Posterous.com (YC summer 08) launches Video support | Hacker News Reader

Posterous.com (YC summer 08) launches Video support

blog.posterous.com

35 pointsrantfoil21 comments

Great idea, but the quality is awful--not at all surprising, given that you're using a video format dating from the late 90s (Flash Video 1, a slightly modified version of the decade-old H.263 format). "Looking like Youtube" is not a compliment in 2008.

High quality at reasonable bitrates in Flash isn't difficult; you just need to use x264. ( 280kbps example: http://norp.ath.cx/h264.html ) Quality has improved quite a bit since that sample was made, too: http://i35.tinypic.com/rk33wx.png (screenshot from 400kbps encode). There's a reason a huge number of sites, both small startups to companies as large as Facebook, are switching to x264.

Drop by #x264 if you need more information; we're there to help. And if you need something more in-depth, I do contracts, too...

Thanks for the tip! I just switched our codec to x264 and we saw a quality improvement. I'm also playing around with higher bitrates, we definitely want the video on Posterous to look good.

Note that if you're using ffmpeg (which seems to be popular for Flash video encoding), you have to be very very careful with encoding settings because it uses rather bizarre defaults for x264, forcing you to re-specify all the existing ones to get it to work ideally. Fortunately, there's useful guides on that too:

http://ffmpeg.x264.googlepages.com/mapping http://rob.opendot.cl/index.php/useful-stuff/ffmpeg-x264-enc...

The first link is useful even if you're not using ffmpeg, since it has a relatively good explanation for what most of the options do. And if you still need more quality, drop by our IRC.

This is fantastic. Thanks for the link and the advice. Talk about being helpful... I'd like to +10 karma on DarkShikari's account.

Next episode: Posterous now delivers babies, too!

Jeezus H, Gary and Sachin, take a break or something. You're making us the rest of us look bad. And I even know some of the other stuff you're working on, too, so it's almost depressing.

Ha nice work.

Luke, you guys at Startuply has been working insanely fast too!

They recently rolled out an awesome resume tracking system for employers, which we definitely hope to be using in the future.

Very cool update. Now I'm waiting for my phone to support video capture (GUESS WHICH PHONE!).

Once you guys roll out customizable themes and domains, I'll definitely be using Posterous to host my blog (vs. tumblr). That multiple posting feature is really winning me over.

Great job pumping out the features.

Thanks kyro! Paul says that the 10 weeks of YC are some of the most productive times you'll have in your entire life. We can confirm that first-hand. =)

There are some unofficial video recording apps for the iPhone, and they have email support built right in. Hopefully one of these will make it to the app store, and we'll have a direct video to blog flow. Brings a whole new meaning to live blogging.

I'll take a drop-dead easy solution over a theme any day.

Don't get me wrong, themes will be awesome, but simplicity and ease of use are the game changers with Posterous. Keep up the good work guys!

I like the concept of email to blog, but I have no wish to move my blog to maxklein.posterous.com. Why can't I just use my existing blog and you integrate into that?

We have a feature called autopost which will post to twitter, flickr, and all the existing blogging systems out there. Just sign in to Posterous and you'll see where you set that up.

as i can recall the founders of YouTube said it was impossible to share videos with email because of the large size... except .3gp how are you going to avoid the file size limitation of most mail services?

For short videos of around 20 to 25 meg, it's quite viable. It's actually ideal for camera phone and small digital camera videos, because it's long enough to see something interesting but short enough to not bore people.

Posterous keeps getting cooler and cooler. Nice work guys!

Excellent job, guys. I'm still not a fan of the email-to-posting system, but the rate at which you've added features is stunning.

Why?

Because it lacks a sense of community, and that's why I would use a communal blogging site like Posterous. It's why the only system I use outside my main site is Tumblr.

I'm still waiting to post blog posts over the phone. I would like voice to text so that i can make posts from anywhere.

You should checkout Spinvox @whatleydude on Twitter is their Chief Blogger, he can tell you everything about it.

Bastian

If you set Jott.com up to send email to post@posterous.com, we automatically clean up the email they send us and just post the Jott.com transcribed content.

That's one fast way to get voice to text to posterous. =)

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