I have been encoding video like gangbusters in preparation for the EDU launch. There are many hours of footage being converted even as I type this. Several DVDs worth, in fact.

Some notes on video formatting:

Dave and I had a discussion as to which video format would be best for the EDU system. There are basically three choices: Windows Media, QuickTime and Flash. We decided to go with Flash.

Windows Media rules the school because of the above-par quality available in a very compact size. The compression methods it uses are, in a word, awesome. But it alienates many Mac users from viewing the video so we couldn’t use that.

QuickTime has the best pseudo-streaming capability. When encoding an MOV it has a "hinted" option that makes for better pseudo-streaming than WMV. But there are scores of Windows users that absolutely despise the QuickTime player and outright refuse to use it. Obviously we don’t want to force anyone to download specific software just to view video because it would upset people. So QuickTime is out.

So then there’s Flash, or to be specific, the FLV format. The quality is as good as MOV and WMV. The pseudo-streaming is on par with MOV. But most importantly, everyone has Flash and that was the reason we went with it.

The quality level we chose to go with is a 640×480 size @ 400kbps. It is vastly superior to YouTube spec. There will be a huge difference in quality, clarity and sound. And best of all it will be from PCMech servers directly and not other hosted services. This means it will be very speedy (always a good thing).

The point of this update is to alert the masses we are putting a very large effort towards making EDU the best possible. Even for something as seemingly trivial as what format to choose for video presentations, we are scrutinizing every detail to provide the best experience.

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