Monday, January 29, 2007
The law of the jungle...as explained by Prince Charles
I happened to catch the last part of C-SPAN's broadcast of Prince Charles giving a speech last night, on the occasion of receiving the Global Environmental Citizen Award from the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School. It was actually a fascinating (and even amusing) speech, but the part I liked best is where Charles explains what the real "law of the jungle" is. [Suggestion: start by viewing the last version below, and, if you're interested in the subject of optimizing videos for online presentation, look back at the first three. Otherwise, just look at the last one.]
An experiment: below is the same video, uploaded to Google Video. Any comments on problems or preferences you have with one or the other are welcome.
Here's the link to the Google Video version; see below for the reason I've removed it from this page.
Third version. I'm leaving these experiments up for the benefit of others. YouTube recommends you upload videos at 320x240; that was the case in the one at the top. Here I uploaded the video at 640x480; it's considerably better without the fuzzy character, except that naturally the file is much bigger, so if this were a longer clip, it would exceed the 100MB YouTube limit. Anyway, here's version 3:
A fourth experiment - same as the third (640x480), but only 15 frames per second (vs. 30), thereby reducing the file size. No, I don't think this is the most important clip I've ever seen, or will post, but considering how little advice I could find online on the subject of optimization, I thought I'd leave all this up for the benefit of others:
Update: I may delete the Google video above. Why? Because it seems (I'm pretty sure about this) that when I reload this page, Google video pre-downloads the video so it's ready to play, even if I'm not going to play it. This is an incredible waste of bandwidth. In contrast, YouTube only starts to download when you click the Play button.
