today as I was busily troubleshooting a backup issue, there came a knock on the door. I wanted to ignore it but didn't. It was the wife of the pacific area director. They were visiting. She had told me without knowing I was the author that:
"I have this bible dedication video and I can't seem to show it on my toshiba laptop."
I was surprised that the pacific area director had a copy of the video. I had originally burned the dvd so it would play NTSC, PAL, on any dvd player or provide data files for MAC or PC... so this was my first complaint about inability to show.
I compressed the data file with MPEG4 (h.264) and it dawned on me, she either needed ffdshow codecs or vlc player installed.
She asked "am I truly the first complaint about this?"
I replied "well I didn't know the video had made it outside our country, and most folks here are adept at using VLC and multiple format dvd players, so ... yes... you actually are."
"well look at that, Ukarumpa ahead of the rest of the world." she replied jokingly.
I chuckled. Of course we're not ahead of the world, it's a common format... but it did feel good for a moment to think that at least were weren't BEHIND the rest of the world.
She then explained to me her intentions to copy the video and disperse it, which I'm fully in favor of. Still I don't think she knew I was the creator of the video.
It's odd to me, that this little video I did for fun and for ministering to people HERE, to remind them why we do what we do.... has reached so far already.
Side RANT:
the compression formats that work best for me (smaller so I pay less to transfer) (divx, h.264) simply don't work on windows machines with XP by default... so when I send videos home folks can't play.
INSTALL VLC (videolan) player, or install DIVX and ffdshow codecs... and this problem goes away.
