I've been spending a lot of time recently playing around with video codecs, compression systems and web playback - and I've now found a combination of systems and settings that I'm happy give a much better quality of playback of video online. Compare this with the horrible stuff you get out of YouTube.

Here's an example of what it can do. The clip is a little overexposed - a fault of my cheap camcorder and lack of skills, but the crystal shows up well. It's a corundum crystal from Madagascar and shows a rather complex and unusual crystal form. We found quite a few small sapphires in Scotland with a similar form. The specimen was shown to me by Jordi Fabre at the Munich Show yesterday.



Things are going to improve even better shortly as there is a system called H.264 that is now available for encoded video also, and once I build support in to mindat for this it will be practical for people to upload their own video clips to mindat. Better buy some more hard disks for the server first though!

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