Sometimes it’s better to avoid MTV. Promoting their new unpronounceable album “Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust”, Sigur Rós’ video for Gobbledigook (NSFW… why do I find myself typing that so often?) isn’t the kind of thing the FCC smiles upon. I don’t think most people would find it offensive – far more disturbing things routinely make it onto afternoon television – but naked Scandanavians frolicking in a forest are more of an online-only thing. And while the Internet isn’t free from content censorship either (you won’t find this on YouTube), this is a nice way to take advantage of online freedom. It’s the kind of thing that otherwise would only find distribution on DVD or in a gallery, but can reach a much wider audience this way (and better serve its purpose as a promotional film).

-Nick

We’ve been working a lot with the new H.264 support in Flash. Like the On2.VP6 addition back in Flash 8, the inclusion of H.264 opens up new potential for delivering high-quality video at low bitrates. One drawback is that Flash doesn’t currently support transparency in H.264 – you’ll have to stick to VP6 for your walk-on hosts and so forth.

The latest figures from Adobe put the H.264-enabled version (9.0.115) at 62% penetration for the US and Canada as of March. This is probably into the 80s by now, as the 99.4% of users with Flash 6+ get prompted to auto-update when they encounter Flash 9 content. There’s little reason to hold off from distributing in H.264 at this point: very few users will have trouble viewing it and the quality boost and/or bandwidth savings are significant.

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