This is nohifilms, Niels "nqpz" Serup's index of a varation of short films. The films involved generally revolve around the stopmotion technique.
The information presented below is a bit outdated. Now I simply use ffmpeg.
When creating stop motion films, I simply take a lot of pictures, which I then pass to my stanimate bash script. Its functionality is limited, but it does what it's supposed to do: create simple stop motion films. I'm in the process of finding a smarter and faster way to create my films.
I have chosen Ogg to be the video format used throughout this site, with the Theora codec handling video and the Vorbis codec handling audio (though currently only two films possess audio). Ogg is a free container format, and Theora and Vorbis are free codecs. There are several ways to play Ogg in a web browser -- using plugins of various media players (totem, vlc, etc.) is one, using the Cortado player is another one. A third, relatively new way of playing films in one's web browser is using the web browser's built-in support for Ogg. Mozilla Firefox 3.5+ (and thereby forks such as IceCat 3.5+) fully support the Ogg format, which is why I've set up my page to use that support. For browsers that do not have built-in support for Ogg, I've implemented the Cortado player as a fallback, available at Xiph.org. The only requirement to making Cortado work is having a Java Runtime, which is extremely common these days. I have tested both the OpenJDK Runtime and Sun's Java Runtime, and both seem to function flawlessly. Cortado is free software.
You can read more about Ogg in the manual published by FLOSS Manuals, either online, as a pdf or in real-life format (a book).
The videos on nohifilms are downloadable in 1 - 5 versions. Some videos may only be available in 640x360 or 640x480, while others exist in resolutions as high as 1080p. Occasionally a film will also have a "Behind" video that shows how the film was made. Below is a list of the various resolutions in use.
~~~~~~[16:9]~~~~~
640w : 640x360
576p : 1024x576
720p : 1280x720
1080p : 1980x1080
~~~~~~[4:3]~~~~~~
640w : 640x480
576p : 768x576
720p : 960x720
1080p : 1440x1080
"Behind" videos varies in resolution.
Apparently Ogg Theora isn't suited to HD stuff, but the 720p versions still play fluently on my relatively old computer. The 1080p versions clearly need a powerful computer, but they should be playable, though only at ~8 fps. Mortal people like me are unable to play the 1080p versions.
I would be more than happy to provide the original jpegs, but as they take up quite a lot of disk space (50MB - 900MB per video), I haven't found a satisfying way of hosting my files yet. Maybe I should use BitTorrent? It's not at all impossible for me to upload the files somewhere, but as I don't want to pay to get my files hosted, people who want to download my files will have to wait at least 15 seconds (often more) to receive a download link. Furthermore, though there are some upload sites that supports filesizes above 1GB, these sites mostly use a Flash uploader instead of a normal upload form. I currently use Gnash instead of Flash, and websites featuring Flash upload forms seems to focus on users of the Flash plugin. Apart from that, most such sites seem to focus overly on design and layout, but that's an unrelated issue.
What all this means is, that if I choose to upload files to the standard file hosting sites, the file archives would often have to be split (not that splitting is difficult) and downloaders would have to wait for download links to appear.
I have recently found Kdenlive to be a very nice video editor. It doesn't crash very much.
