12 posts tagged “video”

As hoped, after my previous post detailing my failure to rotate a video for display on Flickr, I've had a useful hint which has since led to me successfully uploading a couple of videos.

Gareth pointed me at a page detailing how to use mencoder, part of mplayer, to rotate the video (along with a bunch of other steps at the end assuming you want your video to stay landscape in the end; I don't.) At first I had no luck getting it to work, but a download of the source and compile (which was error, if not warning, free on this Intel Mac) left me with a working command-line application. Starting with Scott Hansleman's invocation, I ended up using

./mencoder -vf rotate=1 -o output.mov -oac copy -fafmttag 1 \
           -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mjpeg input.mov

to convert the file from the Ixus to one that Flickr would accept. The important bit is the "-vf" tag, which gives a list of video filters to apply; -oac and -ovc are for the output audio and video codes respectively, and I'm using mjpeg as it's the same as the input. (Using "copy" didn't work, probably because it was using the frames without rotating them).

Ideally there'd be a nice front end for this, but most of the mencoder GUI wrappers I've seen for Mac OS X were abandoned long ago. For now, using the command line is fine for me, and if you're trying to do the same, hopefully it'll work for you too.

I posted nice and early about Flickr and the API, without even posting a video of my own, and with no inkling of the protests that were about to bounce around Flickr's forums. Eventually I pulled a couple of videos from my old photo site (I'm particularly fond of this one, since you really need the movement to see what the point is), and posted them, while I looked for more videos that I'd shot with my old Ixus, generally five years ago now.

This morning, there were two more videos I wanted to post. However, both were in portrait not landscape orientation, and so far I've not found a way of posting them to Flickr the right way up, despite trying a few things. So, here's what doesn't work, before I ask the crowd what will.

Firstly, and most simply, I tried using QuickTime Pro to rotate, using the Movie Properties window as discussed at The Unofficial Apple Weblog, amongst many others. Unfortunately, while this looks as if it works, it's actually just a metadata flag, and Flickr discards it on upload. This fate also befell a "hinted movie" export.

This started me on a search for a suitable Export format. I tried AVI with Cinepak, but that looks truly awful, and I wasn't prepared to even try uploading it. AVI + DV-PAL looked as if it worked, but on upload Flickr converted it to a 4:3 aspect ratio, rather than 3:4, which is obviously no good. The same problem affected various MPEG-4 exports, including the presets for the iPhone and so on that QuickTime offers. I had a look at the 3GPP formats, but these have a maximum size of 320 pixels, while my originals are 640x480. That's no good.

Thinking that maybe I was in the wrong application, I turned instead to iMovie. However, it turns out that it won't even think about producing a movie unless it's in landscape format*. I suppose I can see why: if it's a video for TV, or that would eventually be shown on one, then it'll have to be that way around for it to work. On the other hand, this is the exciting new digital era! Who knows what sort of device your video will end up on? The best I could manage here was to mark the video as rotated, and then crop the middle out to return it to 4:3. Sigh.

After this exploration, though, I can see why post-upload rotation is still on Flickr's to do list for video support (along with replacing videos) - although if it was there, it'd be the solution to my problem right there. Anyway, that's basically the end of the road so far. I keep seeing Windows MovieMaker mentioned as a way to rotate video, but I don't (yet) have Windows installed here, and I'd really rather not for something that I'd thought was trivial. Can anyone else suggest a way of doing this with a Mac software package? In the meantime, you can't see my shiny carousel. Sorry.

Updated: Thanks to Gareth, here's a command line solution.

* iPhoto 7 has a similar problem with cropping images to a 16x9 aspect ratio. For 3x2 and 4x3, you can choose either landscape or portrait; for 16x9, you can only use landscape. My workaround is to rotate, crop, then rotate back, but that's stupid. More sigh.

Overnight Flickr launched their video support, which I'm sure you can read about everywhere else. I'd like to note (as much for myself as anything) how to handle videos in the API.

As with the main site, videos are treated just as funny photos. As kellan explained on the Flickr API group, the API does just the same thing. There's a new "extras" parameter, "media", which returns either "photo" or "video". What isn't fully explained on the thread is how to display a video as a video, rather than as a static thumbnail (the way Flickr themselves do on, for example, pool pages).

