Rather recently people have figured out some ways to make YouTube display H.246 video on the site. That method is to add “&fmt=18″ to the end of the URL. That works well, but wouldn’t it be better if it could be done with a simple click? For all those who don’t use addons like Greasemonkey or the like, a bookmarklet would be ideal.
I made a steady cam rig thing! And it seems to work well! I was finding a lot of my footage from the shooting of the behind the scenes stuff of other people’s projects has been really wobbly and shaky. So I decided to try and make a steady cam rig like the one I had read about online a while back. The insurrections I used are by Johnny Lee. He says it costs $14, and mine cost around $12, so it really is rather cheap to make.
I had my brother drill the holes since he was around, and is a bit more handy than me. I used Plastic pipe where I could, but had to use a steel tee connector in the middle. Using plastic caps made it easier to drill into, and lighter. Along with being light, it is also cleaner. Steel pipes have oil all over them to help keep them from rusting.
I plan on using this all weekend as we finish up the filming of everyones movies.
This video here was an idea I had while listening to this song from the Best of Bootie 2006 mix cd on the way home from school. It is a collection of some of the best mash-ups of that year. The song in question is: ‘The Money Song (Hard-Fi vs. Red Hot Chili Peppers vs. Flying Lizards vs. Abba vs. Jay-Z)’ by team9.
At one point, mis-heard lyrics jumped into my head, and I could not get them out. And then the idea of illustrating these lyrics to make an amusing video followed. So, after about 8 hours of work, some of it late in the night. I present Mole Money, Mole problems.
Special thanks goes to Tony for help with the whore. She would look more like a ‘dirty old grandma’ without him.
Today in class I figured out how to Get a YouTube video on a Verizon Cell Phone for Sam. I thought I would create a little tutorial for him, and others and place it on my site. So here it is.
A Phone that supports 3GP video playback and receiving.
Part one Get the video from YouTube.
Using safari go to the page for the video you want.
Open up the activity monitor in Safari. (Command-Option-A)
Find the file in the list that is the biggest. This should be the only file that is over 1mb in the list.
Hold down option and double click the link in the list. This will download the file to your default download location. It will be named “get_video”.
Go into the Finder and rename the file to something ending in flv.
Part Two Convert the file to a format you can use on your phone.
Open the newly renamed .flv file in Quicktime Player.
Using the timeline select 29 seconds of the video you want to use. (I say 29 since the limit is 30 seconds, and just 1 frame extra over that limit will cause it to be too long. Thus 29 seconds keeps you safe.
Copy this selection (Command C)
Create a new player from the file menu (Command-N) and paste (Command-V) the video into it. Go to the end of the video and verify that the time is indeed 29 seconds or less.
Choose export from the file menu. (Command-E)
From the Export format menu select “3G”. And then click options.
Now you need to set up the specs for the video. I found that the default bit-rates and formats worked on the phone I was doing this with, so I recommend using those. I also found that the newest version of Quicktime updated the 3G capabilities and formats. So if you are using a version below 7.4 the dialogs might look a bit different than mine.
Select ‘3GP’ or ‘3GPP (Mobile MP4)’ (depending on your quicktime version) from the File format menu at the top of the 3G Export Settings dialog. This should in both cases set all the default settings needed to export. Below I have a screenshot of the settings just incase.
Click OK and then Click Save. Once finished encoding you should have a video file ready to send to the phone.
Click ‘Upload Media’ located at the bottom of the left column of the interface.
Follow the dialogs to pick your exported video and upload it.
Once uploaded drag the preview of your video over to the area on the right and enter any text you want to send along with it. Click Preview & send.
On the next dialog you will enter the number of the phone you are sending to and an optional additional text message.
Click send and it should send.
Part Four The disclaimers and notes.
This might work for sending to other carriers phones. You would have to test to see. It might be verizon only. And if that is the case there might be other services out there that let you send 3GP videos to phones on those carriers.
This will work with other settings and 3g2 videos. Though this depends on the phone you are sending to some can’t play all file types, or bit-rates. So play with increasing the bit-rates and sizes and 3g formats to see what works and what don’t. Remember the Verizon site limits the file size to 3mb. So you might be able to get some clips looking really good. You never know. I just don’t have any phones handy to test with.
There are other ways to get the FLV from YouTube. The method shown here is just a quick and easy one all Mac users can do. KeepVid.com is another way to download the FLV.
There are other ways to encode to 3g other than Quicktime with Quicktime Pro. I don’t know them off hand, but this will work with those too as long as the produced 3g videos are of the proper specs.
Remember there are fees related to messages and data on phones. So don’t go crazy with this unless you know what your rates are, or the rates of the person receiving the video.
I hope this tutorial is found to be useful in some way. Apologies if something is unclear. Ask in the comments and I might be able to help.
Remember that Perian is the only way you can open the FLV in Quicktime, and it needs ‘.flv’ at the end of the file to open it.
I just made this to illustrate a forum post I made. One that prolly won’t even get many views since the forum is a small community. It was to illustrate the topic “WoW hits 10 million. Creators use hundred dollar bills as fish wrap.” World of Warcraft is a crazy money machine. And it seems to be still churning.
This Yahoo! Pipes pipe will look at the rss feed for your gamertag from 360voice.com and spit out just the entries where achievements occoured. And it will filter out weekly recaps. This is not an original idea, but it worked out well. And I set up the pipe to accept easy input of your gamertag to use. It is good for places on your own site where you want to bring in a feed of your XBox 360 achievements.
It requires that you are registered with 360voice.com.
Here is another new video I made for Video Production today.
This time the objective was to create “an exciting movie trailer from very boring video footage.” And very boring it was. I think it turned out kind of ok. There are still things I wish I could have done to it, but due to time, and the fact I was using iMovie HD 6 I did not get to them.
The video was edited in iMovie HD 6. The music was made in Grageband, and the sound effects came from a website that escapes my memory right now. The title slides were made in Photoshop. All done between 4:30am and 7:30am. It is also a bit short too. It was sposto be at least 1 min long.
I just spent an hour playing with CSS to fix the layout on Vicomm.org to look right in IE 5.5 and 6.0. It don’t even look like it does in Firefox and Safari. It is just slightly off, and now useable. Designing for multiple browsers should not be an issue too, since there are strict standards.
Browsers like Safari, and Firefox strive to follow them to the letter. While Microsoft seems to care less when it comes to IE. Internet Explorer 7 seems to getting things better though. At least is does transparent PNG files properly. Now if only it was easy to get everyone to upgrade to it.
I started working on this because I popped onto the forums and saw that there were some crazy errors and layout issues regarding the theme. Turns out the host Emmalee is using finally got around to moving us to a new server like he said he would about 2 months ago. Seems it does what he promised though, finally have access to write privileges on the server and it seems a bit faster. And the fix to the theme was just telling it where things were on the new server. It Coulda been worse. He could have nuked our databases.
Once I fixed the issues I decided it was time to fix the errors I saw when the site was used in IE 6. I saw these for the first time when Emmalee was showing the site to some people telling them I made it etc. It was rather frustrating to find out since I had the site looking fine in both Firefox and Safari, and people had told me it looked fine in Internet Explorer.
Well, enough of this rant, I should go to sleep. Seems most of my blog posts are always made at night, when I should be sleeping.
This Yahoo! Pipes pipe will look at the rss feed for your gamertag from 
