Mobile Has Crossed The Rubicon

This morning, I have reached a watershed moment.  It is a fascinating discovery for me, but perhaps you have already known it.  Mobile has crossed the Rubicon. By that, I mean that mobile viewing of my youtube channel has beaten out the regular youtube watch page.  I just checked out the analytics for one video, and it is astonishing:


Mobile devices
1,039 (58.1%)

YouTube watch page
730 (40.8%)

Embedded player on other websites
19 (1.1%)

YouTube other
1 (0.1%)


When you couple that with the fact that PC sales are way down, it looks like mobile has truly come of age and the desktop is going the way of the dodo bird.  It look like even the laptop is headed on the way out.

Here is the take-away.  For us developers, we have to start thinking more and more in terms of mobile, even for enterprise computing.

Just for the record, you can watch my mobile video channel here:
http://www.youtube.com/user/ochsblogger

See if you can see the difference between .AVI and .WMV files -- Direct Comparison

Did you ever wonder what the real difference is between AVI and WMV movie files?

See if you can see the difference. Here is the same movie in both AVI and WMV. First, we have .avi:

The .avi file is 31.3 megabytes in size. Here is the .wmv file:

The .wmv file is only 18.5 megabytes in size, and is a proprietary Microsoft format. WMV has a higher compression and is not very good for editing.

After I uploaded these movies, it occurred to me that maybe Google converted them to flash, however perhaps the difference in a lossy compression format would be visible as there were different input parameters.

You be the judge.

Microsoft Codecs Bite

I just finished my rugby video application, and one huge area of risk was the Microsoft video codecs. The ones that they ship with their operating systems don't play in the sandbox well with .Net video playing code.

Specifically, when I would pause a movie, and programmatically advance the frame counter, oftentimes I would get a black screen and the movie was playing but the graphics were not being painted.

I connected a slider bar to navigate the video, and the slider bar sometimes worked and at other times, I would move the slider to a new position and hit play, and the movie would resume playing at the old position. It was hit or miss.

I finally got fed up, and converted the video .avi to div(x). Then I downloaded the DIVX codec from DIVX (quel surprise) and after installation, the video software components worked better than expected.

Not only did I get better screen resolution, but the slider worked as smooth as butter, and the degree of accuracy in frame positioning was an absolute precise delight.

You can get the free DIVX codec pack from here:

http://www.divx.com/en/software/divx-plus/codec-pack