As mentioned in today's bulletin, I'm experimenting with putting videos of our Sunday morning sermons on the church website.
One of the problems that's hard to get around is that the sermons run approximately 45 minutes each. Converting a video that long to a web compatible format results in a file that is several hundred megabytes in size, definately too big for most folks to consider downloading. To get around this, I've compressed the file as much as possible. The result is a file of around 15 megabytes. While this is a reasonable size for broadband users (it took me about 2 minutes to download it at home), it's still pretty large if you have dialup. Also, the compression causes the image to be pixelated and the audio doesn't always match up with the video. In other words, the quality suffers a significant amount. I can improve the quality, but file sizes will increase proportionately.
I'd appreciate it if a few folks could check out the first one I've put online and give me a little feedback. Would larger file sizes be acceptable if quality improved? How long should each file remain online? Any other comments?
Here's a link to the menu: sunshine-church.org/video/index.htm
Sunday, March 11, 2007
Online Sermons
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3 comments:
Ok. I'm the kind of person who prefers quality over quantity. So, even if it will take longer to get it to play on your computer, I think it will be more enjoyable and more affective if you could see it better and hear it better. It was kinda' weird 'cause Jon didn't even sound like Jon. I don't know if that can be fixed but I thought I'd throw that thought out there just in case.
So, yeh, I think it would be worth it to make it a better quality and just have to wait longer. I'm getting pretty good at this waiting stuff anyway...haha! If I can wait for a baby, you all can sure wait for a sermon to load on your computer. ;)
Jennifer
Oh yeh, I forgot to talk about how long the sermon should stay on the website.
I'm wondering if there is a way to view how many "hits" each sermon file has. If this is possible, I would imagine you could leave the ones that are used most and remove the less used after a month. That will give people 4 Sundays to have the chance to listen to one particular message. I don't know....maybe it should be longer. I'd personally like to see them all stay on there forever! ;)
Jennifer
Al,
I finally was able to take time to check it out. The sound is altered, but, it is easily intelligible. I watched it at work where I have a fast connection.
It will be interesting to see how much this will be utilized. I think you are on to a good thing here.
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