Your Opinion is Needed for Training Content Format
In what Media would you like Training Content to be available?
Rui Campos writes:
…this is mostly a poll to know how the community would like to have Training Content available, there are a couple of Options:
- Standard DVD, video in MPEG2 (720×480) runs in your home DVD Player or on the PC/Mac.
- HD-DVD, video in HD format on a DVD (1280×720 – 720p), runs on newer HD-DVD players (including XBOX-360) and on the PC/Mac.
- DVD-ROM, video compressed in the highest quality in Quicktime (1280×720), runs on the PC/Mac.
- Bluray, video in HD format on a Bluray disc (1280×720 – 720p), runs on PS3 and on the PC/Mac with the proper Bluray drive and Software.
What would be your choice?
Do you like to watch Training Sessions on your Big Screen TV, or do you like to view it on the PC/Mac?
Please visit the forum thread to vote in the poll. The poll results will be used to determine the media format for upcoming training materials.
Standard DVD, video in MPEG2 (720×480) runs in your home DVD Player or on the PC/Mac.
heh..
Please visit the forum thread to vote in the poll. The poll results will be used to determine the media format for upcoming training materials.
Definately viewable on PC/Mac, since I like to switch back and forth between the video and the application.
I liked my idea about a interactive inside help in blender ..
I wrote in the topic below :
B-Mesh Video Preview
http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Blendernation/~3/182256719/
Any content that VLC could play. The more on the disc, the merrier. MPEG4 perhaps with a reasonably viewable size for any disk publishing or submission. I’d go with the same for a download library. But I’d also format for flash video play. Using the new flash higher res potential, streaming that would be great. But if download or CD is the only economical option, whatever is great with me. If somebody can figure out blender, they can surely figure out playing video with codecs right?
On the other hand, if the content is suppoed to be fully free, is OGG Theora a better choice?
good luck, anything is great, I’m excited to see it come to fruition.
Video: Mpeg4 AVC (a.k.a. H264)
Audio: AAC
Container: Matroska (with chapters / sub-chapters)
CD-ROM / DVD-ROM
Can play back on VLC.
My choice is pc rather than TV.
mpeg4 (.mpg can be played both on pc mac and linux for that matter) for video and zbrush like macros for interactive tutorials played in blender itself I read this function is planned for the next release.
ONLINE?
The QuickTime HD is the best format, compressed and High Quality.
Thanks for the feedback to all and please vote on the poll if you haven’t already.
Whatever the result of the poll, it will play nicely on Linux and with VLC as well as Windows and Mac, that’s a promisse …
whatever the hell you choose, make it playable on tv as well. And yes i allready voted on the poll.
I’d first go for a standard dvd, viewable on any television set dvd player, and the second choice would be playing it on the pc. I’d like mpeg or divx or even xvid. most dvd players can handle that nowadays, and they don’t need to be expensive too.
I don’t specifically care about whether or not VLC can play it, if only because it plays practically anything, so I don’t expect less of it…. but I want to be able to see it on the tv, it’s a lot more relaxing and less distracting to watch than behind a computer screen.
I quite disagree with the more the merrier. if the quality is good you don’t need more space to crank in the same amount of content. People with little time will more likely watch a few well done vids that are short and to the point than a gazilion videos that keep beating around the bush all the time. (3dbuzz anyone, well some of their vids anyway)
And just because someone takes the time to learn blender doesn’t mean he should know all the latest video codecs or have the bandwidth to stream everything in flash.
Just go for old and proven tech on this. You reach more people with it, and you make more people happy with it.
and whatever you do PLEASE! I BEG of you… DON’t go for WMV!!!!! it’s hell to play on anything other than windows…
Standard DVD, video in MPEG2. European standard is PAL 720×576.
I’m with Markus. Let me stream or download the video at my choice of 480p or 720p.
Free Streaming FLV – like gotoandlearn.com – video on demand player + Free ;-) There is also a offline player for the same content.
Some facts from the blenderartists thread for those interested:
— RCAS —
1.) certainly won’t be free, as each package will sport around 8 to 12 hours of training, with a lot of stuff in it.
