Maggie's Farm

 
I've noted a handful of times in these lessons that if there was ever a time to jump into a computer field, it's now.  Whether it's hardware or software, virtually every field of the computer is quite a bit easier these days than even just a few years ago.  Streaming video is certainly no exception.
 

An Assumption

This lesson assumes you know all about running your web or blog site, know the lingo and how to do various things like access the source code of a page and how to write the entire HTTP path to your video files.

The Age of Templates

And thank goodness we're in it. A 'template' is a block of code that we cut & paste into the web or blog site, then change the various parameters (name of file, size) to fit the new files. When I want to add a video to my home page, I simply do a copy & paste with an existing video on the page. I click on the video box in the editor, Ctrl-C to copy to memory, then Ctrl-V to paste it in the new place. I then open it up and change the name of the file and the video size, if necessary, and it's ready to go.

The Castaways

In the early days of streaming video there were three competing formats; RealMedia, Quicktime and Windows Video. I ran endless analyses with various programs and there was never a doubt that the Windows formats (first ASF, then WMV) were far better than the other two. Byte for byte, WMVs were sharper than RMs, and, quality for quality, WMVs were far smaller than QTs. Hence the exclusion of RealMedia and Quicktime from this text.

The Online Players

We'll cover four of them, three for the web and one for WordPress blog sites. I won't refer to the WordPress one again until the end of the page.

It's to note that they usually only work with one type of video format, but, with free converters around, this should not be a reason to choose one player over another. You should be looking at function and features, and I imagine you'll agree with me that JW Player is the best of the three.

• Windows Movie Player — This uses WMV files, which the free Microsoft Media Encoder will do a dandy job of making.
  
  Up Side: Doesn't pre-load files when the page is displayed. If it did, like Flash does, you wouldn't be able to put a bunch of video displays on the same page or they'd all be downloading like crazy as soon as the person arrived.
  
  Down Side: Won't allow for preview pic, so all you see is an ugly black screen until it starts playing. Also, WMV files won't display on Macs by default, so a certain percent of your readership will be upset — and perhaps justifiably so, with FLV around.
   


• Flash Player — This uses SWF 'loader' files which, in turn, play FLV videos.
  
  Up Side: FLV format displays on all computer platforms.  Shows first frame of video as preview pic, but not custom pic.
   
  Down Side: Pre-loads video so you're limited as to how many players you can put on a page. Needs a professional program like Flash 8 ($699) to make the SWF file so you can have player controls. All in all, it's a pretty lame player, but it's popular because of its compatibility with Mac, Linux, etc, due to it handling FLV. Except in reference, I won't mention it again.
   


• JW Player — This has the best of the above.  Doesn't pre-load files, allows you to display a custom pic and uses FLV format. So, the only tools you need are the free SUPER video converter and the 'Paint' program already on your computer (for the preview pic) and you're ready to go. Instructions for making screen-grabs and using 'Paint' are here.

The Trick

If there's a 'trick' to all this, it's using full paths to the various files, starting with the "http:". That way, should you shuffle a video around on your site, you don't have to fuss with the paths.  Snip it out of one page with Ctrl-X, slap it in another with Ctrl-V and it should be good to go.
 

For that video up above, I did the following:

• Opened the source code of the page on my site where I have the video


• Highlighted the player code, hit Ctrl-C


• Opened Maggie's online editor, opened the source code


• Hit Ctrl-V to paste it into the page

Worked right the first time.
 

Video Sources

When it comes to peripheral devices, like vidcams and phones, the one, single goal is to get it on the computer in whatever format possible.  Virtually any format can be converted to your format of choice — once it's on the computer.

For grabbing online stuff, read this.  As noted on the page, more and more videos are being streamed to the computer's memory, rather than the hard drive, in which case there's no hope (so far) of recovering them.  Nor does prying through the source code do any good.  But the common stuff, like YouTube vids, are still sitting there happily in your Temporary Internet Files folder, ripe for the plucking.

For the heavy-duty stuff, like taking high-quality clips from DVDs, the guide is here.  Be forewarned, it makes the leap from the simple conversion routine to real video processing.  Bring a bag lunch.

 
Video Size

You'll need to know the exact size of the video. Almost all media players have some kind of 'Properties' that display the basic file information. In Media Player, click on the title bar with the right mouse button, 'File', 'Properties'.

With AVI and WMV files (but not MPG), you can click on the file's icon with the right mouse button, open Properties, click on the 'Summary' tab and the 'Advanced' button to see the info.

For FLV files, which you probably don't have a player for, you'll need to use a program like MediaInfo.  After you click on the green 'download' button, look for the 'Graphical interface' version then click on the second green button.  This is a perfect candidate for the SendTo feature.
 

