topics: · technology
Link to this story · Leave comment or trackback
Comments are temporarily disabled while we work on anti-spam measures.
Trackbacks are closed for this story.
