Digging Out

Penelope Pooping

• update, 2010-02-03 – Tried it again this morning and had the same results. CPU spikes well over 100% and the UI is unusable.

John Gruber writes,

Seriously, this is the real deal — full-screen H.264 playback with no Flash, no browser plugins, full iPhone OS support, and sane CPU usage, better in every single regard than any video player ever made with Flash.

Have a look for yourself.

What I experienced is nothing like Gruber describes. I saw my browser lock up and my CPU usage spike and stay spiked while the video played. I sent it to Matthew and he experienced the same performance issues.

I look forward to better implementations and support from browsers. Better performance, real full screen, sharable implementations.

Fact. iMovie 09 will not recognize the original Flip video camera’s AVI files. For awhile I was doing a complicated conversion using QuickTime Pro that converted the files to DV files which caused some quality degradation. Not happy with that solution anymore I did some more Google searching and came across this thread. As it turns out Flip released a new version of their FlipShare software which allows you to export an exact copy of your videos in a format that iMovie can recognize!

In honor of the sea lions who apparently took a fishing vacation up north I present this. Audio was recorded using the Voice Memo iPhone application and it was edited with iMovie.

I found this video on Jeff’s blog and found it to be really inspiring. It is especially relevant since I was just reading about the Flip Mino HD camera he used to shoot it with.

He proves you can do a lot with a little, he cleverly glued a wide angle lens to his Mino camera, and still create something meaningful and beautiful.

I own a Flip video camera and for what it is meant to do I like it. However once I get my videos off the camera I can not hear the audio anymore. I still haven’t found a solution on the internets and even their own website admits the problem, but their solution of “update your software” does not work for me nor does it seem to work for a number of others. The odd thing is, if I upload the video to YouTube or Flickr the audio track comes back.

What a pain!

update, after some more searching around I found this solution, which if you read the comments the author recommends removing old QuickTime video codecs and only leaving Perian installed. Worked for me!

Randy sent this today, thought it was hysterical. I think he could have really acted it out a little more, like SNL’s Lazy Sunday.

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I am a coaster geek, everyone who knows me knows this. I thought this old Gemini ad was awesome. Who saves this stuff, captures it and puts it on YouTube!? Awesome.

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edt-Embed is a WordPress plugin for embedding content into your posts. As of right now it only supports SWF content using Geoff Stearns’ SWFObject, but I hope to extend it to also embed QuickTime, WMV and any other media that may need to be embeded into a post.

The original concept and code for the plugin came from Ross Gerbasi’s plugin for embeding Google Video. After looking at the code that ended up being embeded on every page, I decided to make my own version that would be a little cleaner and easier on your bandwidth. Ross has a newer version of his plugin that is worth checking it out as an alternative to this.

Download edt-Embed

Syntax

You can embed content with just a src attribute based on what the content is. swf, flv, smil, mp3, yt (YouTube), gv (Google Video) and gmv (GameVideos.com). The flv, smil and mp3 file types require a swf on your server with it’s constant set in the plugin ready to accept a variable of the same name (flv=”myFlv.flv”). Example files coming soon.

YouTube

[embed youTube=“YouTubeVideo.swf”][/embed]

Google Video

[embed googleVideo=“GoolgeVideo.swf”][/embed]

GameVideos.com

[embed gameVideo=“GameVideos.com.swf”][/embed]

FLV

[embed flv=“MyFLV.flv”][/embed]

MP3

[embed mp3=“MyFLV.flv”][/embed]

Or you can add any or all the attributes of the video.

[embed yt=“YouTubeVideo.swf” width=“320” height=“240” version=“9”][/embed] [embed yt=“YouTubeVideo.swf” version=“9”][/embed]

Constants

You need to edit the plugin’s constants to set default width, height and version numbers for all the content types. I have some defaults set already for YourTube, Google Video and GameVideos.com. Also, if you are doing an FLV, MP3, or SMIL player, you need to have the variables set in the plugin for the swf path to those players.

Bugs, issues and future development

• Closing tag for CDATA is being encoded to “// ]]&gt”;
• Add admin panel to edit constants like FLVPLAYER, SMILPLAYER etc
• Embed javascript file automatically?
• Category/archive view not displaying the videos.

Version Info

1.2

• Added support for a new syntax for embedding Google Video, You Tube and GameVideos.com