Some time ago, I made this website called gameminutes.net featuring lots of videos (a few minutes) of videogames: reasonably recent ones, older ones, and very old ones (and by the way, if you would like to see a particular game there, just tell me and I’ll see what I can do! Feedback on the content appreciated). I thought it would be nice to have this kind of “photo album” for games, many people have had some great time with them.

I encoded the videos in XviD (it seems that Theora wasn’t able to give me such a good quality with the same file size) and until recently, visitors just had to download those AVI files, which gave a fairly good quality/size ratio. The problem was, of course, that they needed to download the whole file before beginning playback. So I switched to a Flash-based video format (flv): this makes playback much easier, embedded in the webpage (provided that you have the Flash plugin…). However, there is a big drawback: I need to use the Flash 7 compression method so that everybody can watch those videos (we’re still waiting for Flash 9 for Linux, and for 64 bits versions by the way…), and this produces much larger files (it is still good for real-time, in most cases) while decreasing the quality a lot. Schplunks.

So, dear lazyweb, I have a question Do you know a way to stream (or progressive-download) XviD videos (or similar formats) without requiring visitors to download some rare plugin first, and so that people can view those videos on any OS? I also thought of QuickTime, but that’s even worse (no Linux version AFAIK). Can Fluendo do something like that? I can always wait for a Linux version of Flash 9 but, well… Oh, needless to say, Open source solutions are best!