Video hosting
Buzzmachine has a quick look at various online video hosters, and while he doesn’t come to any definite conclusion, does say blip.tv is one of the best for picture quality.
What I notice is that Motionbox won’t work without Adobe Flash Player 9, which effectively rules it out if you want corporate types to look at your stuff.
And Brightcove was not only complicated for Jeff to use, but gives me dire warnings about lack of bandwidth.
Personally I’ve used Google Video and YouTube. Both seem okay, but I’m looking for ease of use, not necessarily best quality.
iPods
Jeff Atwood tells us why he’s not buying an iPod.
It should be obvious why iPod doesn’t support WMA… because then you wouldn’t have to buy your online music from the iTunes Music Store.
I have three WMA songs on my iRiver. I downloaded them with the $5 voucher that was included when I bought the player. I also have about a hundred 128 kbps MP3s. The WMA files are by far the losers in sound quality. All bass is woofy and wobbly and distorted. All of my MP3 songs (except one which seems to have had an encoding error) sound far, far better and have nowhere near the same level of discernible distortion.
I don’t know if those WMA songs were just encoded horribly somehow. Perhaps there are ways to get it wrong. They are the same size as my MP3s.
Maybe Apple has decided that WMA is so bad that iPods shouldn’t play it.
I suspect that’s how the WMAs were encoded, rather than a limitation of the WMA format itself. I’ve heard some shockingly-recorded MP3s.