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Speed - we need more of it

Back in the Days

Do you remember those days you started programming? Back then all I had was a Commodore 16, one and a half bad books, and BASIC of all things. The really awkward kind with numbers in front. Incrementing by 10 every line in case you need to insert something later on. Drawing a Sinus curve took bloody ages. You could literally see how it was plotted pixel by pixel.

Later at school I had some C lessons. I liked C a lot. It was fast enough to do draw some odd effects in real time and the code looked so much better than C16 BASIC. Well, big deal. But back then it was truly the holy grail for me. I also got introduced to that odd algorithm stuff. Bubble sort. Gasp.

I can't hear you

Motivation

A few weeks ago someone complained about screencasts being (ab)used as replacement for documentation. I think I saw it somewhere over at reddit or dzone. Well, that rant wasn't all that interesting, really. However, it did point out two real issues: they are useless to the deaf and you lose the advantages of text (searchable, quick scanning etc.). I can't agree more with those bits - it's something that bothered me for ages.

The former can be addressed with subtitles. The latter, however, is more complicated than that. Solving that problem would also solve the issue that screencasts don't really reveal much of their content to search engines. If you put countless hours of work into your screencasts it would be pretty sad if your audience is unable to find them.

Interestingly subtitles are also the solution to this problem. Once they are written (or copy/pasted from the script) you have a complete transcript together with the timing information. With those two pieces (text and time) you can create a transcript where each line can be clicked to seek over to that position.

As I mentioned earlier this new version of the flash player supports MPEG-4 AVC (H.264) and High Efficieny AAC (HE-AAC). Check the press release for some details. Well, there isn't much of a surprise there.

What's surprising tho is that it was released for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and Solaris simultaneously. Way to go Adobe! :)

Grab it while it's hot!

Update: There seems to be some issue with Adobe's mirrors. Right now it claims it would be 9,0,115,0 (the version I spoke of), but the version I'm actually getting is 9,0,47,0. I guess I have to wait a bit.

Update2: OK. Seems to work now. Unfortunately the "lossless" H.264 mode from ffdshow tryouts still doesn't work. It's a shame really, since that one would have been perfect for screencasts.

Wow that's some awesome news. Just a few hours ago I thought how nice it would be if Flash would support H.264. And there it is! :)

The compression ratio of the lossless codec (Screen Video/Screenshare) is sorta bad, Sorenson Spark (a H.263 bastard) looks really bad and VP6 is a major pain to get working (and it isn't really all that great). H.264 (2pass), however, works really well for screencasts. You get very good compression and almost perfect looks. It's currently the best choice for the last mile.