August 7, 2008 – 10:29 am
Check out Rupert’s fun experiment with YouTube’s new annotation feature. I thought I might try to write a long post about this but really the whole idea and a lot of thinking behind it are not new (See recent posts from New TeeVee + ReadWriteWeb or read some of Adrian Miles’ thoughts on the subject) . Even this example is, like Rupert comments, “a bit like a Choose Your Own Adventure Book from 1982” (or even Dragon’s Lair).
The reason why I’m writing about this at all is that what I think is important is that this tool is super easy, widely available and free. Historically it’s been difficult and expensive to do stuff like this and, personally, even though I’m fascinated by the idea, I’ve never been particularly excited by the results. Even the commercial project I worked on, could have done so much more. But just as videoblogging became really interesting as the tools became simple and ubiquitous, I’m hoping interactive video will become interesting as more people get to experiment with it (> 5000 videos posted with annotations in the 7 weeks since the feature was released). Once people are as comfortable and practiced with annotating and linking their videos as they are with shooting and posting them, I think the really cool stuff will begin to emerge.
Today I’m releasing the first version of my video-centric, Show In A Box, WordPress theme, Spacey that feels complete. It seems like I’ve been working on this thing in one version or another for more than a year. I really like this theme and I especially like how easy I’ve made it to customize.
This is still a pretty “bloggy” theme and doesn’t stray too far from the original K2 layout (it’s a K2 mod). Basically the idea was to get something out there that was easy to use and could support a 640 pixel wide video embed. Now I’m looking forward to experimenting with something less conventional.
Learn more about Spacey, see it in action and download it here.
A few days ago at work I was asked to put together a single webpage where we could show 3 videos. Since the videos were not for public distribution we wanted to add a notice about confidentiality and possibly watermark the videos in some way. This was a perfect opportunity for me to extend what I’d learned about using the Jeroen Wijering media player. I’d always wanted to figure out the playlist features and this seemed like the perfect use for them. The videos already existed but there wasn’t a confidentiality notice or a watermark. Using a playlist let me run an image for few seconds first with the notice and then use a transparent .png over top as watermark as the 3 videos played in succession.
Now the whole reason why I’m writing about this is because the playlist can be XSPF playlist or an RSS feed. Our blogs already pump out all kinds of RSS feeds and David Meade is already working on a plugin to do XSPF (he’s got a demo on his site right now). When he was showing me what he’d built I asked if it was possible to provide ways for the viewer to generate a playlist on the fly. He said once he’s got it working as plugin that it would be possible. Imagine someone looking at your archives and saying, “let me see everything from New York in 2006 in chronological order” or “give me everything tagged ‘art’ and play it randomly.”
As a learning exercise, I put together this playlist of some of my machinima pieces. All of the videos are encoded with H.264 and look pretty nice in fullscreen. The page source and XSPF playlist are fully commented so it should be easy to recreate.
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Some links:
Jeroen Wijering media player
Playlist documentation
Flashvars documentation
Update your Flash player - you need version 9,0,115,0
Last year Adobe announced that Flash would support H.264 video. I hadn’t had the time to follow up on that until I saw this cool tip on the Videoblogging list yesterday. So this post is just testing that functionality - even though there is a “Flash” version that plays in the Jeroen Wijering Flash player, it’s the same H.264 file you’ll get if you click the “iPod” link. By the way, if you can’t see this video you’ll need to update your Flash Plugin. Another nice thing is that the video is compressed with the new version of Apple’s Compressor, which finally comes with some nice presets. The one I used for this makes a 640 wide progressive dual-pass video at about 1100kbps. It looks great on the web, on an iPhone and blown up full screen on a 24″ monitor.
