There are still lot’s of formats out there for video encoding and pakaging. I have he decided that I will not download any more codecs or players. No content is important enough that I would bother with more programs that need updates etc etc.
So, dear content provider, if you care about my precious eyeballs, then please encode your clips either in
quicktime
or
windows media
Quicktime is preferred. The best looking content on the web is encoded in quicktime. Streaming should be avoided: You don’t have the bandwidth. Repeat after me: No matter how many servers and connections you might have or dream off: You don’t have the bandwidth. Unless you are Apple, but that is a different story.
If you do streaming, please do not use wmv. It simply does not work right.
Realplayer?
Yikes! If somebody uses realplayer then you can be pretty sure this was a decission made by a big corporation trying to protect it’s ‘precious’ content. It will be protected alright: Nobody will care about it. No matter how many big media outlets have wasted years with pushing this junk. Real is dead. Nobody wants it. Case closed.
Flash?
Oh, everybody has flash. And there are lots of “web developers” who actually just click around in the Macromedia UI. So writting 4 lines of html is too hard for them. The problem with flash is not only it’s bad quality. The UI of the player is always different. Maybe nice for the ego trip of a 23 yo “web designer”, but not good for usability: Remember it is a player. Not the center piece.
Nobody paints pictures on their TV cases. Ok, not many people do. Flash looks way ugly, can not be linked to, and really does not work.
AVI with some obscure Divx revision encoder.
Yeah, whatever. People pushing this content love to install the latest greatest codec some kid came up with. Nothing ever blew
me away. OK, not bad for a school kid in denmarkt. But definitely not worth the trouble.
So, please, quicktime.
Thanks