Yesterday I got the news about nicovideo supporting H.264 streams on their site.

Btw, for those who haven’t heard of nicovideo, it’s a kind of japan’s youtube site. The overall quality of their video is superior than any video host you can find today. They also have the unique commenting system where the comments scroll as you watch the video. Details on registering can be seen here.

Here’s a sample, a video of idolm@ster AMV with the song Electro World (by Perfume) in H.264 quality:
http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm2539712
I can’t embed it in wordpress, sorry. You need to follow the link to watch.

The quality is very good. It plays offline smoothly using MPC while the previous VP6 fails to play using the newest stable ffdshow.
The only downsides are:

• Huge files. The video above weighs 26.927KB for a 04:22 video. It means roughly it needs 103KB/s (or 1Mbps) connection to stream smoothly.
• Embedded player lacks post-processing filters. The video turns grainy when you resize it beyond its normal resolution (at least that’s what happened to me in my firefox 2 with flash v9)

Those who are following IT news should also know that youtube are also testing their HQ streaming (by adding &smf=6 at the end of youtube URL, only some videos supported).

This sucky wp’s embed limitation makes me think again to set up a custom host or moving out to blogger.com.

I can’t believe the hardest part in starting a blog is that of finding a decent host.

Most are lacking the user’s freedom to revamp the site’s design (or themes). What I hate the most (from wordpress.com) is that fixed width themes waste A LOT of space while the flexible width themes  simply dont allow for custom heading (well, one does.  But I won’t call a 100×150 px img a heading).

There’s also the other option of setting up blogs in free web hosts (and I have the skill to do so) but they suffer from ToS inconsistencies :/ the next thing you know is that your site was taken down because of <insert something stupid here>.

One reason I care about ToS so much is because I’m going to post risque content in here (read: girls with lack of clothes and copylefts). So far, I never stumbled on a host that respects freedom of speech in its pure form (the right to write obscene or  hateful or racially or ethnically objectionable contents). Defamatory acts aren’t that of a problem, just like P&T teach how to do it safely in their first episode of bullshit.

Lastly, I don’t care if a free service includes an advertisement on its member page. We are not paying anything, anyway. As long as the ads are not intrusive, I think it’s fine to place ads on user pages (like this site, a Japanese blogging service: http://blog.livedoor.jp/clausemitz). I rant about this because we need to pay $15 a year for a custom CSS? o_O I would really appreciate it if in the future wordpress gives an option to have free custom CSS with displayed ads in the pages or paid version with no ads.

Phew.
(I hope) This will be the last time I rant about technical stuff.