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Re: [school-discuss] Victoria Australia banning YouTube from schools

On Wed, Mar 14, 2007 at 11:33:24PM -0400, John Mitchell wrote:
> I see the ability to upload video as an incredible way to share in the 
> learning process and as such created a site called MySchoolVideo.net. It 
> uses a commercial script but my hope is to make it available to schools 
> to function just as YouTube. I am still learning how to administer the 
> site but want to make it available to schools for this very purpose. I 
> would appreciate any feedback and would love to collaborate with folks 
> in other areas to give access to the site for uploading.

I've found that FFMPEG (sometimes with a little help from MPlayer's
"mencoder", when I need to adjust the brightness of a dark video), along
with an Open Source Flash animation called "FlowPlayer" has been a great
way for me to post videos of my baby in a way that's easy for family to
get at.  (Apparently not everyone can view the AVIs my digital still camera
makes when it's in movie mode.  Plus, this lets them stream, rather than
download the whole thing.)

I end up with a Flash-based video player on my pages, just like one gets
when they post a YouTube or GoogleVideo video on their web page.  Except
I'm in 100% control, and am hosting the video myself.  And no "Related Videos"
distractions at the end.

  FFMPEG:      http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu/
  MPlayer:     http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/news.html
  FlowPlayer:  http://flowplayer.sourceforge.net/

This looks like a good read, too:

  http://ffaat.pointclark.net/blog/archives/129-Flowplayer-Anti-leeching.html

To start off with, it points out the advantage of this kind of video player:

  "While looking for a reasonably priced free method of hosting my own
  videos, I quickly came to realize that Flash Video (FLV) is the
  coolest kid on the block - and for good reason. According to a few
  different sources on the net, FLV is an excellent choice for providing
  video. It reaches a higher audience percent than any of Windows Media,
  Quicktime or Real, while also having a smaller footprint. This is the
  reason that You Tube and Google Videos both use flash to deliver video
  content on the web."


Here's a little shell script I wrote that I run on the Linux-based webserver
where I store my videos.  I simply upload the AVIs I get off my camera,
and then run "flash_it.sh *.avi" to conver them all into the ".flv" format
that the player uses:

  #!/bin/sh
  
  for i in $*
  do
    echo Converting $i
    F=`basename $i .avi`
    ffmpeg -i $F.avi -acodec mp3 -ar 22050 $F.flv
  done

(I'm using FFmpeg version SVN-r7972 which I admittedly am using a back-port
of, since my server is running Debian Stable (3.1).  The apt/sources.list
line is:  "deb http://debian-multimedia.org/ sarge main")

The FlowPlayer.swf is only 60KB.  I only need the one copy of it on my
website, since I tell it which FLV video to show using "<param>" HTML tags
within the <object>...</object> that embeds the Flash on the page.
Oh, and I have plenty of pages with multiple baby videos.
(I just have them all set to _not_ autoplay -- visitors need to click the
">" play button to start each one manually.)

I even have a PHP function that makes it easy for me to throw a video
on a page.  I just do:

  <? include("../video.php"); ?>

and then later on in the page, right amongst the "<img src=...>" I do for
the still photos, I just do  "<? embed_vid("mvi_xxxx.avi"); ?>"
(I keep the AVIs on my server with the FLVs, and provide download links
to the original AVI format files, for offline viewing.)

The video.php looks like this:

  <? function embed_vid($file)
  {
    $file = str_replace(".avi", "", $file);
    $url = "http://www.MYWEBSITE/subdirectory/$file";; ?>

    <object type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
      data="http://www.MYWEBSITE/FlowPlayer.swf";
      width="320" height="263" id="FlowPlayer">
        <param name="allowScriptAccess" value="sameDomain" />
        <param name="movie" value="http://MYWEBSITE/FlowPlayer.swf"; />
        <param name="quality" value="high" />
        <param name="scale" value="noScale" />
        <param name="wmode" value="transparent" />
        <param name="flashvars" value="config={videoFile: '<?= $url; ?>.flv', autoPlay: false, loop: false, initialScale: 'fit' }" />
    </object><br>
    <a href="<?= $url; ?>.avi"><?= $file; ?>.avi</a><br>
  <? } ?>

Feel free to use this info as you like.  Enjoy! :)

-- 
-bill!
bill@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.newbreedsoftware.com/