[Techtalk] multimedia help, please

[Wim De Smet]

On 6/22/06, Carla Schroder <carla at bratgrrl.com> wrote:
> hey all,
>
> I have an opportunity to create some video presentations for Jupitermedia. You
> can see some archived presentations here:
> http://www.twominutetips.com/
>
> My first question is, can the movie be viewed on Linux at all? I am
> multi-media ignorant.
>
> Secondly, what is a good cross-platform alternative to what they're using? As
> much as I want to present good FOSS-oriented material on a mainstream tech
> site, and believe me the potential audience is huge and definitely not the
> Linux choir, it's a slap in the face to Linux users to present this in a
> Linux-unfriendly format. If it playable on Linus via non-free but easily
> available codecs, it's good foot in the door. If it's not viewable at all,
> then that's a different problem.
>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_codecs has a long list. Basically
most newer video codecs seem to be MPEG-4 based (which is patent
encumbered but playback exists in a large amount of players for most
codecs). There's ogg theora as an alternative, but I don't think that
one is quite finished yet.

If you do create a video I assume it will likely be in WMV format. If
possible I'd steer clear of WMV9 and use WMV7 (v1). WMV9 is in many
cases only playable with win32 codecs. There's two problems with this:
1) might not be legal to redistribute them
2) people on non-intel machines can't use them, since they're just
binary blobs that contain machine instructions. So people running
linux on one of the older macs or perhaps another platform won't be
able to play the files.

regards,
Wim