Episode #157
Hi Leo and Team, We want to record sermons and load, put them on our website, and allow people to listen (download ?) them. What is the ‘best’ file format, considering quality vs file size vs anthing else, please ?? ps: what a great show you put on (its true, but I hope flattery helps my cause !!!)
Neil, Ashwood, Melbourne
Sean’s note: If your goal is to make these files usable to as many people as possible it’s really important that you stick with a standard file format, and for a number of years now MP3 has pretty much been the defacto standard for audio on the net, and the format is playable on a good majority of audio players available Windows, Mac and Linux. You may be tempted to choose Windows Media Audio because of the wide install base of Windows users, but then you’re limiting your audience to people who can play back Windows Media on their machines (some people may not have the ability to install software on their machine to add WMA decoding) and you may be excluding people who have an older version of the Windows Media Player on their machine.
The great news is that if your content will mostly be voice, you can save some bandwidth by making the audio mono, and by dropping the bitrate down to 64kbps mono — the human voice doesn’t have the same dynamic range as typical music, so you can squeeze the files down substantially without serious damage to the audio quality.
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Air Date: March 5, 2008
TranscriptCaller Questions
- Matthew, Perth
- Neil, Ashwood, Melbourne
- TJ, St. Catharines, ON
- Shawn, Indian River, MI
Sean's Shinies
- Samsung BD-P1400
$499
While Samsung has already released its combo Blu-ray/HD-DVD player, the company is still releasing standalone players in its original format choice, Blu-ray. This player is an update to the BD-P1200 player, and it largely provides tweaks to the previous design, especially better audio support. It still supports 1080p output, and it boots up far faster than the original Blu-ray players, but it does still have a few of the quirks that the new high definition players sport, like the occasional sluggishness when moving from one part of a menu into another…and this one also is a bit noisy when the pickup changes position. But at this price point — especially since you can find it for less than $300 on sale occasionally — it’s getting a bit hard to resist the call of high def.Shiny
- 1080p output
- faster bootup than before
- better audio support
Dull
- occasional long pauses in menu
- sometimes noisyBD-P1400
Samsung
Kate’s Tips
- brainpop.com
BrainPOP (http://www.brainpop.com is a pioneering developer of engaging, animated content that motivates and inspires children to learn. Each month, BrainPOP welcomes more than 1,000,000 visitors to its websites, reaching roughly 13,000,000 students in homes, classrooms and computer labs worldwide.
Hosted by an expressive orange robot named Moby and his teen companion Tim, BrainPOP movies cover everything from the Underground Railroad to the atomic model to Shakespeare. Interactive quizzes for assessment and enrichment materials like experiments and creative activities supplement the movies. Topics – aligned with state and national education standards and searchable by state standards – are grouped within the subjects of Science, Math, English, Social Studies, Health, Technology and Arts and Music. Our ever-expanding library currently consists of more than 600 movies for grades 3–12. Designed to spark children’s inherent curiosity, the movies are visually appealing, cleverly written and speak to kids in a voice they can relate to, but without talking down to them. All movies are closed-captioned and many are also available in Spanish at es.brainpop.com.