Francesca and I put some time into our bi yearly Christmas video and I am rendering the videos now. In the past I edited the videos in Kino or Windows Movie Maker and then formatted them for VCD and distributed it to friends & family. Shockingly enough VCD’s play on most DVD players due to the popularity of VCD in Asia. I would rather put out a DVD but you can burn in two differing formats: DVD-R and DVD+R. I usually do DVD-R but that doesn’t play on every DVD player, they only play on some. Dunno is DVD+R is better but its a consumer fuck either way.
Seriously? Two competing consumer DVD formats? Fuck you whoever did that. So, for our video to play on most friends and families hardware we create a VCD. Upside? Cheap. Downside? Quality. Its noticable on a standard def TV but most people don’t seem to care. I do so as a long term storage format, VCD sucks. If you have a HDTV and some kind of upscaling DVD player or Bluray, its going to look craptastic as well.
*sigh*
I am toying with the notion of distributing a SVCD this year. It increases the quality to sub DVD but MUCH better than VCD. Francesca votes we should go VCD because we know it plays in 90% of the people’s players we send it to.
This year I am going to make a 720p HD copy of all the videos available for download if people care to watch at a higher resolution. As always they will play fine in VLC or Quicktime.
This year we created the videos in iMovie. iMovie is a good video editor and has all the stuff I need to do what I need to do. The only downside is that it doesn’t export to VCD format. So I export as a DV file and do the VCD/SVCD conversion on Linux. ffmpeg to the rescue really.