Hell Yeah Bitch! .com

I am Jack’s complete sense of surprise.

You must understand how weird it feels to say this, but as a professional web developer, I’m honestly excited to start using a new Microsoft web product. Seriously.

Silverlight is the new flash competitor that Microsoft is rolling out, and without getting into too many details (because that link to TechCrunch does a pretty good job of getting the details out) I couldn’t be more excited to start using it. Well…screw it. I’ll tell you one reason why I’m excited: You don’t have to learn some funky new language that you will never use anywhere else just to make a video player or something simple for your site (cough coughActionscript!). Don’t get me wrong, you are still going to have to kill me before I ever use .NET or ASP but with Silverlight you can use Python for example, or hell, you can even use javascript. Thats the kind of anti-lock-in feature you don’t usually see from Microsoft, just like their efforts to make sure this works on all browsers and platforms including the mobile ones (there’s another exciting feature!).

Look, I gotta go. Veronica Mars is about to come back on, and I’ll get back to the Britney Spears jokes later, I just wanted to go on record with my actual excitement with a new Microsoft web product.

Today, all of a sudden the audio for flash video died in all browsers on my G5 iMac at home. Restarted. No go. Call the computer and “fucking piece of shit” while clicking on everything but changing nothing in my system preferences. No go. Restarted again. No go. Then I found this:

Every once in a while though, on Mac OS X it can happen that these Flash video players don’t have sound anymore.

It is pretty hard to figure out why, and the solution is quite random, but on macosxhints I found a comment mentioning that it could be a sampling rate problem:

1. open /Applications/Utilities/Audio MIDI Setup
2. check the properties for Built In Output.
3. It might be set to 96KHz. Change it to 44KHz and audio in Flash will return immediately.

Now, I don’t know what software it is messing up that setting, but I am glad it can be fixed.

Odd. But it worked. The issue I’m having is what do I set it too if it happens again?

via fredericiana

Think of it like a youTube at the end of every article. Starting…now! You can make a video of yourself and post it up on any of our articles to augment your written comment. This way I can see your face when you call me an asshole, or we can all see your body as you slowly strip down to nothing, thanking me for being so god damn awesome it makes your sexy girl-parts hurt. As that ideal situation still floats around your head, I do want to make that point that when posting video, we all expect to still have text to go along with it. Some don’t have flash, some don’t want to watch or hear your video, and some of us are blind, and although I assume all blind people eventually get super powers Daredevil-style, they probably still can’t see video on a computer screen. Your video should be there as a fun helper, not the whole statement. …unless you are making fun of blind people, then video is the way to go.

As far as instructions go, just go down and comment like usual and then after the comments, there is a new VIDEO option. Click Browse, upload your video and wait. You are uploading and encoding video so it can take a min or so. Be patient. Once the page refreshes, your video will be there. Watch it yourself and chuckle at your topical wit. Wait for people to tell you that your are wrong. If something breaks or sucks or you love it, let me know in the comments or any of these ways

A Note on Video Encoding:
For now, you can upload windows video (wmv) and quicktime video (mov) including H.264. However, if you are on a Mac and encoding your comment with H.264, you can’t use AAC audio as of this writing, but I’m working on this. The problem is, its very tough to get FFMPEG encoded as I need it while working within Dreamhost’s shared server rules.

Sadly there are restrictions. For one, please god don’t upload some obnoxiously long video of you putting different outfits on your cat. Size matters, but in the reverse way that women usually tell me it does. The smaller your video the better. These are meant to be quick, not epics, please keep that in mind. I’ll get in to a full on techplanation, including the code, later but for now I’ll tell you that, like youTube, all videos uploaded are converted to flash video for a variety of reasons. What does that mean? Well not every format is going to work, so try to stick with the basics: avi, wmv, mov. One last thing, I NEVER remove any written comments that aren’t spam, and I intend to keep it that way, however video leads down a path to possible copyright infringement, and although uploading other’s works is the exact opposite intent for my work, if someone does upload something that could get me sued, it will come down.

Other than that, try it out. I wanted to get the code running here for a day or two before I release the 1st version to the world at large, so help me test it and make something entertaining!

What?