The answer is to use the embedding code shown with each video. (You'll need to be logged in to see that page.) Seasoned API users will note that the photo ID and secret are in the code that Flickr gives you, so it looks like it'll be easy to check the media attribute for a photo, and either show just the image, or use the Flash code (with the appropriate substitiutions) to show a playable version. Unfortunately, if you can't figure out the aspect ratio of the image (typically by using the o_dims extra argument to methods like flickr.photos.search - and yes, it works for videos), you'll need to do an extra call (to flickr.photos.getSizes) to get those arguments for the <object> tag. (This is a problem for images, too, but I'd be happier leaving height and width tags out of an <img> than an <object> tag.)

In summary, then, supporting videos on Flickr through the API looks as if it should be straightforward, and in fact even if you do nothing then it'll work (albeit with videos treated as images). Nicely done.

Today, John Gruber linked to the just-out-of-beta video site, Hulu. Paid for by NBC and Fox, it allows you to catch up on TV shows online, via a Flash-based video widget that can be embedded on your own site. The videos are pretty good quality, and there's a good selection. Unfortunately, 95% of the world's population can't really use Hulu. Sure, they can browse it, and see what's there, but when you get to a video, it displays a message saying "this video is currently not available in your region". (The link was updated while I was writing this post to note that very fact, but I've seen other commentary which blithely ignores it.)

Sometimes the boot is on the other foot. Last year, the BBC launched iPlayer, a video site paid for by the BBC that allows you to catch up on TV shows online, via a Flash-based video widget that can be embedded on your own site (sounds familiar, huh?) Of course, just like Hulu, it uses geolocation on IP addresses to limit the people who can use it; only UK users can watch video. The fact that there's a very good reason for this (almost everyone in the UK pays the TV licence fee; nobody outside it does) doesn't stop commenters (and even authors) from whining about it almost every time it's mentioned. (To be fair, the comments on that particular post are pretty smart.)

In fact, over the last week, there's been a nice old flap about the fact that the just-launched iPlayer for iPhone (take that, Hulu!) was (ab)used to allow the download of non-DRMed movies to computers. I'm somewhat surprised at how little attention this got from the (American) Mac blogging community. For example, Ars Technica covered it the day after the Telegraph. The Telegraph, I ask you! (For the latest, Ashley Highfield's blog post is worth a read; apparently 3% of iPlayer viewers are using an iPhone or iPod touch. Impressive.)

To be clear, I don't have much of a problem with the fact that Hulu is US only, or with the fact that iPlayer is UK only; I realise there are commercial pressures and that, although the Internet goes everywhere, products don't. (Just like most geeks, I wish they did, but I also wish that I could eat chocolate cake every meal without getting fat, but that's not going to happen either.*) My problem is with people assuming that, just because something is available to them, it's available to everyone they care about.

Mind you, I did have a bit of a think about the issue of region locking this week. Firstly, a commenter on a picture of Hulu said that censorship sucks, but then, I don't see it as censorship. Secondly, I read a post about the increasing filtering of YouTube videos by geolocation. It mentions that taking YouTube down tends to get noticed (part of the Cute Cat theory- if you haven't read that writeup of a talk from Etech, you really should), so countries are now asking Google to filter particular videos for their countries, and it seems as if, faced with a ban on one hand or allowing censorship on the other, Google are sometimes doing as those regimes want.

Notice that I'm happy to call what YouTube are doing censorship. What's the difference, then? I think it's the fact that YouTube was built as a global video site; anyone could see anything. Specifically blocking particular videos for a particular location, at a government's request, is out of the ordinary, and "censorship" feels right. (Studios taking down a video for everyone is on the line; I can see how it gets called that, but I wouldn't use the term myself.) iPlayer and Hulu, on the other hand, have never pretended to offer their services outside a particular location,** so it's more of a commercial decision; call it "region locking", or "geographic filtering", perhaps. I was glad to be able to find a self-consistent position. Isn't that what being a detail-obsessed nerd is all about?

* Except breakfast. That would just be wrong.
** Well, both allow a certain amount of browsing; it's difficult to choose between that and just locking the entire site away.
*** Remind me to rant about how much better than Twitter Jaiku is sometime, and how utterly unfair it is that it's called a "Twitter clone" when it launched, with more functionality, months earlier. Why didn't anyone use it? Because it came from Finland, a place that's not only not the US, but where they don't even speak English as a native language. Of course nobody had heard of it.

