1. Frontier is the reason flights out of Denver are so inexpensive.

This probably applies to their other hubs/focus cities (Kansas City, Milwaukee, Omaha) however Denver is the point of focus as that’s where I live at the moment. Southwest is often caught having to match Frontier’s fare sales rather than the other way around.

An example of this behavior is the pair of $39 (plus taxes and fees) one-ways I got between Denver and Austin…on Southwest, using their rewards program so my out-of-pocket cost was $5 for the round-trip plus a paltry amount of Rapid Rewards points. Granted, the flights were on a Tuesday and Saturday outside of the peak travel season, but I guarantee you that Southwest handed all of their “producer surplus” (sorry, economist lingo) to me, and then some, thanks to the heated competition in DEN over every passenger on most major routes.

Such competition might not be sustainable (at least at those fares), however Frontier can take the heat better than Southwest, due to Frontier’s lower cost structure (they’re aiming to be a “ULCC”, or Ultra Low Cost Carrier), versus Southwest. This is why the airline is still around in Denver; Southwest can’t engage in predatory pricing aggressive enough to smoke them out.

2. Frontier allows you to pay for the services you want, and offers them at a reasonable price.

Frontier has three fare categories: Economy, Classic and Classic Plus. The cheapest option tends to be comparable to Southwest’s cheapest in price, but includes a few less amenities: no free checked bags, and changes cost $50 plus the fare difference. Then again, if you don’t check bags (me 90-plus percent of the time) and don’t change your flight (me 90-plus percent of the time) I’ll take the risk with Frontier because they’re a little more convenient when flying out of Denver, and are more comfortable while en route (wider, more comfortable seats, chocolate chip cookies instead of hundred-calorie snack packs).

The delta between Economy and Classic is usually $25 or so, and if you want no change fees and checked bags you can get both with that fare. Or you can buy some of the components (DIRECTV, checked bags) a la carte if you have a cheaper fare. Add a few more dollars on and you get frequent-flier treatment (seating up front with more legroom, a free alcoholic beverage, priority security lanes and boarding) without needing to meet the airline’s (low) qualifications for such tiers. Or, again, you can pay for STRETCH seating (United calls an inferior product Economy Plus) and the beverage on a lower fare…and these upgrades cost less than, say, Economy Plus’s upcharge on United.

As an added bonus (for me anyway), if you want snacks on board (beyond the cookie) you can buy them, at a reasonable price and with known good quality (I’ve tested this out a few times). The good thing (if you’re a customer) about buy-on-board is that the airline has to work to make the product good enough to convince customers to buy it, and Frontier does a good job at achieving this. Try buying anything other than liquor or a Monster on a Southwest flight and they’ll look at you funny and walk away.

Speaking of Southwest, they have three flight tiers just like Frontier. The difference is that there is very little that you gain from upgrading fare classes, and the upcharge cost is steep in many cases. Case in point: I’ve never bought a Southwest fare above their cheapest category. I have (once) bought a Frontier Classic ticket, and have bought on-board items, checked bags and seating upgrades on Frontier multiple times, and been happy with what I paid for.

3. Frontier is expanding smaller-city service.

Going back to the competition again, AirTran (now owned by Southwest) used to serve a number of airports where it operated more mainline flights than the rest of the airport’s tenants, combined. AirTran contracted out labor (or maybe had a few staff based locally) and everyone was happy, despite the tight Economy seat pitch of AirTran’s 117-passenger Boeing 717s.

Then Southwest bought AirTran and, since their labor agreements don’t allow subcontractors on the ground, started killing these smaller bases. Plus some big, redundant ones like Dallas-Fort Worth and Miami (served respectively by Dallas-Love and Fort Lauderdale). In many of these cases, AirTran was the only low cost carrier to serve those airports so, absent new competition, fares of competitors will increase.

