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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Studio Daily has pointed out an awesome resource: Canadian director Bruce McDonald is making all the footage from his latest feature, The Tracey Fragments, available for free online for re-editing as part of a cool contest. The contest is for Canadians only, but anyone can download the footage and play with the footage under the terms of the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 2.5 license.

Adding to the cool factor is that the film features rising star Ellen Page, who is starring in the critically lauded upcoming film Juno. Now, my footage admittedly has not finished downloading yet. However from what I hear (and you can check out the trailer for an example) the film uses some complex Mondrian frame layouts throughout the entire thing. I’m curious to see how this is handled in the included Final Cut Pro files.

All the files are Torrents, except the script which is just a simple downloadable PDF.

You can read more about the initiative, called “Re-fragmented” by visiting either the official movie website or the official movie blog.

For the second time now a video podcast has changed, making my earlier statements incorrect.

First it was Morgan Webb backing away from the camera, and now it’s the Revision3 Gazette being made available to everyone. As I mentioned in my “Problems with Revision3” post, I thought it was a bad move to make exclusive content that users couldn’t preview, especially when the payment system is deeply flawed.

But now it’s free to download by all users, not just paying members.

The Revision3 Gazette is hosted by Rev3 Director of Production Sarah Lane (you’ll remember her from G4TV’s Attack of the Show, and she used to be Digg founder Kevin Rose’s girlfriend). It’s a behind-the-scenes look at how the Revision3 network operates day-to-day, with the first episode focusing on their move into new offices.

Link to Revision3 Gazette.

Link to Sarah Lane’s announcement at the Rev3 Forums.

Embedding YouTube just doesn’t cut it.

Of the tips I’ve given thus far, this is probably the most difficult to accomplish. Bandwidth and time work against you when you try to provide more than one or two options for your viewers. But it makes the experience much better, and far more accessible.

Attention spans don’t allow people to only focus on one thing at a time. You’re listening to music right now, aren’t you? The TV might even be on in the background.

We feel weird if we’re not listening to music while we’re online. We feel weird when there’s not something on the TV in the background. I’ve been trying to cut down on my TV watching (down to only about 1.5 hours a day), so having the TV screen black beside me makes me really uncomfortable. I don’t want to watch anything, but I want there to be something to watch.

When you only provide a YouTube embed for your video podcast, you’re forcing people to focus solely on it. It becomes difficult to have it running in the background while you’re trying to do other things. I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that if you have a video podcast, most of the your audience is using Firefox. Or, at the very least, they’re probably not running IE6. They’re used to having tabs. They don’t like having multiple browser windows open. Which means they can’t comfortably be reading websites while they’re watching your video podcast.

They need to be able to download it and watch it in their own media player.

As I said before, this causes problems for you, the producer, because you’ll have to spend time transcoding and you’ll have to spend money on bandwidth.

Providing an iTunes feed is a great start, but not everybody has iTunes and not everybody runs Windows or owns a Mac. But, at the very, very least, you should be publishing it to iTunes.

To see a great example of providing multiple formats, check out Rocketboom’s list of options for the viewer.

Revision3 offers, along with their embedded Flash player, multiple Quicktime, WMV, and Xvid encodes.

Part 2 will have helpful tips about how to provide options like these for your viewers.

If you could call it a debate.

Information and link to download audio of the debate are here.

Selected summarizing quotes:

“It’s not better, it’s the way it is.” — Scott

“The signal to noise ratio is going to change.” — Howard

Scott’s made his success by podcasting his novels, gaining him exposure and a loyal audience. This translates into book sales. Obviously, then, he’s in favor of releasing content for free.

Howard feels that, while this is all well and good for now, once publishers are no longer trying to stop authors from releasing things for free and, instead, force them to, there will simply be so many choices out there that it will become more and more difficult for authors to speak to a large section of the culture. And the publishers, as the moderator suggested, will expect authors to bring their fanbases with them, instead of using their clout and money to create an audience through publicity and distribution.

Howard may have a point, here, when it comes to the expectations of publishers. But Scott’s quote up above is really the best argument. The industry’s evolving, and Howard mentioned that evolution doesn’t necessarily mean that things will get better, they’ll only get different.

But that’s simply the way it is.

Authors like Scott Sigler and Cory Doctorow are on the leading edge, and they’re the ones that stand to benefit the most from this trend. Eventually, everyone will be doing it, and then no one will stand to benefit.

What will happen then?

Someone else will figure out a new way to make money, and others will follow. What appears to be so difficult for people like Howard Hendrix to understand is that, yes, trends can make some people suffer and some people succeed. But once everyone tries to cash in, it merely changes again.

Creative Commons may not, in fact, be the end-all-be-all, the one final answer to problems of distribution and fortune-making. It might just be a temporary fad with which some people will create large fanbases. But someone else, somewhere, someday, will find another way to create popularity and money.

Maybe some science-fiction author will try to get even closer to the fans than they’re able to with only a blog, and form an entire social network around themselves, or their book. Max Barry created the game NationStates to sell his book Jennifer Government a few years back. Will every author have to invest that kind of time?

Who knows? Maybe they will. And then they’ll all start doing it, it will stop working, and then, surprise surprise: Someone will do something else.

As Ian Clarke once said, loosely quoted, ‘If you’re selling water in the desert and it starts raining, it’s time to change your business model.’

Vimeo have launched version five of their people-driven video sharing tool. The site, owned by Connected Ventures (and through a few levels, IAC), was originally created by Jakob Lodwick as a resource for sharing his short videos with friends and family. The idea grew, but the mission stayed the same – make it easy to share video you create with people you trust.

The new site

The changes are obvious with the new home page, which distinctly lays out options to register or log in, clips that the Vimeo staff features, stuff that you have brought to Vimeo, and a new area, “Vimeo Obsessions”, an area where, presumably, the Vimeo staff finds the latest trends and links to a short video that fits the trend. I’ve seen the “Five Vignettes” meme and the “LibDub” trend both displayed in the Obsessions area.

The video player is new as well, featuring a more boxy and cleaner layout. It feels faster and more intuitive than the previous player, which was sometimes a bit tough to control. The color has also switched away from a red/green to blue, part of Vimeo’s extensive redesign. No stone was left unturned!

Different strokes for different folks

Jakob Lodwick, Vimeo’s founder, has been very vocal in his stance against the increased influence that YouTube’s traditional media partners have on the network’s organisation and structure. In a post to his tumblog (which was extracted from an instant message which was a copy/paste from an email) he writes:

YouTube is oscillating between the chaos of automatic, popularity-based rankings and the stability of old-school, owner-controlled editorial. Both are lame and you can see the miserable effects of either in every media outlet that exists today. I would bet everything I own on a third alternative: user-controlled editorial.

Lodwick’s point is confidently prescient, but it makes sense. We are in an era of user generated content – who is to say that the users cannot decide what content is showcased? Vimeo is making efforts to ensure that the community defines the community; they do not want this to be another stop on the marketing tour. Everything about the site puts the community at the forefront, even the ads are Amazon affiliate ads specially designed by Vimeo to fit nicely into the interface.

Will this new release be enough to convince YouTube users to make the switch? Time will tell, but I think initial prospects are incredibly promising. Vimeo not only has a great product, but a visionary path (unique in this world of a million YouTubes, Google Videos, Metacafes, etc.). Hopefully this vision can carry it to success.

Check out Vimeo version five by visiting http://vimeo.com/