Hello, I'm looking to incorporate video on my site for product demo's.

I made an initial experimental video. Please let me know what you think.
Too long?
Too large?

http://www.izumiconsulting.com/video/lasliderwm512.wmv

It plays in windows media 9 and is about 3 megs in size.

I used pinnacle 9 and encoded to a 512k stream. Audio is royaltry free. Encoding smaller resulted in large artifacts and made the video unviewable.

If you have any suggestions on how I could optimize these types of video's further, please let me know.

Do you think a flash video would be better?

Plan is to host the video on 3d party servers so that I won't affect the store.

Thanks,

I suppose you know your customers better than the rest of us. For me its too much, but I'm not one of your prospects/customers.

I'd be surprised if someone wanted to download 3meg to see a demo on some fishing lure (particularly a $4 item) on dialup. If you say they need 512k to stream (I may have read that wrong), that excludes a bunch of 256k dsl users and all dial-up.

However, I suppose fishing is one of those hobbies where there are a lot of zealots that want to know everything. So if they have broadband (or lots of time) I guess they might like to see a demo. The only concern is that you end up serving up bandwidth and they buy elsewhere like the local Wal-Mart (or competitors link your demo).

Ed

A video like that I think probably would be for current client but in a how to type form. I think if you want to offer like a tour/demo video then a flash video would be the best. You see them all the time on microsoft site and even has one i believe.