Class 7, Thu July 13 - Maybe pointing out the obvious is actually helpful from time to time. When Wootten noted a handicap of embedded players being that it prevents you from browsing to other pages, it occurred to me that this had never occurred to me. I donno. For whatever, reason I like the embedded player...probably for aesthetic reasons. It makes the page more fluid and if you WANT your audience to not stray from the video, it probably is the best way to go. But I thought it was helpful that Wootten outlined the advantages/disadvantages of embedded vs. separate.

Gosh, I think I would go insane being a coder. I'd probably have to be insane to be a coder, for that matter. -Probably appreciate RealNetworks' metafiling system the most, as it's a straightforward playlist of URLs. All the little details between media player library commands are nuts, and I can see how it would be somewhat tempting to stick with one media player format and get accustomed to it if you do a great deal of code-level work. I wonder if anyone else is noticing that the text in Wootten is starting to look like one long HTML string. But the embedding command distinctions are helpful, insofar as I always wondered how that is achieved.

I really enjoyed the chapter on mobile video. It's going to be really interesting to see how that takes off and how it changes the design of 3G units. Leaps and bounds are gonna have to be made, probably, to get it to be perceived as anything other than a "cool extra feature". Internet access has been available on phones for a few years now, but I don't know of anybody who actively uses the web browser on their Nokia. The functionality of BlackBerries are hugely popular, so I wonder if mobile video is going to pursue a similar approach in the professional world...maybe self-recorded video clips will replace text mssgs. Seems like you won't have to worry about maximizing compression with mobile players until ppl start using them as a primary entertainment/information device.