Notes on video formats

Thanks to the efficiency of the free market and the effectiveness of the US patent system in spurring innovation, the most popular operating systems on the market (Microsoft Windows and Apple OS X) use incompatible and patent-encumbered video formats, and Linux users must break the law to view either.

The best solution I arrived at was to encode all videos with h264 in MPEG-4 containers. These play very well in Quicktime, so they'll work fine out of the box on Macs and just as well on Windows, if you have Quicktime for Windows installed. On Linux you'll probably need to download codecs from a less enlightened nation. Google appropriately, e.g. "opensuse+mpeg4+codec"

Just to be safe, I've provided the most important movie (the velocity/state-space split-screen) in four formats. If you can't view any of those, we're really in trouble!

The .ogg file is "Ogg Theora", an open-source, unencumbered video format and container.


emacs tag: Last modified: Mon Dec 3 00:12:13 IST 2007
subversion tag: $Author: predrag $ - $Date: 2007-12-18 11:25:44 +0530 (Tue, 18 Dec 2007) $