Bandwidth in Austin is disproportionately more expensive than Dallas and Houston which have some of the cheapest bandwidth in the country because they are very well connected cities.

I'd love to setup a new build office block here in Austin which offered bandwidth to small businesses at affordable prices. Lots of small companies like mine need to upload and download the occasional 5 gig file and it takes hours on the overpriced cable connection.

Unfortunately there is just too much that Windows makes much easier to do than Ubuntu, and needing to edit Adobe Flash files, etc means that I can't make the switch to Ubuntu until there is more supported software.

Hopefully in the next few years switching to a free OS will be a more realistic option.

The recently released OS based on the works by ClarkConnect, appears to make WAN balancing a snap: http://www.clearfoundation.com/docs/user_guide/clearos_enterprise_5.1/multi-wan.

Obviously WAN balancing two connections will not double the download speed for a single file transfer through a single connection, but by using a download manager which makes multiple connections, or by using P2P, you can effectively download a single file at 2*XYZmbit/sec by balancing two XYZmbit WAN connections.

I'll test it out and report back.

I've just replaced the .so that was loaded, with the latest 64bit release from Adobe. Just follow the instructions here, but for me the folder was /usr/lib/firefox/plugins, not /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins.

The flash player is showing again, hopefully this plugin resolves the problem I was having.

With that in mind; I just switched my home machine from Vista to Ubuntu 9.10, now I can easily use tools like rsync, ffmpeg, etc. I'll give this a few months and if things go well then I'll switch the work machine over too. Right now I use Dreamweaver a lot for work, so I can't really jump right into Ubuntu yet.

I've experienced a couple of problems with the GUI freezing when I had the visual effects set to full (even with the Nvidia driver installed), but turning the visual effects off seems to have resolved the problem.

Below is a screenshot of me experimenting with ffmpeg/x.264 on my Core2 Quad:

You can download the PowerConnect 5424 user manual here: 54xx_ug-dell-switch.pdf

Although instead of using the fmt=18 as suggested in that article, I would suggest using fmt=6. Format 18 is a mp4 quality file at 512kbps, 128kbps stereo. And format 6 is a flv at 900kbps, 96kbps mono. As detailed here: http://blog.jimmyr.com/High_Quality_on_Youtube_11_2008.php

If you click play on both of the videos at the same time you should notice that the standard quality load progress bar loads more quickly than the high quality video bar. You will also be able to see the difference in quality by comparing the videos.

High quality:


Standard quality:

Get Putty, set some basic tunnel settings within it, ensure that AllowTcpForwarding is set to yes in /etc/ssh/sshd_config on your server, and change your browser settings to use your new proxy/tunnel.

There are plenty of legitimate reasons for wanting to do this (encrypting your traffic across your ISP to your trusted server) aswell as plenty of questionable reasons, such as wanting to watch hulu.com content from outside of the USA.

Regular encoded .flv videos would load perfectly well as I could download from the USA at 200kB/sec and these videos only require about 90kB/sec of bandwidth, but the H.264 video requires about 470kB/sec to load/play instantly.

So, I have coded a simple CDN solution and now videos for users from the Western hemisphere will load from a server in the USA and videos for users east of the Atlantic will load from my server in the UK. I now receive download speeds of 480kB/sec which is just enough for the H.264 video and only limited by my broadband connection.

I shall expand upon the CDN code in due course, but for now it is a perfect and fully automated solution requiring no maintenance.

If you experience any troubles with the videos on the site then please let me know by posting a comment below.

H.264 is a more processor intensive codec than previous codecs allowing for much higher quality video to be stored in smaller files. Apple has been making use of this technology for a while now within their .mov offering, but the ability to play H.264 video with the flash player means that web video can easily take advantage of this technology.

I just grabbed the Transformers movie trailer from Apple (in 720p .mov format, encoded with H.264) totalling 105MB, and have plugged it into the flash player below. Check out the full screen quality!

Previously even with ON2 VP6 such quality would of required around a 170MB file.

Update 29th May 2008: I have uploaded three copies of the IronMan movie trailer to demo the quality of H.264 at various bitrates and filesizes. Honestly I have a hard time telling the difference in quality even on a 24" monitor. The 480p seems like a perfect solution for full screen web video.

480p 56mB
[See post to watch Flash video]

720p 121mB
[See post to watch Flash video]

1080p 197mB
[See post to watch Flash video] ]]> http://www.infohole.com/blog/computing/h264-video-in-flash/feed/ 1