In contrast, Frontier is actually adding service to smaller airports, in some casesreplacing what Southwest has left, in others experimenting with entirely new service. Frontier doesn’t seem to want to wring every last penny out of these new markets on a per-person, per-fare basis (unlike legacy carriers) and tends to have larger (and thus more comfortable) planes than the ERJs or CRJs that tend to frequent airports of that size. The airline tends to fly into destination markets (e.g. Orlando) or into Denver, which is a nice airport (the best hub that I’ve been through, compared with DFW, Miami, Charlotte, Houston-Hobby and Chicago-Midway) with a high level of efficiency and a low level of sitting on the ground, waiting for gates to become free (ahem, Atlanta). So Frontier coming into a market is a win for anyone wanting to fly to or from there, even if they only serve a city or two nonstop (versus Southwest, who tends to serve a half-dozen from any given airport), and those on a sub-daily basis to start with.

So…what do you think about Frontier?

The other benefit of Prime is, of course, free two-day shipping on anything bought from Amazon (or some third-party sellers who participate in the program), plus $3.99-per-item one-day shipping. Which of course feeds into people’s desire to purchase from Amazon to the point that ShopRunner, a federated competitor to Amazon Prime, is giving away free service to prior trial customers (like me) to encourage use of the federation’s retailers.

Speaking of shipping, Amazon has started pushing “frustration-free packaging,” which acknowledges that you don’t need shiny retail boxes with anti-theft mechanisms built in if you’re selling products online. The result: smaller boxes that are easier to open and cheaper to make and to ship…and they’re more recyclable.

You could write a case study about innovations Amazon has brought to the markets they’ve decided to break into. Granted, they’ve made life harder for their competitors and I’m sure some of their vendors (book publishers in particular) however customers are receiving the benefit of their actions; quarterly net margins were on the order of three-quarters of a percent, on a company that does things quite efficiently as far as I can tell.

I would go into more detail about the interesting/wonderful actions Amazon has taken 9and opened the floor to people who don’t like the company) however that’s a post for another day and time. Class is in less than eight hours, and I don’t want to get mono…

Depending on where you are, certain wireless providers will have better coverage than others. Nationwide, Verizon has the best network from what I’ve seen, though you pay for that privilege. AT&T is second by virtue of pure land area, and they now have LTE in a smattering of markets, but in areas where Verizon also is, Verizon tends to be better. The same comparison happens when in T-Mobile HSPA+ (“4G”) enabled areas; T-Mobile wins versus AT&T there too. Sprint falls behind everyone at times due to a botched 4G network deployment (they’re now switching gears from WiMAX to LTE) however they have a decent network in many areas where T-Mobile is either roaming or 2G-only (which is why I still have Sprint).

So, with all that in mind, pick the cellular provider that gives you the coverage you need in your area. Though the best deals tend to be on Sprint or T-Mobile.

Specifically, Boost Mobile, Virgin Mobile and CricKet PAYgo all use Sprint as their underlying network. Any Android phone running on Tracfone’s Straight Talk or Net10 brands is also Sprint-only. Simple Mobile runs on T-Mobile.

But what’s so good about the carriers that I mentioned above?

On Straight Talk you can get an Android phone for $150-$200 (depending on whether you want an LG phone with a keyboard or a lower-end Samsung without one) and an unlimited-everything plan for $45. On Net10 the $150 Android is made by LG, the LG phone with the hardware keyboard is $180 and the unlimited-everything plan is $50 per month. If you want AT&T service instead, Straight Talk’s highest-end phone runs Symbian, for a slightly higher price than the Android, but with an identical monthly charge. If you want Verizon, you’ll have to settle for a non-smartphone.

For CricKet, unlimited talk and text for a non-smartphone is $35 within their home network area (see my previous post for more information on this). For a smartphone, the cost jumps to $55 per month, but phones are a little cheaper for what you get compared to Straight Talk. Outside CricKet’s own coverage area, prices are similar but you get 1000 minutes and 500MB of data instead of unlimited minutes and 1GB (after which data speeds slow). The outside-area non-smartphone plans are rather attractive as well; $25 gets unlimited data plus 300 minutes. $35 ups the minute count to 1000.

