ABC

This is kind of a long video.



At any rate, I've figured out some tricks with video encoding. Sites like Youtube encode videos to a flash video format (.flv or .swf). The software they use to do this is rather pricey (if you use windows or mac) so I figured there must be an open source program to handle it. Sure enough, with a little bit of playing around I was able to install a flash encoder in linux (Pod- for your reference it's the ffmpeg flv-muxer). To make a long story short I was able to take a starting file that was 273 Mb and compress it to 8.3 Mb once it was encoded to flash format.

So, who the hell cares?

Well, I do- and here's why:

If we do the blog from our own server in the house we don't want to have to load video to sites like Youtube, it kind of makes having our own server a bit pointless. Being able to encode to flash format means we can skip using Youtube, convert the video here, and just slap it on the blog. No need to upload anything. We just encode the video on one of the linux boxes in the house and stick it directly into the blog.