Producing Participatory Media
Week 4 - February 10

Topics:

  • Video Aggregation Sites Revisited
  • Video Aggregation Software Revisited
  • Pushing online video further
    •

    Video Aggregation Sites Revisited

    This list has moved to the wiki: Wiki::VideoAggregators for all to edit, update and reference.

  • mefeedia - Browse and Find: Tags, Search, API, Thumbnail Generation, Playlists, Feeds, Favorites, Post to Your Blog, Comments (on main blog), Popularity Ranking. Primarily video bloggers.
  • Yahoo Video Search -
  • Our Media -
  • Blip.TV - Create and Share: Tags, Cross-posting (posts and video), Mobvlogging, Stats, Video Hosting, Categories, Creative Commons, Comments, Permalinks, Search, Feed Creation, Mobile Sharing and more... Primarily video bloggers.
  • YouTube - Browse and Share: Tags, Ratings, Flash Player, Playlists, Share (via email), Hosting, Topic Groups, Channels/Categories, Social Network. Primarily commercial and home movies. Driven by MySpace.
  • FireANT _
  • Google Video - Search, Sell and Hosting: Search, Thumbnails, Transcript Searching, Flash Player, Related (Search), Playlist, Popularity, Hosting, Cross-posting (posts), Sell. Primarily commercial content and home videos (but has just about everything).
  • Video Bomb -
  • vSocial -
  • Medicine Films -
    • IFILM: AtomFilms: http://www.atomfilms.com Current.tv:

    Video Aggregator Software Revisited

    iTunes
    FireANT
    I/On
    DTV



    Pushing it further

    Using existing web based technologies in combination with audio and video on the internet we can push the medium further. From allowing tagging to occur within video to simply offering a better experience we might be able to offer some of the things that video blogging and podcasting are missing.

    JavaScript and QuickTime (on the web)

    Since QuickTime can be used as a browser plugin, it can be scripted.

    The first step is to embed the video: 

      <OBJECT CLASSID="clsid:02BF25D5-8C17-4B23-BC80-D3488ABDDC6B" WIDTH="320"HEIGHT="257" CODEBASE="http://www.apple.com/qtactivex/qtplugin.cab" ID="myMovie">
    <PARAM name="SRC" VALUE="http://itp.nyu.edu/~sve204/ppm/embedded.mp4">
    <PARAM name="AUTOPLAY" VALUE="false">
    <PARAM name="CONTROLLER" VALUE="true">
  <EMBED SRC="http://itp.nyu.edu/~sve204/ppm/embedded.mp4" WIDTH="320" HEIGHT="257" AUTOPLAY="false" CONTROLLER="true" PLUGINSPAGE="http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/" NAME="myMovie">
  </EMBED>
  </OBJECT>
    Careful when using this code. Make sure that stray line breaks don't mess things up.
    There is more about embedding QuickTime in last week's handout.
    Apple also has more online at: Embedding QuickTime.



    You reference the movie from JavaScript using the ID attribute (for Internet Explorer) or the NAME attribute (for Netscape compatible browsers).

    document.myMovie.Play()
    document.myMovie.Stop()
    document.myMovie.GetTime()
    document.myMovie.SetTime(500) - 500 is the frame not the timecode

    For More Commands, See: JavaScript Scripting Guide for QuickTime

    What can we do with this?
    How about 2 videos at once or how about creating a system where you can associate comments or tags at a specific spot in the video?

    My Example (Don't forget to view source)

    Flash Video Player

    Flash has recently emerged as a nice video player for web based video content. It has a couple of advantages over things like Windows Media and QuickTime such as it's fast load time and it's large installed base. It is also easily extended by those who work with Flash. Unfortunately, it has very limited support for different codecs and doesn't have a corresponding desktop playback application nor does it have support on mobile devices like iPods or PSPs.

    Here is our example video as rendered in a very simple Flash video player:

    Here is the embedding code:
        <object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" codebase="http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=7,0,0,0" width="550" height="400" id="player_lite" align="middle">
        <param name="allowScriptAccess" value="sameDomain" />
        <param name="movie" value="player_lite.swf" />
        <param name="quality" value="high" />
        <param name="bgcolor" value="#ffffff" />
        <param name="flashvars" value="url=embedded.flv" />
    <embed src="player_lite.swf" quality="high" bgcolor="#ffffff" width="550" height="400" name="player_lite" align="middle" allowScriptAccess="sameDomain" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" flashvars="url=embedded.flv" />
    </object>
    Basic Flash Video Player Source File
    Checkout the tutorials on gotoAndLearn.com: Video Basics Part 1 through 8
    A Dynamic Example (Using PHP)

    You *should* be able to convert video to Flash on the lab machines that have Flash installed through QuickTime Pro. There are other ways of course.

    FFMPEG

    FFMPEG is a Free and Open Source multimedia system. A command line tool that can be used to encode and decode from and to several different sources.

    Main FFMPEG Site

    FFMPEG is being installed on ITP's Webserver but if you are itching to get started you can try these:
    FFMPEG Windows Build
    Use Darwin Ports to install FFMPEG for MacOS

    Sample Commands:
    Generate Thumbnails: ffmpeg -i inputfile -t 0.001 -ss 10 -s 100x100 outputfile%d.jpg
    -- replace inputfile with the name of your movie file, the number after -t is the duration (in seconds), the number after -ss is the starting point in seconds, the value after -s is the width x height and outputfile is the name of the outputfile. This command will create as many frames of JPEGs as it needs to meet the assigned duration.

    Convert to Flash Video 7: ffmpeg -i inputfile -acodec mp3 -ab 32 -ac 1 outputfile.flv
    -- replace inputfile with the name of your movie file, the 32 is the bitrate of the audio, the 1 is the number of audio channels and outputfile.flv is the output file name (make sure you keep .flv). Last it should be mentioned that this is not a perfect program. It can have troubles with various file formats (as it does on my server) but in general it should work.
    FFMPEG Documentation

    What's Next?