Tiyuk's Second Life Adventures

On January 9, 2009, my Second Life avatar, Tiyuk Quellmalz, became two years old.

Per the ongoing challenge by Moggs Oceanlane to grab a parachute or an umbrella and jump naked from the sky, I've done it: click here. You will need to view this with compatible codecs; as part of my totally non-celebratory and normal rezday, I am making my rezday post educational rather than self-centered. Let's learn a bit about audio and video codecs.

*The container format of the video is Microsoft AVI. It's been around for a while, and any self-respecting video player supports it.
*The video encoding complies to the MPEG-4 AVC-H.264 standard, which has codec implementations such as libx264 and within Quicktime.
*The audio encoding complies to the MPEG-4 AAC standard, which has codec implementations such as libfaad2 and Orban.

For more lovely details on how audio and video work in general, head over to the Avidemux wiki, which was very educational for me as well. This information is platform independent, so you must care about this regardless of which platform you are on, if you consume video content other than Flash and Silverlight.

For those of you who just want to see the darn thing, download VLC (VideoLan Client) for your platform.

UPDATE: For those of you who couldn't play the above file: Get QuickTime 7.0 or later on Windows or Mac, or you'll need ffmpeg with MP4 Containers, H.264 Video and AAC 2.0 Audio on Free Desktops. Here's a more compatible version.

-T