Moorhens, the 10 Mbps MPEG4 I encoded, looked just about the same as the 5.9 Mbps .wmv version of it, when I played it on my monitor, before uploading. All the time (90 min.) involved in rendering it into H-264, with double-pass and B-frames, didn't seem to give any benefits over the 5-minute rendering that WMM did on it. What you're saying about the downloaded version of my "Goslings Meet the River" seems to imply that you can get better quality by downloading a video from Vimeo, than you can by playing it directly off their website. I don't think the gosling video looks very good played on Vimeo and I can't expand it above the small window without it looking very poor. I'll have to try downloading it back and seeing how it looks that way. When I play all my converted and compressed HD videos before uploading, they look surprisingly good and much better than when they are re-converted on Vimeo. Thanks for your remarks and I appreciate you taking notice of my videos. When I see how good the original HDV looks that this little HC9 can produce, I'm eager to find a way to make the Web versions retain more of the quality.

Added note: I just did a Real Player download on the gosling video, but it looked very bad, with just 22 MB of bit-size. How did you download a wmv version of it, that averaged 6 Mbps? There's obviously something I don't know about downloading options of these posted videos.

Regards,
Steve

Steve, I downloaded your orginal gosling video by right clicking the download link and selecting "Save Target As..." (btw thanks for making your videos public and thus allowing access to the orginal uploaded file - I really like the gosling video.)

Once your video was saved to my hard drive I checked its spec with the GSpot v.270a Information Appliance, which read your WMV file's bit rate as 6039 kbps (average) with audio as WMA v2, 48 kHz, 192 kbps, 1-pass CBR stereo.

Usually I don't bother watching videos posted on vimeo in HD - generally I preview them with "HD off" and if I like them, and if a download link is available to the orginal file, then I download and watch them at a much higher quality than vimeo HD FLASH. Actually the same is true of many SD uploads as well - the SD original is always far superior in quality to vimeo SD FLASH.

As I said in the forum, thats what makes vimeo so good: access to the original upload file.

Anyway take care Steve, I'm looking forward to perhaps seeing some more of your wildlife videos, all the best, Nigel.

Nigel, thanks so much for the tip on downloading the full-quality original uploads. It works quite well and I will apply this to all the other videos I watch from Vimeo (at least those that are set to allow downloading). I used WMP to play this return download and displayed it at 100%, which filled the 1,280 X 720 window, where it looked sharper than at full-screen. I'm surprised that Vimeo doesn't make this downloading option more obvious and give references to it whenever someone remarks about poor picture quality. Now, if I can just pass the instructions for the downloading on to my friends who aren't too swift in computer acrobatics-----I may have to make a few house calls and walk them through it. My own speed in this has at least doubled since I got my HDV camcorder and a fast computer two months ago. On a scale of 1 to 10 for computer savvy, I think I have now risen to about a 3. Good videomaking to you.

Regards,
Steve