I am downloading a blip.tv video because it played so badly as it streamed that I want to really listen to the whole hour-long presentation and focus on what was being said. I assume that the reason it played badly is that my hotel limited bandwidth to slightly lower than the bandwidth blip.tv needed to play my video uninterrupted. Ah well – it is now downloaded and I can enjoy the talk and focus on the content of the talk rather than the start/stop of the streaming.
But what I get from the download is Flash Video, I would have to endure another hour-long conversion before I could listen to it – but that is where Perian comes to my rescue.
“Perian is a free, open source QuickTime component that adds native support for many popular video formats.”
Very nicely done and it allows me to (a) instantly play Flash videos in my Quicktime Player and (b) if I want to convert to Quicktime or MP4, I have far more control than automated conversion programs from Flash to Quicktime that pick my settings. Also with QUicktime Pro and QUicktime 7, I can trim, etc without converting first – and actually, I can keep the FLV as my highest quality archival format – while the FLV videos are pretty harshly down-sampled, at least I do not have to down-sample again and lose quality and increase size.
I can pretend that FLV is a native QuickTime format – thanks Perian!