Blogs, RSS, and Embeds
 

OK folks - who here has joined the blog world? I would like to find a good person to talk to, or barring that, some good information on how to do a RSS on my website, or on a typepad site, or even a wordpress site.

Seems that there are a bunch of codes for different players (windows, quicktime, and flash) and different player numbers. Is there a good tutorial out that that *actually* walks you through this maze? I've found lots of stuff that seems limited to one solution that one person likes - nothing that gives you a good overview of how this stuff works, and the basics for constructing pages to do this.

Thanks for the help,
Milt

Moved here from one of the Sony Vegas boards.

I have a WordPress blog at http://olivebarrel.com/blog. Check it out.

Although I have not broadcast (or "podcast") anything yet, I intend to use Quicktime 7 (H.264) when I do as it is cross-platform and very efficient.

Um.

QT7/H.264 is cross-platform on paper, but not very much deployment on the PC platform compared to Mac. Probably it will be, but I think it is premature to expect that PC users in your audience will have easy access to an h.264 stream.

For what it's worth.

Not at all! I'm a PC user and I use H.264 without any problem. Just install Quicktime.

Ah the oldest fight in the book. OK folks, well, I'm well aware of the three sides of this issue - MAC (quicktime) PC (media player) and Flash. Not many folks seem to be encoding for - or setting thing up for RealPlayer. My suspection is that it is because - as a podcaster/web designer - you need to have to pay for and run "REAL" on your site in order to have it avaliable. My feeling is that in the long run, this will backfire on the "Real" folks. Why pay for it when all the other options are free?

Frankly, I didn't really want this thread to be about which codec is better. I've used all three. I have used both versions of the H.264 codec in Vegas. I've used Flash 8.0 and SwishVideo ( a flash encoder) and I've used Vegas' windows encoder. They ALL have their limitations - which are constantly changing, as they improve.

What I really wanted was to find a place (or person) that has a strong grasp of the Embed code, the options available, and the various implementations of all this stuff. I have found many sites that will tell you about their favorite, and how to use it - with their favorite blogware.

Non of that is really all that helpful. Doesn't give you an overview, and a way to make choices based on your likes and dislikes. I am a correspondent for Rocketboom (http://rocketboom.com) and frankly - they are Mac people, and post in Quicktime, but also put up a windows version.

Anyway, if there is a Vegas person out there that is doing this stuff, I would love to hear from them. That's why I started this thread in Vegas - but hey, I would take any help I could get.

Enough ranting,
Milt

Agreed. Me too. Great format.

However... Amongst folks who do a lot of streaming, there is recognition that compatibility is not the driving issue. Player penetration is.

(And this gets back to Milt's issues)

The question is what software exists now on PCs and Macs, and how widely has it been distributed. If I want someone to see my video stream, I have to pay attention to what's loaded already on their computer. QT7 player isn't there yet in terms of downloads/installs.

Real is a great example of how technology doesn't rule, marketing does. They had a great player, good quality for bandwidth, they would leapfrog MS with new releases, then MS would leapfrog them. Then, to my sense of things, they made a big mistake - the player became a very active portal for Real's advertising and marketing, and their partners. The player became aggressive in grabbing all media file playback. You'd drop an audio CD in your drive and find yourself looking at ads from Real, the equivalent of browser popup ads. WOW, did they lose market share fast. First, all the corporate IT departments dropped them from their software loads like a hot potato. As a couple months went by, users realized that the player was just annoying. I came up with a new class of software - IrritationWare. They fixed it, but lost so much marketshare...

Back to topic, in terms of perceived quality for a given bandwidth, QT7/h.264 looks really very, very good. Windows Media looks very good. With their latest codec release Flash Video looks (finally) very good. RealMedia looks very good.

But when it comes to what people can see without downloading new players, I think it's a different story.

Windows Media is great - automatic background codec downloads ever since Win98. No player download has been neccessary since then to see video encoded with the latest WM codecs. Mac users not quite as smooth, but pretty good.

Flash Video is great - Macromedia has been highly successful in bundling the player technology with both PC and Mac OS, and codecs update automatically. Basically no mac/pc divide here.

QT7/h.264 is too early to be reliable for mass/consumer distribution, as most PC users have not updated to QT7. I'm not anti-QT, this will change over time.

RealMedia - nobody who lived through the IrritationWare phase wants to touch it.

Granted, if one is making video for specific market segments in which users/viewers are more technology-aware and want the latest greatest players, they are much more likely to have downloaded QT7, and much more willing to do so if they haven't yet.

I don't perceive this as a "fight" at all, Milt. Just trying to best understand who the audience is so that we can get a message to them that will easily be viewable.

I'm expert in WM embed and streaming, sort of adequate in QT embed, really want to explore Flash and Com/Breeze server this year.

What is it you're looking for? Feel free to send me email via the site.