For Boost Mobile (again on Sprint) $50 per month gets you unlimited everything on a non-smartphone. Smartphones are $5 more per month for the same thing. The cool feature here is that, every six months, your monthly fee decreases by $5 until you’re at $35 or $40 per month, depending on whether you have a smartphone or not. Boost Mobile also has the Samsung Transform Ultra, which is a little better than other smartphones that run on non-contract Sprint-based providers.

Virgin Mobile shares Boost’s unlimited plan pricing, albeit without a discount for non-smartphone users or long-term customers. That said, they have less expensive plans if you’re willing to stay within a specific minute count (300 for $35 per month, 1200 for $45). They also have, for non-smartphones, a $30 plan that gives 1500 minutes and 1500 text messages per month, plus 30MB of data (a fair amount for a non-smartphone). Virgin Mobile is a little less expensive than comparable carriers for similar phones; Android phones start at $100 and include higher-end models such as the LG slider found on Straight Talk, the HTC Wildfire S and a large-screened Motorola-branded phone with dual cameras.

On the T-Mobile front, Simple Mobile doesn’t sell phones; you’ll have to buy your own T-Mobile compatible handset for a sm that could be fair or fairly princely depending on what you choose. However their plan structure is simple: $40 buys unlimited talk and text with 3G-speed data; another $20 per month upgrades that data speed to 4G. The catch: service is only available where T-Mobile works (which isn’t everywhere), and you’ll need to pick up a specific-to-prepaid T-Mobile phone to get a handset at a rate anywhere near reasonable (a very basic Android phone is available for $75, a refurbished mid-level handset is $120 and a higher-end phone is $350).

But what if you just want to talk and text on a phone that doesn’t include Android? That’s actually a lot easier; Straight Talk and Page Plus Cellular both offer Verizon-based unlimited-talk-and-text plans for $45 per month. Straight Talk also gives the option of buying an AT&T-based phone with coverage that mirrors AT&T’s contract network (Verizon and Sprint resellers either won’t let you off their respective networks or charge you for roaming), and either picking up a 1000-minute, 1000-text, 30-MB-of-web plan for $30 or an unlimited-everything plan for $45. Net10 offers 750 minutes-plus-texts for $25 per month.

If you don’t even need that many minutes, two good choices would be Tracfone, Page Plus Cellular and PlatinumTel. PlatinumTel runs on Sprint but has the distinction of offering a rate plan that charges 5¢ per minute, 2¢ per text and 10¢ per MB of web access, with a minimum monthly spend of just over $3. Page Plus (on Verizon) offers minutes at between 5¢ and 10¢ apiece depending on how many you buy at once, and costs at minimum $2.50 per month. Text messaging is 5¢ per message on this plan, or you can buy a pack of 2000 for a month for around $11, or unlimited for $20.

Tracfone’s per-minute rates vary, depending on what size of airtime card you get, and which phone you add it to. The company, which has traditionally used promotional codes to give savvy shoppers more minutes per dollar, has now started offering “triple minutes for life” on some of their phones, including one that costs $50 and runs on AT&T’s contract-class network footprint, including roaming (as long as you stay on 2G, AT&T does just fine). This means that Tracfone’s $10 airtime card costs around 11 cents per minute, or 3.3 cents per text (text messages cost 0.3 minutes of airtime), and their heavy-hitting $200 one-year airtime card doles out 4500 minutes (at a little over 4.4 cents apiece, or 1.3 cents per text) instead of just 1500 (or 3000 with double minutes). $200 may sound like a lot of money to spend on cell phone service, but minutes last a year, so you’re winding up spending less than $17 per month on a minute bucket where you can average 375 minutes per month, which isn’t bad at all.