This plugin allows a Movable Type blog to give the readers the chance to comments via video. The video is uploaded and encoded into flash video (like on youTube) and then displayed in the comments of an article with the use of an open source flash video player.

Requirements

This plugin isn’t as straight forward and many others. The reason is, you need to have FFMPEG installed on your websever in order to encode the video correctly. However, installing FFMPEG is only the beginning, because you can / should also compile FFMPEG with any number of extras in order to handle the myriad of different video types out there.

The Plugin File: videoComment.pl (Update: Dreamhost made some change with their servers, so I had to remove the .pl extension. Download the file at the updated link and add the .pl extension yourself. Sorry.)
FFMPEG: http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu/
Flash Video Player: http://www.jeroenwijering.com/?item=Flash+Video+Player

Features

This first release features:

• Upload and auto-encoding to a directory of your choice.
• Zero code changes to any Movable Type scripts, just modify the comment form on your template.
• Zero additions to the Movable Type database.
• When a comment is deleted in the Movable Type interface, its associated video content and screenshot is removed automatically.

Demo

As of right now, no demo is available at Hell Yeah Bitch! .com. I will post on tonight, after Dreamhost fixes their network connectivity issues. (No use in demoing a video upload, with the speeds are this slow.)
Update: Dreamhost seems to have gotten us to move at least a little faster. You can now see a demo in the comments form of every post, but please use this article’s comments for discussion and testing.

Install

1. Check to see if your web server or web host has FFMPEG installed and configured. If not, you will need to do this yourself or request that your system administrator install it for you. For help configuring and installing FFMPEG with all the video decoding ability your site needs, see http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu/ and http://hellyeahbitch.com/archives/2006/09/081009
2. Download the Flash Video Player, and “install” by putting the flash player file in the root of your web directory.
3. Now, download the plugin file, and place it in your $MT_DIRECTORY/plugins directory
4. Modify the plugin file at the top to set the directories that you want your video comments to reside and where the plugin should place the temporary files before they are deleted.
5. Modify the HTML form in your comments template to accommodate the uploading of the video file. To do this, modify your form to this general example:
   

   [Your current form's contents]
   Video:
   < input tabindex="6" name="video" type="file" / >
   [Submit button]
   

6. Lastly, the plugin will give you two new tags for use in your comments templates. They are for use in between your tags. They are: < MTIfVideo >, <$MTShowVideo$>. The first is used to check to see if the comment being displayed has video content with it, the second is used to show said content. So in your comments showing area of your template, you would put something like
   

   < MTIfVideo >
   <$MTShowVideo$>
   < /MTIfVideo >

   After the rest of your comment tags.

7. Your done.

Like I said, its not as straight forward as most plugins are, but with a little work on the FFMPEG install, you can get your video comments working just fine.

Hopes and Dreams

- Hopefully Dreamhost will fix the problem tonight and I can post up a demo.
- Hopefully I will figure out how to install faad2 on my Dreamhost shared server account so that you can upload video with AAC encoded audio for use with the comment system.
- Hopefully I’ll get at least enough response and bug reports to tap out a new version sometime soon and possibly figure out a way to kill a few steps in the install process.

Who doesn’t love a good old fashion “Hit Celebrities In The Face Repeatedly” flash game? In the latest itteration of this timeless genre you are a bouncer with one job: Beat up K-Fed so he can’t get into your club. It sounds easy, until Britney show up holding her baby Tater-Tot and plays human shield for her soul-mate. The game has a cut scene at the beginning that might be funny, but I had to play it at work with no sound, so who knows.

Link: Play “KFed”
Via: Kotaku

Truely, this is the type of cool web-art that Shockwave and Flash must have been created for!

This very cool shockwave art is as simple and beautiful as it gets. You just click the picture which takes you deeper into different (sometimes repeating) mosaic pictures. Its hard to explain, so just go check it out for yourself.

