video

Need Video for your Blog: Turn your camera videos into FLVs for your blog, easily and quickly.

Posted by

I’ve been doing video for a while, and always found it a pain to transcode videos. Why? I don’t have a Flip camera but I just use the movie mode available for the smaller cameras (my Lumix for example). Unfortunately, I’m not an Apple FanBoy, which makes dealing with those QT movies a really pain in the butt. I tried different solutions for transcoding those and had limited success.

Transcoding Hamlet!

But for a recent project, I need to transcode some FLVs of Hamlet lectures like this. This was a project for the Taiwan Science Council and the website was the result of a project application.

hamletintaiwan

I didn’t have any time editing the videos, though that would’ve been ideal. I only had a little time to transcode and upload the videos. The results are surprisingly effective. And that was all thanks to a program called MediaCoder:

MediaCoder is a free universal batch media transcoder, which nicely integrates most popular audio/video codecs and tools into an all-in-one solution. With a flexible and extendable architecture, new codecs and tools are added in constantly as well as supports for new devices. MediaCoder intends to be the swiss army knife for media transcoding in all time and at this moment, it already has millions of users from 170+ countries all over the planet.

I found that for the first time I was able to transcode video easily from Quick Time to FLV without an intermediate step. Previously I had to create an AVI format and then use Super to create an FLV file. After that, uploading was time consuming but effective! Voila!

make an FLV

Simply drag the file to the transcoding area, then hit Extensions and “Other Devices” and Flash Video Maker. I set the quality as high as I dare which turned 1 hour of MPEG4 video into an FLV of about 150MBs. I also kept the audio as high quality as I could, given that it was a lecture, audio quality was more important than video quality. Other choices: 25fps, Hi-Quality, with 300Kbps bitrate and original resolution. Audio was default settings. The results are effective if a little grainy.

Adding Video to a Post

You can download one of the best plugins for adding Flash Video to your blog. It’s called Flash Video Player Plugin for WordPress and can be found at http://www.mac-dev.net/blog/index.php where you can download the latest version. Installation is easy: upload and activate.

To add a video to your post, you simply upload the file via FTP, then create a post and add the code as follows:

That’s it. Pretty easy, I think. I had some problems getting video to work on my other blog, but it was because of a plugin incompatibility! Once the offending plugin was turned off, it worked beautifully.

So if you have videos on your camera in unusable QT formats, download MediaCoder, transcode the files, and upload the FLVs to your blog. As an example, I’ve included my wife playing Jenga… and she loses, big time!

Enjoy!

Cool Stuff from Computex 2008: Video

Posted by

After all the hoopla has died down, you can see some great stuff in this video that was featured on ERA News in Taiwan, including (drum roll!) Asus EBOX PC.

I’ve been following this company’s products since the launch of their Asus EEE PC 700 in 2007. The breadth and innovation of the company’s products underlines the ambitions of this company to reshape the PC (sans Apple) world by packaging the PC in a variety of new forms: UMPC, SETBOX style, Asus Radio, Video Gaming, …

While the video is in Chinese, you will get to see some great gadgets in the video: first up, of course, is the EBox. There isn’t the same level of interest in this device, but I believe it has a number of advantages that will see this become an extremely popular choice for all sorts of un (and under-) served markets: kids computing, older folks, family computing, simpler networking, classrooms, etc..

The price, the size, and the low power consumption make this a VERY attractive computer for the next generation of household computers. You could put one in EVERY room in your house for a very affordable price.

In our business, we would find it relatively inexpensive to equip a small language classroom with five or six of these machines; networked together, they’d be quite a cool and effective computer-skills teaching classroom. Now I just have to sell that idea to my partners.

Isla Formosa: Five Videos from Taiwan

Posted by

Life in Taipei really is different. I’ve collected four different videos to illustrate just how life is different in Taiwan.

Garbage. Sort it, bag it and drag it!

John Chow recently posted this video on how people throw away garbage… Can you guess what that sound is?

7-Eleven: One of the plus points!

This video takes you round the 7-Elevens that dot the cities and towns of this beautiful island. It’s worth watching to give you an idea of what it’s like. Also, the 7-Eleven is a useful place for paying almost every bill that you can think of: parking tickets, cable TV, mobile phone… and there’s usually an ATM inside to withdraw NT$.

Scooters: If you dare

I’ve already posted one crazy YouTube video. But this is a real scooter ride through the streets of Taipei (I think!).

Nightmarkets: not for the faint of heart!

Visiting the nightmarkets in Taiwan is a must for all visitors to Taiwan. The atmosphere (and heat!) is incredible, and the range of snacks is breathtaking: ice cream, dumplings (several dozen varieties), cakes, drinks, Taiwanese snacks, …

Scenery: A Land of Contrasts

But of course, Taiwan has other beautiful scenery, too.

Enjoy these videos. Thanks to the video authors. Click on the YouTube videos to find their other videos!