One reason I like blip.tv is that they will take the Ogg Theora/Vorbis video I create in RecordMyDesktop and edit in Pitivi, and transcode it to FLV and MP4 (H264/AAC). The FLV is for streaming to a flash based player. The MP4 version is used in the iTunes feed. They also feed directly to our YouTube channel for maximum reach.

I also use the flash stream and mp4 video to supplement the Ogg video on the site. So visitors with browsers that support the video tag such as Firefox 3.5 will see the Ogg video embedded, users of ‘lesser’ browsers will either get the MP4 stream or the Flash one. I have tested this in Safari for example which shows the fallback MP4 video using the Quicktime plugin. On Windows in IE I get the Flash based player. Here’s the code I use:-

<div id="UbuntuPartitioning">
<video id="UbuntuPartitioning" controls="controls" width="640" height="480">
<source src="http://static.screencasts.ubuntu.com/2009/09/03/Ubuntu_Partitioning.ogv" type="video/ogg" />
<source src="http://blip.tv/file/get/Ubuntuscreencasts-UbuntuPartitioning718.mp4" type="video/mp4" />
<embed src="http://blip.tv/play/ge9BgZzwZgA" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="968" height="544" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true"></embed>
</video></div>

You can see this in action here at http://screencasts.ubuntu.com/2009/09/03/Ubuntu_Partitioning.

One problem I have though is that sometimes the blip.tv automagic video conversion fails. I have a ‘pro’ account with blip.tv so that lets me retry the processing, but it almost always fails on a retry so that’s a kind of pointless feature for me. The conversion that fails is the MP4 one, so that means the iTunes feed doesn’t get populated, and I can’t embed an MP4 video into the site for (for example) Safari users.

It dawned on me this morning whilst looking at the YouTube page that they also convert to MP4 (H264/AAC). So I downloaded the MP4 from YouTube and uploaded it to blip.tv as an ‘alternate’ format to an existing movie. It worked.

I tested the MP4 in Safari on the Mac, and sure enough the quicktime plugin loaded. I also checked that it would download and play in iTunes however it won’t even sync to my iPod. I guess iTunes decides it’s in a format my iPod won’t play. The videos that previously did convert okay at blip.tv do work on the iPod, so I assume there’s some resolution/codec issue in the YouTube converted ones.

Now, dear blip.tv, please fix your own transcoder, or allow me as a user to ‘pull’ MP4 video out of my YouTube account, back into my blip account. This ‘download from YouTube, upload to blip’ process works for me, but it’s time consuming and unnecessary.