Via Stylegala

Sadly I couldn’t get tickets, but I’m sure there is a sea of red clad, happy people flooding around downtown St. Louis right now. The festivities for the first home opener for “Busch Stadium III” are set to kick off any minute, with the game starting roughly an hour after that. I’ll get down there a little latter in the season to see the new park from the inside, but until then I have to settle for pictures. However, viewing pictures of the new park on the web was a surprisingly pleasant experience today when I found the new (?) feature on EPSN.com called EPSN ZOOM. Its an auto-resizing flash application that shows each picture in a gallery in beautiful full window size with a simple navigation on the top and a little information / caption box that can be drug around the window or hidden at will. Its is truly one of the best and cleanest flash implemetations I have seen thus far. I know its simple, but to me, this is really what flash should be used for: A simple, clean interface for a single aspect of a site. ESPN has really done some nice work reworking the entire face of the online face of their brand and ZOOM is one of the nicer and more surprising features they have added.

…Oh yeah, I love the look of the new Busch stadium as well. It should be a good day today…and maybe, just maybe I’ll get in a better mood after last night’s this past weekend’s stupid loss to sweep by the Cubs.
View the new Busch Stadium in the ESPN ZOOM gallery

I just completed a complete redesign of a site for my company and part of it was to create a web application that allows the user to play with a myriad of options and configure the product how the want it all while giving them a preview of their progress and a continually updated pricing list. They had something like this on their current site, but it was old, and clunky perl CGI with lots of refreshing and rebuilding after every change the user made, so I opted to go with an AJAX approach. After many changes and feature tweaking and adding, I found myself staring at a small-ish group of PHP files and one very large file of javascript. Its finished now, and seems to work well, but as I look back on this aspect of the site that seemed to be growing every day, I wonder: I should have done it in flash?

AJAX has been a great tool for the modern web designer and it has allowed the creation of even more dynamic web applications with relative ease, but at what point of complication do you drop AJAX and move to a more cohesive tool like Flash? One of the first things I heard when AJAX became vouge was the flash people screaming: “We could already do this!” and its true. Flash has always been the go-to platform for web apps of the more complicated nature, but now AJAX has cut Flash off at the knees with its ability to do things like Google Maps without having your users download the latest Flash upgrade and wait to download the app. So when does an app cross the line from being “Perfect for AJAX” to being “Wow, that sounds like a Flash app.”? Or does it have to? Is 700 lines of javascript to get an app working with AJAX still better than having to go pick up a copy of Flash MX? What about 1000 lines? 2000? If you drop that much time and effort into a cool AJAX app, are your worried about how easy it is to get a copy of the code with just a right-click?

I think it depends on many things: Your familarity with Flash (ActionScript) or AJAX (PHP/ Ruby/Perl…, CSS, XML, and JavaScript) and your time. Play to your strengths so to say. The obvious answer, I know, but I also think that AJAX, in its present form, can only take you so far. That might not be the case in a few years, but currently, for a complated app, like the one on SpreadShirt Flash seems like the best option. Couple that with the on-going issues with standards compatibility on the world’s most popular browser: Internet Explorer, and if you are going for a complicated web app targeted to everyone, Flash seems like the clear choice. For everything below those tough standards, things like Backpack, Google Maps and Yahoo! Mail (in beta), AJAX seems to be working fine. Hopefully in the future, they will become competing methods where a developer can use one or the other at anytime, like PHP and ASP. For now, it looks as though one must be able to learn both and adapt to the project at hand.

A web design firm called Liquid Light threw together a little game they call: “The Right Mix Cocktail mixing game” Its a fun little flash game where your job is to mix the right cocktail. You have to do it all, pour the right amount of liquids, add ice or lemon and shake it the right amount. The main problem is that to “win” the game you must go about making the best Cosmopolitan. Not exactly my drink of choice, but they made this as an invite to a company party for a client, so that must have had something to do with that limitation.

Link: The Right Mix Cocktail mixing game

Everyday at Download Squad they have a little something called “Today’s Time Waster.” Ususally this is some odd flash game I look at for a second and then go back to my usual time waster, kicking small animals and children. However, today’s selection, Grow Cube is pretty entertaining.

You are shown a blank cube to which you add differnt items (they are preselected and displayed around the screen) to the cube. Each addition causes the whole cube-verse to grow. The goal is to get every object to grow to its max potential.

Grow Cube can be a bit tricky, which is why I cheated. If you are fed up and want the answer, its posted after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »