Back to WMV Videos for good

Nityananda! Gauranga! Hare Krishna! Jaya Shri Guru Parampara! Pranams. We are back to WMV-VC1 Videos for good this time, it seems. I will try to summarize in short some of the difficulties faced in producing MP4 videos compatible for the upcoming Adobe Flash Player and also some advantages of WMV-VC1 videos:

1. Encoding to MP4 or FLV video formats takes much longer than WMV-VC1 while outputting bigger file sizes.
2. MP4 or FLV somehow give lower quality video than WMV-VC1 at the same bitrate. Maybe be subjective.
   
3. Presently the normal MP4s produced do not stream directly in the upcoming Adobe Flash Player. One has to move the moov.atom from the end to the front of the MP4 file and tools for effectively doing this have not yet been released.
4. Normal and Fullscreen Playback of MP4 and FLV requires more computer resources than WMV-VC1.
5. The new Microsoft Silverlight technology makes it possible now to embed the videos inline in our blog posts though only by an iframe method which has an advantage that we can track the number of plays and downloads.
6. Microsoft has announced a tie-up with Novell to produce the Moonlight version of Silverlight player for Linux.
7. Microsoft will be supporting the Silverlight player in Opera browser also very soon. Win 2000 support is also coming.
8. Presently Silverlight player works in Firefox and IE browsers in Windows XP SP2, Vista and Mac operating systems.
9. The Microsoft Silverlight player is small in size (~1 MB) like the Adobe Flash Player but only one install is required for both Firefox and IE browsers unlike the Adobe Flash Player.
10. The Silverlight player has a cool fullscreen option by double-clicking (single-click to Pause/Play) the video like the one added in Adobe Flash Player 9. A range of many Silverlight web video players should soon be released. I am waiting for a web Silverlight Jukebox for playing all WMV Videos in one window which would be made in XAML. Overall WMV-VC1 looks better at fullscreen than MP4 or FLV even for lower quality videos in my opinion.
    
11. WMV-VC1 Video DVDs will also play in HD and Blue Ray DVD players just like MP4.
12. WMV-VC1 format will play in all smartphones and PDAs with the Windows Mobile OS. WMV videos can be converted very fast to MP4s for playing on iPhone, iPod etc.
13. WMV videos encoded by any free encoders play well in the Silverlight web video player provided the audio bit rate in the video is restricted to 44.1 or 48 KHz.

So please download and install Silverlight if you have not already done so to view the upcoming videos on NITAAI.com. You will have to restart Firefox after installation and Silverlight in IE should work without restart. Thank you.

Daaso'smi, Swami Gaurangapada.