Like putting pictures on a web page, it's best if the video is the size that it's going to display as.  If you put a small vid on the site and use the box's 'grab bars' to make it larger, it's not going to look near as good as if it had been resized with a real video converter.  Reducing it to a smaller size with the 'grab bars' won't matter.

You can resize it during the conversion, putting in the exact specs you want.  I presume you know about keeping the aspect ratio together, but if not, I'll turn you over to last week's lesson.
 

The Choice

What conversion process you use depends on what quality you're looking for, and the size it'll be played on the site. It breaks down like this:

• Keeping in mind that video is a case of "garbage in, garbage out", if your source file is some crappy web download, a quick run through SUPER using the low-rent settings will be just fine.
   


• 
  
  If it's a quality clip but it's still going to be in a small display window, then you'd use a converter like SUPER but jack up the settings.
   
  A download link & instructions to SUPER are about halfway down this page, the 'Down & Dirty' section.
   
  
  


• If you want it to play full-screen and maintain the high quality, then it has to be WMV. JW Player has a full-screen mode, but it'll be FLV format and the quality at that size will seriously suffer. For the top-flight stuff, stick with WMV. And you'll want to instruct the readers to double-click in the window after the video starts playing, like so.
   
  Note that a high-quality full-screen video, like that last link, is somewhat more complicated than merely converting the file, and that's doubly true if the source is a DVD disc. For this particular process, go here and buckle your seat belt.

Cropping

If there's something you want to crop off the beginning or end of the clip, the procedure would be:

• If it's in any format except AVI or MPG, first load it into a program like SUPER and convert it to AVI using 'AVI' and "huffYUV' in the top two boxes.
   


• Load that file into VirtualDub, crop off the ends, do a 'Save as AVI' from the File Menu.
   


• Load that file into SUPER and make the FLV file.

Warning: This procedure involves uncompressed video files, which are gigantic compared to regular videos.  As such, you'll need some spare hard drive space.

The free VirtualDub can be downloaded here.
 

Windows Media Player

Microsoft's free Media Encoder v9 is here. It's an excellent program. I've matched it up with other converters (VideoStudio, VirtualDub, TMPGEnc, Media Encoder v7) and version 9's 2-pass encode just blows the doors off everybody else. And, as noted in last week's lesson, the shame of it all is that WMV is far superior to FLV in any way you'd care to name, but because of the friendly intercollegiate rivalry between Microsoft and Apple over the years, there's no Media Player-type program on the Mac, so FLV just kinda slipped into the gap.
 

Media Encoder is pretty easy to use but let's skip through the steps:

• Select 'Convert a file'
   


• Browse to the source file, check over the name of the output file
   


• Click 'Windows Media server (streaming)'
   


• If this is just some crappy web video, just click 'Next'. If it's a high-quality vid, you'll want to set the top box to 'DVD quality' and give it a bitrate of at least 2,137.
   


• And then comes one of my favorite computer expressions: click 'Finish' to begin!

It'll do a 2-pass render. The computer might feel a little sluggish during the first pass.

 
And Onto The Site

There are two ways to put the WMV on the web page, as a link or in a player window. They're treated quite differently so let's break them up.
 

Link on the page

With a link, we don't link directly to the WMV file, we link to a small 'redirect' file made with Notepad. This tells Media Player it's a streaming file and to start playing it as soon as it gets enough downloaded.

Open Notepad and punch this in:

<ASX version = "3.0">
<Entry>
<Ref href = "http://www.yourdomain.com/folder/coolvid.wmv" />
</Entry>
</ASX>

Put in the full path to your video. Save the file with whatever name you want in the same folder as the WMV file.

Open the folder and change the name to "coolvid.wvx", using the vid's name or close, just to identify it. For future videos, you'd just make a copy of an existing WVX file.

Upload both files to the site. On the web page, link to the WVX file and that should do it.
 

If it doesn't play, you should be able to tell what's wrong by the error message. If it's a 'page not found', the link to the WVX file is incorrect. If Media Player pops open but 'can't find file', the path in the WVX file is at fault.

If it doesn't appear to be streaming; that is, the whole thing's downloading before it starts playing, try putting a "mms:" in the WVX file instead of "http:".  And make sure you're linking to the WVX file, not the WMV.
 

Player on the page

Pop open the web page in the editor, open the source code and punch this in:

 
<EMBED type="application/x-mplayer2" pluginspage=http://www.microsoft.com/Windows/MediaPlayer/ Name="MediaPlayer" src="http://www.yourdomain.com/folder/coolvid.wmv" AutoStart=0 ShowStatusBar=0 volume=-1 HEIGHT=306 WIDTH=320>

You'd change the path to the file, change the AutoStart to "1" if you want it to start playing automatically, and the size of the video.