Some of you might have noticed the episode was posted a little later than usual this morning. That’s because we made a couple technical tweaks that should make things a little better around here.
First of all, the site should now be iPhone-capable. That is to say, you should be able to come here on your iPhone and be able to watch any of our episodes without subscribing or downloading a thing, just as if you came here on your computer. Let me know if this is working for you, iPhone users.
Secondly, we messed around with our video encoding and episodes should be much crisper and smoother, starting with today’s. As any drunk girl will tell you, my face is better when its a little bit blurry, but we wanted the game footage to be really clean. Oh yeah: we’re widescreen this week. I’m on the fence about that. Let me know if you like it better than the usual 4:3.
I hope you all enjoy the changes, and please keep sending in your suggestions on how to make the show and our site better. I’ll be back later today with some coverage of the Commonplace Book competition.
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Awwww… I wish I had an iPhone… : ‘(
Anyway, I did see a change in video quality, so nice one! I like it better in 4:3 though, you can see the games clearer, instead of having bars around the side. But other than that, it was great.
Yeah, a lot of the indies fit better in the 4:3 screen. But the trade-off is that we’ve either been letterboxing or cropping the console stuff, and the framing for power-up stuff (especially with guests and panels) would work better in widescreen. That’s why it’s such a toss-up for me.
Thanks for sharing your opinion, though. If more people seem to like the standard frame, we’ll keep using it.
Personally I like the 4:3 because it really shows the game as is. But widescreen has it’s advantages as you said, and if you get more and more panels and guests it’s easier to have them all in the shot with widescreen.
I liked being able to view this weeks video on my iPhone whilst commuting to university for the day today. It broke with an otherwise dull moment in the day, so the iPhone accessibility is definitely awesome.
Just curious what camera & encoder you guys are using, if that’s something you don’t mind sharing.
We started off in the earlier episodes using an XL1-S. Now we use Jon’s trusty DVX100A.
We encode a couple of ways… what you see depends on your Flash version/what sort of device you’re watching on.
iPhone users and people with capable Flash versions see the .m4v file, which is the same as what subscribers get through iTunes.
Web users see a high-resolution .mp4 if they have a capable system, otherwise we serve a standard .flv.
We encode our .mp4 files straight out of Final Cut (or Premiere, in the case of the episodes I edited). The .mp4 file is run through Episode to create the .flv and .m4v files.