Hi Everyone,
In my continuous effort to make the streaming of our video guitar lessons as fast as possible and retain the quality of the videos at the same time, we have once again re-encoded all of our lessons.
This time around, instead of using .flv (flash video) format, we've encoded to the newer mpeg4 format. The result is equal video quality, at half the file size 🙂 This literally means that each lesson will stream at double the speed as before, which is great news to all of our students who have slower connection speeds. Just in case anyone was wondering, we use a program called Handbrake to encode our lessons. We've tried many-many very expensive encoders, so it is very ironic that the best encoder is free...
The only setback of this new file format is that the streaming mpeg4 files can only be played on PCs that have Flash 9 or higher installed. Looking at our logs, only 0,2% of our visitors have older versions of Flash, unfortunately, they won't be able to view the lessons, but in the interest of 99,8% of our students, we had to make this sacrifice.
I hope this little technological tweak will be to the satisfaction of everyone. If you experience any problems or need help, please do not hesitate in contacting me.
All the best,
Tom Fontana