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.