2.) For the first batch there will be no DRM on the content, doing a “I trust you won’t let me down by pirating this Package that took several months to create…”. If I find that the Community is failing to comply with the previous sentence I will be forced to impose some sort of DRM, but I will trust that everyone will make a good judgement on this.
3.) Download option gives you another deal of trouble:First it will be around 16GB for download and not that many people can afford to download such amount. Second, I can save on packaging, make the content cheaper, but then I will have to pay for a huge monthly bandwidth for such downloads and mirrors of course.
And then you have the other thing, I plan to sell a full package, small printed inlet, cool package you can put next to your other DVDs and so on. Also take into account that most people like to have a physical package instead of a download.
So, the idea to use download instead is put on the shelf for now. Let stick to the initial question please.
4.) On, on the problem of using the content on iPods and wathever, I mentioned already that there wasn’t going to be any DRM on the content, meaning that if you buy it, you can re-encode for your iPod or any other device, as long as you keep it for your own usage and don’t distribute it.
5.) On the pricing, I can’t talk about this right now, but I promise you will know in a month from now.
6.) Just answering some questions. It will be between 8 to 12 hours of training on a single topic, like animation or modeling. There is plan for 30 Packages of Training, each containing 2 Double Layer DVDs (around 16GB per package). Download is not an option right now, it will be in a second stage. Format for DVD-ROM should be Quicktime, but if everyone wants it, let it be XVid, I personally find Quicktime a good option when cross-platform is intended and also see much more quality on it then with XVid, but I don’t mind encoding in XVid. The Content will be provided by several Blender users you all might know, but I won’t get into that until contracts are signed and everything is ready.
— RCAS —
Thanks LL.
HD content is totally not an option for me, so I’m not doing to say standard DVD. I just wonder, though, if the contest is just for BlenderArtists members?
HD formats are too fragmented (thanks a lot, corporate overlords) to be generally useful right now. Neither disc format will “win”, but h264 quicktime/avi files probably will.
My favorite format for this case would be a DVD-ROM with media playable on a computer. An HDTV has the necessary resolution, but I don’t sit two feet away from it with my own copy of Blender at my fingertips.
To DramaKing: a really big part of the Blender Community has a user on BlenderArtists, that was why I posted the poll there.
I think the blender foundation is putting their training on dvd rom. For the reason that it will fit far more hours of video in a high resolution.
SD-DVD needs lots of editing to be usefull: none of the buttons are readable, and with normal compression fits “only” 1 hour of video. ( 80 minutes )
RCAS says he need to make menus for dvd. I think you will need to make menus for dvd-rom as well. People need to be able to find the content, not just by looking at a directorie.
Watching tutorials on tv is overrated as far as I’m concerned, movies yes, but tutorials?
Tutorials want easy scrolling (so no mpeg) , easy access (99 chapters might not be enough) , high resolution pictures.
I’d go for dvd-rom.
* Its compatible with all hardware and operating systems (dvds are PAL or NTSC)
* Its high resolution ( even 800×600 is raizor sharp )
* Easy access, via html menu, (backward) scrollable, directory structure.
* Easy add-ons like web content and picture gallery.
* Fits many ours of content (tutorials do tent to eat time to explain a simple thing).
* Cheap to make, so gets the cost of the product down.
* Clients all own a computer, not all of them own a dvd player.
Anyway… thats me.
1. Do you really watch tutorials on the TV?
I usually watch them on my PC with the programm I’d like to learn open.
2. Blender is open source software so please publish your videos in an open video codec Theora or Dirac. Only these codecs can be played on really all computers without any patent or license problems.
Please no Quicktime or WMV!
3. Please put additional content onto the disk, like the Blender files or textures etc.
I think Standard DVD format and/or .avi/.mpeg? format, it will make it more compatible with older devices. You can use VLC media player for the .avi/.mpeg files. (And as above, please no quicktime or .wmv, as these are annoying and don’t work as well with other programs)
hello guys, does any 1 know when the xbox 720 is coming out??? thanks