Matt-
I'm on a cable connection and the vows took me less than 20 secs to buffer and start playing. I didn't think the colors looked washed out at all-the footage looked clean to me. I don't think the 741kbps is too high a bitrate at all--I use 3mbps for my broadband demos and 256kbps for my dial-ups and haven't had any complaints. The transfer speed has so many variables--the time of day is a big factor. Here in CT we just had a couple of days of heavy winds, which took down a bunch of poles and power/cable lines and greatly affected my speeds for a time.
Keep up the good work.
Vin

Web Demo
 

Matt,

It played just fine for me. However, I like your watermark. Care to share how you did that?

Thanks!

Thanks
 

Thank You All,

I am in the process of switching to a new host, a local ISP. They have told me to expect much faster connections, especially for local clients - the brides that will be looking!

Don't know what is really going on with all the DNS stuff... so if service is interupted, sorry. It seems to be working so far... I think the domain is pointed to the new host already... but am not sure if this is being redirected through my old host... god knows what will happen when I delete my old hosting account.

As far as the washed out look... I thought the blacks looked a little dark after compression (on a windows pc) so I raised the black output in the Matrox Color Correction filter to 32 instead of 16 before encoding in Windows Media Encoder 9. I thought it looked better on my PC's monitor. It looked worse on my mac, but I am assuming most of my potential clients will be running windows? Those who said it looks washed out. Any chance you are on mac?

This is my first real attempt at creating video for the web.

Thanks Again,
Matt

Yes, I'm on a Mac!

working good
 

Matt,

I downloaded one of your ckips. It was as fast as any download on my cable has ever been, so working good!!

Mike

i was downloading your vid at the max speed of my 'net connection, according to the windows media player stats... 1300kbps, which is plenty fast.

i can't believe some of the cheap prices on bandwidth that you guys have listed out here... pricing has dropped like a rock in just the last year.

at that price point, most of what you are seeing there is typically low quality bandwidth that's capped at a certain speed, and you'd probably be sharing a server with hundreds of other sites... but i'd certainly give it a shot at those rates!!

if you are looking for a price point comparison, i have a couple of sites on my dedicated windows media streaming server, at $167 a month, for 1,200 gigs of bandwidth a month... it's all savvis bandwidth, which is top notch stuff, but at least $30 a month of that is just for the windows 2003 server license rental.

$167 a month seems expensive by comparison, but i only got that rate after months of researching dedicated web server hosts at www.webhostingtalk.com... and i've only had the server for 3(?) months so far, so the rates are fresh... all the websites in my sig file are on another server.

as the cheap bandwidth goes, tho, so shall the dedicated server bandwidth... i may have to re-negotiate my bandwidth limit before too long, lol.

Web Host
 

Glad to hear that things are moving quickly. I switched my hosting over to a local internet service provider. It is shared hosting but it seems like I'm all alone on my server. In my control panel for my site I can view the server status. It always says...

Server Load: 0.00 (4 cpus) -I've seen it up at 2-4 a couple times
Memory Used: fluctuates between 11-12%
Swap Used: 0.00%
Disk sda3 (/): 26%
Disk sda1 (/boot): 12%
Disk sdb1 (/home): 12%

Craig... I do all my editing on mac and I agree the WMV files look a little washed out on the mac. If you switch the gamma over to 2.2 (pc gamma) I think it looks alright. I plan on putting up versions in a format for QT for mac users and those who prefer QT. I'll leave the blacks alone for these.

Sorenson, MPEG-4, or push the technology forward and use H.264?

Thanks,
Matt

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