Selling downloads of your film on your own part 5

Thanks for all the ideas and comments on the last couple posts... some really good ideas there! So I've decided to go with Dpd as they have everything I'm looking for and the man in charge there says that large files are no problem. I'll do some speed tests with it soon to see how fast a 100mb file downloads on average. 100mb is not 3.5gb I know but it should give me some ideas of the average speeds... if they are decent then its a go!

Making sure there is a good customer experience is a big priority because it would suck for someone to buy the film then like the downloads are broken....or like take 4 days... slow or stalling downloads can drive a man insane!

So lets say the biggest file which would be the film itself is 3.5gb... according to some quick research...

So if you use this download time calculator for a 3.5gb file using a 10Mbps connection it comes out to about 50 minutes to download a file that big... NOW I know connection speeds and download speeds vary but thats an acceptable ball park...

3.5gb seems doable for the 720p version of the film... but I'm not too sure I can encode a decent 1080p version and keep it under the 4gb limit 0_o I'll do my best but if I have to make it look crappy to get it there I won't do it... people want 1080p for the best quality so yeh.... What if I broke it up into two files? Would that be annoying to have to play two files to watch the film? Ideas?

I do have a little experience compressing the fucK out of videos and if I can figure out what Apple is doing to encode they 1080p movies for itunes I'll be all good ^_^ found these screen caps online

Seems Apple's new compression scheme can keep a 1080p feature over 2 hours at under 4gb.... smaller than they older 720 compression...

Thats an older film... and the 720p is under 4gb....

So yeh I know a big company like Apple probably uses some fancy compression hardware but its good to know its possible...

5gb seems to be a hard limit set by Amazon S3... and the guy from Dpd told me its best to stay under 4gb... So yeh under 4gb is the goal...

The 720p should be under 3gb I'm thinking... although HSM has so much fog and stuff which causes horrible banding and artifacts at low data rates it's going to be interesting....

But yeh for all parties involved the smaller the files the better... saves everyone money and time....

When you do buy the film your going to instantly get a link to either download or stream an SD 480p version of the film while you wait for the download... Ideas?

I'm just brainstorming out loud as I move closer to releasing the film in hopes that this information might be useful to other filmmakers in the future.Brought to you by professional weirdo M dot Strange.