As stated before, the best cellular option for your needs is going to vary depending on what you want your phone to do. I pay a little over $60 per month for a plan that effectively includes unlimited everything including phone insurance on Sprint (I’m on a special plan with special add-ons that isn’t offered anymore). My mom and brother each pay $25 per month on Virgin Mobile (for the plan that is now $35 per month). My dad and other brother have Tracfones, with my dad spending maybe $20 per month on service, and my little brother spending $7.50 per month or so. When you add all the fees up, we’re ahead of where a family plan for equivalent functionality would put us, and only one of us (me) is on a contract. All very good things…

Wrong.

The above misconception is surprisingly common, so I don’t blame anyone for espousing it, however CricKet actually runs their own cellular network in many areas of the United States. They own 1900MHz spectrum in some areas (compatible with the iPhone), 1700MHz (AKA AWS, which is the band where T-Mobile has its better-than-2G network) in others (not compatible with the iPhone).

Beyond those areas, they contract with Sprint (and possibly other carriers) for cellular service. Some carriers (like Sprint) allow all phone functions to be used, including 3G data, without roaming charges. Others, not so much. You might be able to call and text without additional charges, depending on the plan you choose…but that’s about it. CricKet will sell service in areas not covered by their own network (their phones use Sprint as the primary carrier there), however those areas don’t have the unlimited-minute plans that are the hallmark of CricKet-owned-and-operated territories.

MetroPCS is in a similar situation, as a regional unlimited carrier similar to CricKet (except serving different areas with a network that in many locations has skipped from 2G to 4G LTE). They have their own network in some areas (like Dallas, Las Vegas and much of Florida) however if you venture beyond those areas you’re roaming on someone else. Unlike CricKet however, they only sell their service in their home coverage area. On the plus side, MetroPCS has LTE (AKA 4G) overlaid in many of their markets, though due to limited spectrum availability the service isn’t much better than what you’d see from a 3G phone on other carriers.

Now, if you’re looking for a Verizon-based cellular carrier, you can get one, provided you’re willing to keep your data usage way down. The carrier in question is Page Plus Cellular; $30 per month buys 1200 minutes, 3000 text messages and 100MB of data, $45 buys unlimited minutes and texts plus 20MB of data, and $55 ups the 20MB to 300MB. You’ll have to buy your own phone (from somewhere, which could include Page Plus’s website or dealer network) but there’s no contract, and $55 per month wouldn’t even cover the bare minimum single-line smartphone package on Verizon proper. Speaking of Verizon proper, roaming off their network on Page Plus costs 29¢ per minute, but roaming off of Verizon doesn’t happen much these days anyway.

One more thing: you can put an iPhone on CricKet, though it will only work on their network where they’re using PCS (1900MHz) spectrum. In areas where they’re AWS-only, the phone will roam on Sprint if they’re available. I won’t go into how to get the iPhone running on a carrier other than its own (other than noting that only the Verizon or Sprint iPhone 4 can be used on CricKet); that’s what Google is for.

Here’s how to get where I am (assuming you have a Windows 7 computer with Bluetooth…and assuming you own a $69 Magic Trackpad)

1. Pair your trackpad (no code needed) with your computer via Bluetooth. You’ll only get basic pointing functions when you do this but that’s the first step that I did.
2. Download this and open/install it. It’s Apple’s Magic Trackpad driver, extracted from one of their more recent Boot Camp updates.
3. Let Windows re-recognize your trackpad. You’ll lose the ability to point and click for several seconds, but when that ability comes back tap-to-click, two-finger-tap-to-right-click, two-finger scrolling, bottom-left-corner right-click and other features will be enabled on your aluminum-and-glass pointing masterpiece.

One big caveat: there is no way to enable/disable any of the above features (mentioned in step 3). They’re all turned on, and combined with the fact that you’re using a touchpad on what I presume is a desktop computer, you may be in for a jumpy, potentially maddening experience. I am unsure of whether Apple’s Boot Camp Windows application will install on a non-Apple piece of kit, but that’s where the settings for this device are. So if you want to turn off tap-to-click, try installing that (download Apple’s latest Boot Camp update and extract with 7-zip, then extract various files again until you find what you’re looking for).

