<<<-- Originally posted by Rob Lohman : Keith: thank you for your well formed responses and help with
your companies product. That IS much appreciated! -->>>

i'll second that! appreciate the insight to clipstream... i'm pointing out the problems because i just hate to see a product that may help my business not live up to it's potential because of marketing decisions.

it's easy for an internet company to go down the wrong path... when i worked as an encoding engineer at intervu, some genius had the idea of developing a new internet video player that used a new internet video format.

that was the days of quicktime cinepak & mpeg1 dominance, and intervu of course wasn't in the position to create new standards, since they had virtually no income or product at the time... they finally ended up going an entirely different direction, and sold the company to akamai after i had left.

jim, just for drill, take a look at http://www.gamespot.com... i like the way that they have integrated wmp streaming video into their pages.

wrt to older wmp players, the borg finally did make the current windows media 9 codec work with version 6.4 of the wmp player... and since wmp 9 works with win98, that gamespot page will work with over 93% of the computers on the internet.

Dan, I remember InterVu and actually our parent company has been around since then and has survived the dot com shake out. I've also noted GameSpot (and other site's) decision to use WMP. Making a bid for GameSpot would have required the participation of a good partner in that vertical - I think we would have been competitive. The technology challenges we can solve with brainpower, it is the marketing and business development that is always affected by external circumstances.

I will just leave with another comment that applies to the corporate environment in particular. When you are an IT person and you are responsible for massive amounts of desktops, you don't want to go around installing players, upgrading players, making sure people have the right version. However, you can do a system wide install from the server with Java. More and more of the corporate customers who are curious about our technology are talking about firewall security stopping streams coming from the outside. Clipstream will get through corporate firewalls as just another internet resource. Finally, we have security that is pretty robust that prevents downloading and can even prevent local playback for sensitive videos.

Dan, I went to http://www.gamespot.com but I have decided to go with Clipstream. I have only one more request of Clipstream or someone in this forum before I buy and that's how to set my Pinnacle Studio software which has 3 components: Capture, Edit, Make Movie. In the Make Movie section you can choose to save the captured video as:

AVI
MPEG
WMV

I've been told that I should save the video as an AVI file then use Clipstream's encoder to compress it further. Which compression option should I choose?

Cinepak Codec by Radius
DV Video Encoder
Intel Indeo(R)
Intel IYUV codec
Lead MCMP/MJPEG Codec (VFW)
etc.

I've shot a 5 minute video which results in an estimated file size = 740 MB. This seems way too large. What am I doing wrong? Shouldn't file be much smaller?

Which should I choose for frames/second?

5, 10, 15, 30, 29.97, 14.985

(Keeping in mind that I want to offer my video to a mass market.)

Keith, what should the approximate file size be ideally for a 5 minute video before using Clipstream's encoder?

Thank you.

Jim, I've forwarded this request back to my own support email so I will deal with it first thing tomorrow morning at work. Thanks :)