[efh] the promised email!

[jtl333]

Drake Wilson wrote:
> Quoth jtl333 <jtl333 at mail.utexas.edu>, on 2007-01-31 05:51:22 -0600:
>   
>> Here is a link to "the walk" video, as well as many other videos that might have you laughing!
>>
>> http://www.actlab.tv/best_of.html
>>     
>
> Are those videos supposed to have audio in them?  I can't hear any
> audio with VLC on my GNU/Linux machine, but it shows an audio stream
> in the file and it doesn't spit out any "don't know this format"
> errors.
>
> Failing that, can anyone else get them to play on GNU/Linux
> (preferably x86_64 architecture)?
>
>    ---> Drake Wilson
>   
Ahhh...  the joys of video encoding...  So here is the LD.

For a year Brandon and I searched for a universal container/codec, 
looked at ogg, mov, rm, wmv and many other formats i am failing to 
mention.  When it came down to it we chose .mov to use as it was most 
universal and chose the H2.64 video codec and AAC audio codec, the 
standard used by apple's quicktime.  During testing however I really did 
not want to have to use a closed source encoder like quicktime player, 
so we tried, Mplayer, Gstreamer and VLC to encode our files using the 
FFMPEG library and any other libraries that were included (if any).  
Alas every encode we would do worked perfect, however on Quicktime it 
would never have sound, so we had to give up for the time being as we 
were releasing and settled on our standard quicktime format knowing it 
was most universal having checked it on Mac, PC and linux. 

However I do have to admit as time has gone by we have had the 
occasional problem you are experiencing where the sound does not 
playback in linux, however I have experienced many video playback issues 
with Linux in general, sometimes videos will play sometimes they won't, 
it is a frustrating situation to say the least.  I think most of the 
time it has to do with the drivers of the video and audio, sometimes it 
is the video overlay, sometimes the sound cards capabilities.  The most 
hardware/multimedia friendly distro I have found is ubuntu, but then 
again I haven't looked super hard.  (anyone want to chime in?)

Anyway, I am yearning to start up a new effort to look at new codecs and 
containers to use that will work cross platform, be transcodeable with a 
scriptable opensource video encoder (VLC, MPlayer, any others?) that we 
can implement/test for inclusion with our current content management 
system "glacier" designed on ruby on rails by Tim, one of our 2006 
summer of code interns.   If interested in checking out the glacier 
stuff, check the link below out:

http://www.actlab.tv/glacier.htm

For those of you who think this email was written in a crypictic 
language, don't freak out, just google:)  wikipedia:) and ask us about 
it in class, that is what it is all about:)

Also for those who do not know what VLC is, it is the coolest video 
player out right now, you can DL it for free at:

www.videolan.org

it will work on any OS, Windows, Mac and Linux and will play almost any 
video/audio file you throw at it:)

take it easy,

Joey