Just a pity its in quicktime. Oh well.

Pumps | August 06, 08:08 CET

Pumps, you can't install quicktime?

kurya | August 06, 08:16 CET

It's not like we made it a Real video clip (or worse Windows Media). QuickTime is still the most powerful, flexible, useful video technology ever created. Not to mention, I think we managed to get some pretty high quality considering the filesize and length. I think people underestimate the quality that can be achieved from Sorenson Video 3 inside QuickTime.

Out of curiosity, what format would you have preferred? We are certainly open to the idea of releasing it in other formats as needed.

Jeremy
DoneTheImpossible.com

[ edited by JeremyN on 2006-08-06 08:29 ]

[ edited by JeremyN on 2006-08-06 08:30 ]

JeremyN | August 06, 09:49 CET

I just wonder if seeing the legal Bit Torrent will lead to sales of the DVD itself. I would think curiousity for the extras will be enough, and it should

impalergeneral | August 06, 10:39 CET

Easy with the platformisms, ok?

Caroline | August 06, 11:42 CET

Platformisms... I like that word.

The legal Bittorrent has at least quadrupled our daily sales.

JeremyN | August 06, 11:59 CET

I saw somebody mention last time they'd like to see Xvid. I think this comes from the whole torrent culture of ripped DVDs. I don't care either way, like.

I had a streaming copy on the Serenity Browncoat site thing for about a week, it did nearly a terabyte of traffic so I ended up taking it down. It's interesting, however, as I'm willing to bet a large amount of people ended up buying a copy because of the stream.

gossi | August 06, 13:50 CET

Well it helps, that this is a fan produced project, and the fact that a portion of the proceeds go to charity. Which btw, Jeremy , do you know how much will go? Or are you still in the red zone of covering costs?

So I bet most people would view it as a good investment. If it was a production of a big company that makes gazillions of dollars, I think, I could be wrong, most people would not care and think "I saw the movie for free, I dont need to contribute since this company is big and doesnt need my moneyetc...".

One thing about the browncoat community which I think is unique in general, is that b/c the series was cancelled, and that the movie came out and didnt do so well in numbers, that the fans are used to"voting" with their dollar, by buying the firefly dvd and the Serenity DVD, in the hopes of encouraging more. The hopes may be invalid, but it doesnt change the fact, that as consumers we want a certain product and we want to encourage more of a product. My mentality as completely changed because of this fan fan experience. Because we have that mentality, and the positive response to this documentary, the fans would buy this DVD as a way of voting. Although this whole assertion could be wrong.

Lastly, it couldnt hurt that besides the basic documentary, there are gazillions of special features like the timeline interviews etc, not available on the simple streaming.

kurya | August 06, 17:26 CET

As a Hollywood broadcast engineer and cross-platform multimedia developer myself with many years and many titles under my belt I totally concur with Jeremy that Quicktime - combined with the Sorenson codec (compressor/decompressor) - truly provides a most excellent and flexible file format. FWIW, older hardware can playback QT/sorenson 3 nicely, while struggling with mpr/h264, etc...

Oh, and I was so impressed with the Director-based interactive component on the DVD-ROM. I wish I had contributed to your (Jeremy's team's) efforts - not that you would have needed me, as it turns out. (Aside, I'm so happy that Adobe is giving Director a new breath of life with the next major release announced for next year.)

Here's hoping people respect the copyleft, and dl the video torrent only, and not file share torrents of the entire iso, with expanded interviews, interactive stuff, etc...

napua | August 06, 21:08 CET

Divx/Xvid/Mpeg2 :)

Pumps | August 07, 01:11 CET

Well, since you asked, theres nothing wrong with Quicktime if you can point me to a direction, where I can download a _legal_ Quicktime player for Linux that can decode Sorenson 3... ;)

<rant>Even with Windows platform I (emphasis on the I) feel very uncomfortable installing bloated Quickitime Player/iTunes (there are way better ways to sync my iPod) which tries to take over every file type association I've setup and/or add various RunAtStart drivers/systray applications that do nothing but eat up resources. Luckily there are (illegal, ianal) versions of both QT and Real that contain only the codecs. </rant>

The easiest and most comfortable way to spread video in the internet from the end users pov, in my opinion as a professional web designer, is Flash video (version 7 preferably, as there is no version 8 plugin for *nix). Flash 7 has a penetration of roughly 95% according to Macromedia, and the statistics that our company gathers from sites we manage, supports that percentage.

Of course, with lengthy videos such as this, the bandwith and bandwith costs may make the streaming Flash video an impossibility and in that case, I would choose some free and/or open source MPEG-4 codec, such as Xvid, to encode the video, at least as an alternative to proprietary formats.

PS. Real has a version of their player for *nix variants, which actually is a rather lightweight and polished player compared to it's Windows counterpart.

[ edited by kungfutse on 2006-08-07 01:32 ]

kungfutse | August 07, 03:10 CET

EVERYONE PLEASE READ THIS:

The answer to everyone's arguments over preferred video file formats and bloated/proprietary player installation hassles resides right here.

This player beats every other playback software to hell and high water. It installs on all major computer operating systems (ie. Windows, Linux, Mac), plays nearly every video codec except for Realmedia and once you get used to the rather simple keyboard controls (F for Fullscreen, Space for Start/Stop, N for Next and P for Previous) you'll never want to use another player again. And to round it all off, it's totally free - just like DTI.

I'm surprised that in this and all the DTI threads before, no-one has mentioned the VideoLAN solution.

StaffOSimon | August 07, 10:21 CET

Uhm, did nobody understand Caroline when she said no format wars?

gossi | August 07, 12:55 CET

Hm, was my message deleted or did i forget to post it? Which I often do because of that damn preview button, i'm used to other sites where its "click and post"

Pumps | August 08, 21:26 CET