I hope the above post inspires and enlightens others to follow where I have trod, albeit a bit more easily since a 1.77MB file is smaller than a 280MB one. Comment back if you’re able to piece together the settings part of this puzzle, or if you’ve experienced success in your endeavor at the above.

First off, I’ll state my conditions: 3-4 bars of HSPA+ signal, from a tower which got its backhaul upgraded a few weeks ago from 1.5M down and 600K to 5-8x that. My primary testing location is in Golden, CO, right next to Colorado School of Mines. T-Mobile’s service may be better or worse depending on your location, so take that into account when deciding whether to get T-Mobile service for your own use. Other standard disclaimers apply.

For what it’s worth, the folks at the T-Mobile store swapped my old SIM (a few months old) for a new, identical-looking one when I bought the Rocket. Something about SIM swaps solving issues that other people had when coming into the store with their smartphones. Also for what it’s worth, I’m running my tests from T-Mobile’s first no-overages plan: 5GB of data at top speed for $40 per month, throttled speeds thereafter.

I’ll be uploading pics of the Rocket, including what’s in the box and size comparisons with the older Rocket, shortly. But for now I’m laying off any uploads, since roommates are playing Call of Duty on my primary connection, a 20Mbit down, 2Mbit up Comcast residential connection.

Speaking of Call of Duty (specifically Black Ops on a PlayStation 3 slim), said roommate humored me when I asked him to switch from using my Comcast to my T-Mobile connection, routed from the Rocket 3.0 to Ethernet by my last-generation MacBook Pro (2GHz Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM, nVidia 9400M GPU) running Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard). He said that the connection was in the middle of the pack; he could tell that there was more latency than on the hard line, however the game was still very playable (knife kills included), a shining endorsement given the fact that Call of Duty is a first person shooter, and given the fact that I wasn’t using a dedicated mobile router to connect him to the web.

As far as raw latency goes, 1000 pings to mddhosting.com (the host of this site, based out of Denver in a well-connected data center) yielded the following details:

Minimum: 20.158 ms
Mean: 35.795 ms (many oings were in the 26-30ms range)
Max: 159.438 ms (only a couple of pings went this high)
Standard Deviation (Jitter): 14.855 ms (without outliers, this would’ve been a few ms lower)
Packet loss: 0% (that’s right, zero)

In comparison, the typical Qwest DSL connection around here runs between 24 and 46 ms to the same location, with a few milliseconds of jitter. Comcast bottoms out at around 10 ms, but averages 15-20 (jitter is 5-10 ms). Those are wireline connections. This is wireless service…based off of a cell tower. Pretty darned impressive, though in all fairness I started pinging shortly after 1:30 am…not exactly peak hours for traffic. Ping tests were done on my MacBook, which appears to perform better with the Rocket than either my IdeaPad U330 on Windows 7 or my friend’s nine-year-old ThinkPad T23 running Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal).

Next up, photos…

P.S. Comment with what paces you’d like me to put this device through. I don’t have enough data left on my plan to watch a full Netflix movie on it (in addition to other testing), but most everything short of that is doable.

I’m writing this post from a Google Cr-48, which appears to be limited-edition material nowadays, thanks to the introduction of “Chromebooks” at retail just over a month from now from Samsung and Acer. For the record, I was calling my machine a Chromebook before Google was, but I digress. Anyway, I may upgrade to a for-pay model…maybe…because the difference between an Atom N450 (in this machine) and an N570 (in the Samsung model) is significant. THen again, I like toting around an unbranded notebook with a removable battery and a completely matte black color scheme.

