[Dan Sperling]

Ed and Chris & Cow folks,

Thanks for the excellent, in-depth feedback. Here are my thoughts. If you and/or other readers can again let me know of any missteps in logic….

After reading your contributions it seemed like the thing I wanted to do would be to offer files at both H.624 (for QT or updated windows media player) and a Flash made with ON2VP6. I didn’t want to get into wrapping the H.624 in Flash because that could exclude people who didn’t have newer versions of Flash installed.

But a strange thing happened. I’ve been doing a ton of tests and for laughs I made a .wmv with codek wmvV9 using Episode and I think it looks better than my tests making ON2VP6 from both Sorenson and Episode! I expect people to say–what!–because that’s not what I’ve been reading on the Cow but that’s my results. I checked and .wmvV9 files are backwards compatible to player 6 so I think all Windows users should be able to play it. BTW, for me Episode made better .wmv compressions than Sorenson (or FCP using QT conversion), and my tests showed Compressor edging out Episode in making the best H.624 files.

So, unless further comments suggest otherwise, I plan to offer both H.624 and .wmv files. That should take care of everyone. I also plan to offer them in 3 sizes: for download to desktop (as large as I want for best quality); for fast dsl/cable at about 4500 kbps, and for dsl at 750 kbps.

Readers may take issue with these data rates and please do!–but it seems that for progressive download most dsl users can handle a 750 kbps data rate at least that’s what Cow contributors have posted; and going to Apple’s website I found HD video trailers at smaller and medium size offered at about 2500kbs and 5600kbs. My fast dsl could barely keep up with the 5600kbs stream but did so with no problem.

Would love to hear all comments and suggestions before proceeding and thanks in advance.

–Dan Sperling
Dan Sperling Video & Film