vintage television by phrenzee

At YMM’s sister site FOSSwire, we offer a lot of video-based tutorial content. Up until this point, it’s been offered in Flash with OGG downloads available as a backup. With the <video> tag in HTML becoming a hot new standard, it seemed like a perfect time to jump aboard. But our old videos were encoded in FLV (pre-MP4 support in Flash) so we had to do some conversion. This tutorial will teach you how to turn your old FLVs into HTML5-friendly MP4 video files.

It’s important to mention that these MP4 files won’t work in every browser. Opera and (most) Gecko-based browsers won’t support MP4, preferring OGG Theora or Google’s WebM instead. Still, MP4 gets you Chrome, Safari (including the iPad), and the soon-to-be-released-if-we’re-lucky IE9 – a sizable chunk of browsers. You’ll certainly want a Theora backup though, and we’ll go over how to do that next week. FOSSwire has covered a bit of the codec madness, head there for more details.

Follow me past the jump to begin your journey toward HTML5 fun…

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Money...What Money by flickr user stuartpilbrow

In a perfect world, artists and content creators could work without the constant worry of funding and money looming over our heads. Unfortunately it’s not a perfect world, and in an age where content creators are a dime-a-dozen and sponsors are a dying species, you’ve got to have business savvy to succeed in your pursuits.

The City of New York recognized that, and an article in Sunday’s New York Times explains how city government is aiming to teach artists about turning their work into business.

“Does everyone have Excel?,” Peter Cobb, a lawyer and administrator at the New York Foundation for the Arts, which runs the program, asked the class last Saturday. “For next week, your assignment is to make a list of all your expenses for 2009.”

The sighs and complaints that followed were proof of the challenging task Mr. Cobb and his colleagues have taken on: trying to teach people who like to color outside the lines about drawing up business plans, budgeting and making a sales pitch.

YouMakeMedia has talked in the past about various web services and how they help (or hinder) your money-making, but it’s exciting to see a program that delves even deeper, helping artists think more consciously about the business end of what they do. It’s easy to think that it’s as simple as throwing ads next to your content, or selling copies of your output, but having a deeper understanding of business will give you a more rewarding experience (and a more rewarding return) when it comes to doing the selling.

Do you have any tips on learning the business side of arts and content creation? Share them in the comments!