Sitting to my left is my Samsung Epic 4G, which I switched last week to the Android Creative SYndicate’s latest ROM, which runs significantly faster (albeit buggier) than Samsung/Sprint’s standard ROM. I still can’t get a day of battery life on a charge with that phone, but that’s probably because I use it too much…

Further to my left, through my apartment wall, is the Colorado School of Mines campus, where I am now halfway through a graduate degree in Engineering Technology Management. I took my last test of the semester online this morning, and attended presentations for some of my fellow Entrepreneurial Finance classmates in the afternoon. Most of the rest of the day was spent hanging out with friends in some form or other. NPretty much nonproductive but that’s okay; I’ll be working hard tomorrow.

So where does all this leave me? Sitting at a table given to my apartment by a friend who’s graduating tomorrow, if you’re going by days that start at 12:00am. Posting to a blog that I haven’t updated in awhile. Wondering what I’m going to use my newest Virtual Private Server purchase (from Encept) for, other than proving that I can set up nginx with PHP from a bare-metal Xen container. Not wanting to go to sleep quite yet because I had maybe 100mg of caffeine and 150g of sugar from high fructose corn syrup between 10:30 and 11:30. Pondering what exactly it means to be done with a bachelor’s degree, halfway done with a master’s and not really being decided on whether it’s best to shoehorn myself into the well-paid establishment of some corporate environment in the Denver area or to somehow make the next big thing on my own…

1. Windstream’s biggest customers are AT&T and Verizon
Telcos buy backhaul from other telcos when it comes to providing cellular service. As long as Verizon and AT&T continue to rule the roost in the wireless biz, Windstream will continue to get a fair chunk of change per month for T1s and fiber Ethernet connections to cell sites in their footprint. In many cases other cellular providers also have to use Windstream for backhauling their cell sites, which generates even more revenue for Windstream, which isn’t particularly forgiving when it comes to T1 pricing either.

2. Rural wireline customers are going to be around forever
His words, not mine. The idea is that cellular service out in the sticks isn’t all that great to start with, and  if cell service is good then it’s riding over Windstream lines. Rural folks are also more reticent to give up landline service even if cellular service works just fine, and Windstream DSL  goes places that cable never will. Combine that with a USF kickback or two, plus low pricing on both DSL and landline service and you’ve got, in theory, a captive user base who will keep paying you $5o or $60 per month ad infinitum, as long as you keep that copper pair to their house in reasonable shape. Oh, and you’re getting some USF funding on each line because you’re rural; even Windstream’s “naked” DSL service still has a phone line involved, albeit one where outgoing calling of any kind costs 10¢ a minute.

Of course, the model breaks down if you’re serving areas that do have cable, where you just have to compete on price or lose customers unless the cableco is grossly incompetent. Or if the cellular providers use the cablecos for bandwidth and take wireless backhaul routes instead of Windstream wired ones, Windstream loses out. Or if some wireless ISP decides to offer service that beats Windstream’s standard 3 Mbps down, 635 kbps up (after ATM overhead), $40 DSL service, Windstream’s position gets a little less tenable.

Of course, Windstream does do fiber to the home for all of their new builds, and the tech supports either 12 or 24 Mbps down and 768k or 1.5M up. However even those speeds pale in comparison to what companies like Comcast have done with their DOCSIS 3 products. Then again, Windstream tends not to compete against Comcast.

3. Windstream could have bought Frontier, FairPoint , Embarq or even Qwest, but the price was too high
Windstream is no stranger to acquisitions; buying their way into being the ILEC in a given market  has been done several times recently, with Iowa Telecom being the biggest purchase. Windstream is also not averse to buying competitive carriers, as long as they can make a pretty penny on data revenues. To that end, they bought NuVox.

However the company has passed up deals like Verizon’s now-Frontier territories, the sinking carcass that is FairPoint and even such hulking giants as Embarq and Qwest, leaving the two last companies to CenturyTel…erm…CenturyLink. What’s interesting is that the rural telephone market…which also happens to include Las Vegas, Phoenix, Denver and all of Oregon…seems to be converging to two or three carriers: CenturyLink, Windstream and Frontier, with Frontier a possible acquisition target down the road by one of the other two operators. Note that the consolidation talk reflecting future buy-outs is my conjecture, not that of the source I talked with.