Until now, online communication has lacked personality, being limited to text (IM, SMS, email). Seesmic changes that, bringing conversation alive through video

"At last, the Internet is really social: you can see and hear people express their ideas and thoughts, you can join in, and you can make new friends. With Seesmic, everyone can participate in live conversations rich with personality, bought to life through video," commented Ron Conway

New Year's Eve is traditionally time to look back, so here's about the only cogent observation I can come up with for the end of the year: 2007 is the year that video started taking over the web. In 2005, video was almost entirely trapped in the realm of proprietary codecs and plugins, hidden away as QuickTime downloads or Windows streaming media, behind nasty UIs with checkboxes for your connection speed and preferred format. Last year, Flash video became widespread, and, of course, YouTube was sold for a fortune to Google.

This year, embedded video is everywhere. Some blogs seem to be half-full of Flash previews, and it's beginning to be a minefield browsing my delicious network; an interesting sounding link will turn out to be an hour and a half lecture on Google Video. All the criticisms I no doubt made of podcasting on the spool, somewhere, apply here, but even more so: who has 90 minutes to concentrate on a presentation, every day or two? (If you can really absorb information in the background, you're obviously way better at multitasking than I am; congratulations.)

Meanwhile, the Guardian and other newspapers have video on their front pages every now and again, and video adverts on their stories as often or not (or so it sometimes seemed). (As Tom noted on the spool, this might be backwards.) The BBC's audio and video, stuck in the pre-Flash world, regularly gets stick for not moving to the exciting new way of bombarding everyone with moving images, whether they want them or not.

There's beginning to be more and more worry about the twilight of books, and indeed literacy. That New Yorker article goes on to note:

The Internet, happily, does not so far seem to be antagonistic to literacy. Researchers recently gave Michigan children and teen-agers home computers in exchange for permission to monitor their Internet use. The study found that grades and reading scores rose with the amount of time spent online. Even visits to pornography Web sites improved academic performance. Of course, such synergies may disappear if the Internet continues its YouTube-fuelled evolution away from print and toward television.

This wouldn't really be that much of a change, I suppose; as the article says elsewhere, television and radio have been resurrecting orality at the expense of literacy for the best part of a century. The web seems to be recapping the history of mass publishing from the first primitive printing presses, to HDTV, at breakneck speed; what took five centuries is being replayed in two decades.

Given we still don't really understand the changes that happen to society when movable type (the metal sort, not the software package) was invented (I've seen people arguing it led to the 150 years of religious turmoil in Europe centred on the Reformation, and others highlighting its role in the Enlightenment; probably it contributed massively to both), I can see why people need to be concerned about what the effects of such a shift are. I believe this is what Doris Lessing's Nobel acceptance speech was trying to ask, in a passage that was widely misunderstood by web 2.0 boosters:

The printing revolution, which did not take place in a matter of a few decades, but took much longer, transformed our minds and ways of thinking. A foolhardy lot, we accepted it all, as we always do, never asked: "What is going to happen to us now, with this invention of print?" In the same way, we never thought to ask, "How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by the internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that, once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging etc?"

The move to a post-literate society may be inevitable, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be spending some time thinking about what it means. In the meantime, I'll be sitting at the back, grousing when discussion relies on you having watched the latest viral nonsense, and hoping that there'll still be books, full-length blog posts, and interesting articles for me to read.

Flowered Up - Weekender

This is one of those "thanks to the Internet" things but until a month or so ago I'd never seen this video, despite it coming out fifteen years ago. Weekender, you see, was a classic of the early 90s, an epic indie/dance hybrid documenting the ups and downs of a weekend's rave.

The short film was directed by Wiz, who went on to produce videos for the Chemical Brothers, and it wasn't unreasonable to call it that; like the track, it runs for a good quarter of an hour. While it was early in his career, though, it marked the end of Flowered Up's career, after a lone album and a few singles. What a glorious swansong.

As I said, although I'd heard of the video ages ago, it was never shown on TV (or at least, never whilst I was watching), and it took a while to show up online (although I'd heard the track a few times, mainly in the evenings on Radio 1; Annie Nightingale loved the track and played it regularly, including it on a rather good compliation album). However, now someone's digitised it, and so I can share it with you all. Enjoy.

Simon Wistow has been adding these regularly, and today's post on Senser included a link to them playing at Reading on YouTube. It made me think about Orbital, live at Glastonbury in 1994. It was an amazing gig; on after Bjork, playing just after sunset, on a beautiful summer evening at the best festival in the world. It was so good I even wrote a review for the first website I ever wrote (which, sadly, I stopped editing just as it would have been smart to keep doing so; ho hum).

Anyway, one search later, and we have Orbital at Glastonbury 1994, in four parts. Here's the first, with Impact - The Earth Is Burning.