After five months of blogging, and being generous with video, I’ve managed to use up 3.25 gigabytes out of a 50 GB quota. That’s 6.5%. Oh, no! I’m going to run out! Must get more! (That’s a joke for my wife.) But now I do have more. The Web-hosting service has increased the quota to 200 GB!
Obviously, at this rate I can keep going essentially forever. So I’ll increase the rate. The videos are encoded in Adobe Flash to stream at 512 Kb (that’s bits, not bytes) per second. The free Flash video (FLV) encoder I use works well, and I’m utterly reliant upon it, so I sent the programmer some money via PayPal. But the quality for a given bit rate isn’t as good as Windows Media Video 9 (WMV), or Flash 8.
There’s no way I’m going back to WMV9, because it isn’t cross-platform compatible and it doesn’t support a preview still frame. The problem with FLV8 is that it must be purchased from Adobe and it’s very expensive.
So what I’ll do to improve video quality is take advantage of all this storage capacity I have at no additional cost. I’m kicking up the bit rate for the videos by 50% or more. This will mean longer download times at your end. If you have trouble with sputtering-and-buffering playback, let me know.
Yes, I have that cartoon. At least my recollection is that I do. I have a huge backlog of posts that I keep kicking myself for not getting done — Petula, Morty, Crusoe on Mars — but none are time-sensitive. So I’ll first post the “fat pig pays the price” cartoon.
Whatever you say, Dougie! Jeanie Beanie running away in terror, because it brings back memories of “Little Nemo” and the “new math” in 4th grade.
Doug: Do you remember that really old cartoon we’d see over and over in Norwalk about the greedy little pig? His mother was always yelling about him eating too much, so he goes to bed and has a nightmare about an evil old man who straps him in a chair (I know I’ve asked you about this recently, haven’t I?) and makes him go through a Rube Goldberg-like contraption that literally stuffs him until he explodes! It really scared me as a child! Here’s my challenge to you: If you can find it, I’ll be eternally grateful, like those skeletons! (not much of a prize!)