4. Verizon will sell its remaining rural markets, but they may be bled dry before that happens
Verizon didn’t sell their rural Texas markets to Frontier in the gigantic July 1st swap, yet many of these markets will never see FiOS. So Verizon is shopping the markets around…somewhat…though at this point the price to Windstream is still much too high for the company to bite. In all likelihood, Verizon will wait too long to sell to a provider who actually cares about copper-based service, forcing the company to offer fire-sale pricing because they are selling copper plant rather than a customer base. WIndstream is good at keeping churn low, but I don’t hear about the company picking up new lines of service on copper infrastructure unless it’s DSL service for someone who already has a landline.

So, what do y’all think about the above?

The problem in my case had to do with embedding videos into the slideshow. You see, when Picasa exports a slideshow it takes advantage of some of the more esoteric specs of the MPEG-4 container, saving video clips, unmodified, with their accompanying audio alongside the photo slideshow, which includes your music track, captions, etc. So you get multiple video and audio streams “neatly” packaged into a single MPEG-4 container. Cool, right?

Right…as long as you have something that won’t roll over and die when it sees a multi-stream, multi-resolution container file coming down the pike.

Yes, I said multi-resolution; the camera that I used to take the videos built into the slideshow shoots at 720p. THe slideshow itself was outputted at 640×480. Add to that multiple audio stream formats (the music track was one thing, the videos were another) and you get a rather fragile system if your player doesn’t support the whole MPEG-4 container spec to a tee.

QuickTime took the whole thing in stride, though of course deciding 720p video on a 1.6 GHz Pentium M laptop is not as easy as dishing out 640×480. However every other application, transcoder (e.g. ffmpeg) or player (e.g. VLC…yes, even VLC didn’t get the clip right) either couldn’t deal with the video at all (ffmpeg) or was missing one or more of the audio or video tracks (YouTube and Vimeo…neither service transcoded the clip correctly).

Yes, YouTube butchered a video that was exported from Google’s own photo management software. They need to work on fixing that. I thought the issue was with the copyrighted music I had playing in the background (MercyMe’s All of Creation), but they’re actually perfectly fine with that, as I would expect Google to be. After I uploaded the video in a format the YouTube transcoder could parse correctly.

What was that format, and how did I get the darned thing to transcode correctly? Wait for it…MPEG-4…from QuickTime, via iMovie.

I imported my slideshow output file into iMovie (the new version, ’09 I believe), then used the Export to QuickTime option to get some fine-grained control on exactly what I was doing. The specific settings I used were as follows, though minor changes shouldn’t mess anything up…

• Video compression type: MPEG-4
• Frame rate: current
• Key frames: automatic
• Data rate: restrict to 1500 kbps (for quicker uploads over my 384k up DSL connection in TX; quality is still fine)
• Compressor quality: best
• VIdeo filter and size: no changes
• Sound format: AAC
• Channels: Mono
• Rate: 22.050 kHz
• Quality (under advanced settings): Best
• Bit rate: 64 kbps
• Encoding Strategy: Average Bit Rate
• Prepare for Internet Streaming: unchecked

The above settings got me a video that uploaded perfectly to YouTube, though it wouldn’t work right on this site’s (brand new) FlowPlayer install. Can’t win ‘em all I guess, though I’m sure for people exporting their slideshows from Picasa to YouTube their service is plenty.

When will Google fix Picasa’s multi-res MPEG-4 export issue, or tweak YouTube to import the videos without making scrambled eggs of the lot? Not sure. Maybe a few dozen retweets and a Digg posting will do the job.

Comment if you’ve run into this issue as well, and let me know if this fix worked. Also, if Picasa on Windows has this issue, let me know; I can test the process on a Windows box but haven’t done so yet. Unfortunately though, if the same issue exists, I know of no Windows application that can transcode its way out of this situation. Unless Apple still does the whole QuickTime Pro thing for Windows, post-OS X 10.6.