rob_walch_response2.txt

I appreciate your response, though I'm trying to find concrete data to support the claims that VBR encoding is not viable. In an analysis of the top one hundred podcasts from the iTunes charts, fifteen percent are using VBR. Surely a volume of podcasts amounting to tens of millions of weekly listens can't be making such a terrible choice? Jeff Atwood extolled the benefits of VBR in a 2005 blog post [1]. Marco Arment also praised it for its quality and size, with the caveat that seeking is inaccurate on Apple products [2]. For a "dead" encoding, it has substantial adoption and certain undeniable benefits.

My intent is to collect the arguments for and against VBR encoding, most of which were made over a decade ago, and verify them. Some arguments against VBR, for instance, are long obsolete: Firefox and Flash support are commonly cited as a reason to not use VBR, but Flash has supported VBR correctly since before Macromedia was acquired by Adobe and Firefox has supported VBR correctly for over half a decade. Other arguments, such as the poor adoption of timecode indexes leading to inaccurate seeking, are valid but can be seen as tradeoffs rather than hard blockers.

As a trusted authority, I'm hoping that you can simply help to clarify your arguments against the technology. My goal is to find facts in order to separate superstitions from real problems. If VBR is indeed a bad choice, what hard data backs that up?


Thanks again for your time, and I look forward to your response.

Matt Basta
https://pinecast.com