Joe,

How about putting a date for each of the videos indicating when they were first shown.  That way I can keep track of which one I have seen.

Bob Hayes

These two things have the same thing in common. SONY FAILURES.  Sony has the rights to the movies they are going to make their dollar anyway.  Why not have on format so we can play everyone HD video's.  I know that would be too simple. Wait it just like VHS. 

I like many people are not going to go with this format because it is out thier all by its lonesome.

Art

There was BluRay and HD DVD. BluRay won the "format" war.  All movies are coming out on BluRay now.  

In effect, these are all CD formats.

First was the CD format we all know and love that holds about 600 MB.

Then came the "high capacity" CD format (same media form factor) that holds about 5 GB. We dubbed it "DVD".

Now "ultra high capacity" CDs (same media form factor) come on the scene that hold about 25 GB. At first there were two formats - HD and BluRay. BluRay won, HD lost. So now all ultra high capacity "CDs" will be called BluRay disks since they use that format (invented by Sony).

These ultra high capacity disks allow storing a High Definition TV quality movie (1280x720 or 1920x1280 instead of DVD's 720 x 480). The result is an image with up to 4 times the pixels that's so crisp you can see the dust particles on objects, etc. It also takes roughly 4 times the disk space, so BluRay with 5 times the capacity is perfect. The BluRay format also includes more interactive capabilities than the DVD format - you can literally program high definition games on BluRay.

Exactly.

And we can still play frisbee with our Laser Disks.

Blue-Ray sounds cool too, much more interesting than DVD-HD.

Either way they're already a dead format, as streaming and immediate delivery will become the standard in the future. Blue-Ray looks great, but it's just a new coat of paint on that old horse drawn buggy.

I give Blue-Ray 5-7 years in the consumer market place, a little longer for data retention purposes.

FLV video is highly compact and looks very good, and 98% of all computers on the planet have Flash Players installed.

Quicktime is more of a Mac-centric format (although many PCs also have Quicktime installed) and the video image is softer. A softer image looks good for Hollywood movie previews, but for model railroading videos where the visibility of little details is important, a more crisp video like that delivered by the FLV format is preferred.

AVI format video file sizes are huge, so this format is not very suitable for streaming video.

WMV format video is a good second choice to FLV, looking more crisp than Quicktime and the file sizes are almost as good as FLV. WMV's big negative is that it's almost totally a PC format, and not a very Mac or Linux friendly video format.

Hope this explains our choices. Believe me, the decision to go with FLV was not taken lightly. We literally spent months experimenting with various video formats and FLV video looked the best and had the smallest file size.

Joe,

Everytime I have seen a video like the one of yours it inspires me to move forward.  I am on vacation with Grandchrildren and now it seems like I should be home to go back to work on the RR.

Sure, feel guilty about not being home to work on your model railroad. But whould you prefer to feel guilty about not spending any time with your grandchildren while you had the opportunity? Grandchildren gorw up very fast and your opportunities to be with them are already limited as it is because you have to realize that we don't live forever.

Irv

You are 100% right. But in my case the grandchrildren live four doors down and grandson is the head enginer on the RR.  Granddaughter is the chief trouble maker at seven.

Thanks.