Video Solution

Last week my oldest son, Michael, Jr. was in a musical production at his preschool. Of course we videotaped it so we could share it. This wasn't the first time I had shared video online, but this time really made me annoyed. I was really annoyed with the poor quality of sharing sites like YouTube. I tried Facebook's video sharing, and it wasn't much better. I decided it was time to roll my own. After some experimenting here is the stack of tools and service I came up with.

Video Importing/Editing: iMovie. This is what I was already using. iMovie is famously easy to use. The importing is easy, the editing is easy. The default export is .m4v files, which are H.264 files designed to work on iPods. This is important.

Video Playing: Flash. I wrote my own video player using Flex. The Flash player has built-in support for H264 video. Thus the videos I export out of iMovie play naturally in the Flash player. They just need some Flash code to load and control the video stream. I wrote this myself as it was pretty straightforward. I created an external XML file as a metadata repository. This tells my player what videos are available and information about each video, like its size. I hosted the custom built player and metadata files on Google Page Creator.

Video Storage: Amazon S3. This was the most difficult part. S3 is relatively cheap. It is NOT easy to use, contrary to what others might say. I was shocked to discover that there is no interface (web or desktop) for uploading and managing files stored on S3. I wound up using S3Fox. It seems like a nice interface, but buggy. Amazon really should offer administrative tools.

Next Steps: Ideally I would build a plugin for iMovie that would upload the video to S3 and write the metadata about the movie to my Google Pages. I am thinking of doing an AIR app for this first, and then maybe go Cocoa. I must also monitor my usage to make sure that S3 is cheaper than other alternatives like Box.net.

Flock 1.0

In case you missed the news, Flock finally went 1.0 late last month. I've been playing around with Flock for over a year. They're integration with social services has gotten better and better. I did a clean install of it and setup my Flickr, YouTube, and Blogger accounts very easily. I've given up on using it for RSS, as having a server-based solution (Google Reader) is too valuable to me. They've also added Facebook and Twitter integration, two favorite services of mine. Both are well done. And of course it's based off Firefox 2.0 now, which is great. Most Firefox plugins work great with it. I'm using its blog writer right now, as I'm planning on using it as my primary for a week or so and then figure out if I should go back to Firefox or not.

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Ron Paul and YouTube

There's been a lot written about the Ron Paul phenomenon. One thing I will have to do at some point is just talk about what I like about Ron Paul. I've been very apolitical this year though, so that will have to wait. One very interesting thing about Ron Paul though is his influence on YouTube.

My friend Chris wrote an interesting program to calculate the "influence" of political candidates via YouTube. Most of the major candidates have accounts (ok so it's surely their staffers, but whatever) on YouTube, and you can be their "friend." Chris looked at each candidate's friends and at what YouTube videos they had marked as favorites. He looked at the common favorites among friends of candidates. Here's a chart showing this data for Barack Obama:

The big red bar is the most common favorite among friends of Barack Obama. Why did I pick Obama here? Well he is the most popular candidate on YouTube (and on Facebook) as measured by how many friends he has. Anyways, back to the red bar. The most popular video among his Obama's friends is a favorite of 12 of his friends. #2 on the list is a favorite of 8 of his friends. Now let's take a look at the same chart for Ron Paul.



The #1 video among Ron Paul is a favorite of 34 friends, while #2 is a favorite of 17 friends. The video in question is a video of Ron Paul speaking at Google.

I guess none of this should come as a surprise. Ron Paul supporters are ... very passionate about Paul. It's that passion that infuriates many people. He is very much a fringe candidate right now, but the passion of his supporters may well push Paul into the mainstream. Is YouTube a place for that to happen? Probably not, but it's a start. To do my part, here's the video in question. Enjoy.

New Facebook App

Today I wrote a new Facebook app. It's a Flex based app that let's you watch the most popular videos on YouTube. You can watch the YouTube video from inside Facebook, which is kind of nice. That required some hacking of how YouTube hides the URL of their FLV files. The FLV is the actual video you watch on YouTube. People love to use the embed code for a YouTube video so they can put the video on their own page/blog/whatever. The embed references a SWF file. That SWF file is what references the FLV file and plays it inside the Flash Player.

Anyways, back to the Facebook app. I wrote it with the primary intent of using it for a presentation I'm planning on doing at FlexCamp in a few weeks. The presentation is going to be on *drum roll* creating a Facebook app using Flex. I'm also going to use the Find it on eBay application written by my colleague Anand Gangadharan. It's a lot more advanced than my little YouTube application.

Flocked Again

On a tip, I decided to try a developer build of Flock 0.8 (well 0.7.99 is what it says.) It has some very cool new features. The blog editor has some rich editing capabilities. Setting up accounts seems even easier than before. Just go to somewhere like Flickr and Flock simply asks you if it's ok for it to enable the service. Pretty seamless. The only exception I saw to this was with Blogger. It prompted me once when I went to the Blogger website, but then when I wanted to post, I was asked to setup the service again. Maybe that will be worked out for 0.8.

The RSS reader looks a lot nicer. There is integration with YouTube, which is very cool. It is running on the Firefox 2.0 code, so everything renders much quicker. Now if only there was a way to sync my RSS metadata between Flock on my work and home computers...

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