Last Friday, I was woken up by the sound of my cat, named Jones, playing with a mouse playing in the kitchen. I went the next day to the hardware store and stocked up on some traditional mouse traps, and set them under the fridge and dishwasher. However, Jones beat the mouse to the trap, and dropped the mouse in a pile of dirty laundry on the basement steps. Snow discovered the mouse (still alive!) while sorting through the laundry, and promptly re-covered the mouse with the laundry. I grabbed a heavy book and started to re-sift through the laundry, only to discover the mouse had moved on to a new hiding spot. Our basement steps are draped with a thin work cloth (we had our basement steps rebuilt last summer and still need to paint/stain the wood), and I proceeded to stomp the book around on each covered step. As I stepped down, I felt something soft under my foot–the mouse was dead. I took the poor fella outside to take a picture.

I was asked by Sorenson to provide my quick tips for Sorenson Squeeze 4.5 for their November newsletter, and I just found the newsletter in my inbox! You can view the newsletter online to forward to a friend. Two out of five tips were included in this month’s newsletter, with the remaining three to be posted in the December newsletter:

1. DO determine a proper bitrate (or data rate) for your Flash Video content. Squeeze includes several presets for Flash Video to get your started. If you need a wide range of data rates for your deployment, encode several FLV files by applying multiple presets to the same source file.
2. DON’T be tempted to change the image quality setting in your compression preset(s), especially if you will be deploying your Flash Video with a streaming service provider such as Akamai, Limelight, or a Flash Media Server hosting company like Influxis.com. The image quality setting will override the bitrate value you’ve specified for the preset, or alter the frame rate if you elect to drop frames to maintain image quality. Neither of these outcomes is desirable.

If you purchased my new Flash Video book online as a PDF (or if you’ve lost or damaged your original DVD-ROM), you can download the > 7 GB of files from my Amazon.com S3 account. Because I have to pay for this hosting based on a per-GB fee, please e-mail me directly to get the URLs to the content. I will likely send you a “word challenge” where you have to tell me the [insert random number here] word on page [insert random book page here] to verify your ownership.

In the near future, I’ll have an online request form setup that randomly generates the word challenge and submits the data to me via email. (Check back!)

If you’re looking for some source video files to practice video encoding, you can check out the links to various clips from archive.org that I included in my new Flash Video book. I love browsing archive.org for documentaries created in the 1940s through 60s.