12 January 2006

Media-formats poll results

for the record here are the results so far
from the poll on media formats:
         not hate like ???
everyone 130 126 121 114
RealVid 75 43 23 11 = 152
RealAudio 69 46 28 11 = 154
Win(wmv) 37 54 59 14 = 164
QTVR 37 12 44 36 = 129
Quicktime 24 31 86 8 = 149
Java 24 34 58 20 = 136
Flash 21 38 78 10 = 147
m3u 18 13 64 27 = 122
mp4 16 12 76 22 = 126
Javascrpt 15 32 68 23 = 138
pdf 13 50 83 4 = 150
png 10 5 80 24 = 119
mpeg 5 5 100 12 = 122
wav 5 18 88 7 = 118
mp3 3 1 117 0 = 121
I had no idea RealPlayer was so reviled-- it works much better than Quicktime for me (QT won't even play an mp3 in a background tab, and freezes things for several seconds while it loads). I view WMV as malware and keep it disabled, almost never link to it.

I expected Flash to be 10x more popular than Java, but they're about equal. (Java takes forever to load, and often crashes my browser.)

(I added Java and Javascript to the poll after about 25 votes had already come in, so those figures need a nudge. Being able to turn these two on or off with a toolbar-click is a big advantage for me.)

PDF is reviled but suffered-- I got tired of having it freeze my system when I unintentionally clicked a pdf link, so I disabled it, but I see there's now a Firefox extension that offers you a choice at that point.

In the not-sure column, QTVR works okay for me (glossy 3D) but is slow. PNG is standard in Firefox. M3U playlists are nice but I had to configure WinAmp for them.

I switched from Quicktime to 'Quicktime Alternate' in hopes it would work better, and lost mpeg and mp4 somehow in the process. For me, I wish everybody used Flash for audio and video, because it just works.