Het Bijstere Spoor

FITC presentation videos are online, including mine. Its the first time I actually watch it. It's a bit creepy to see myself, but I guess it went fine. I couldn't get a mic hooked up at the time, so the audio quality is a bit crappy.

I also notice that I made a bunch of mistakes related to embedding swf's, which I only found out later.

A funny fact: The girl sitting right in the front (and leaves after a while) is now my girlfriend. So we actually have video footage of when we first met :).

I had the best time at FiTC.. Not to rub it in or anything, but if you weren't there.. you missed out.

My presentation didn't go bad ( I hope ). I got a bunch of questions at the end, which people tell me, is a good sign. The only issue is that I was done a little too early, but I guess thats something you learn through experience.. Overall I felt pretty comfortable on the stage, even though I had been awake for more than 30 hours and I suffered from a cold.

The conference itself was just amazing. There was a good balance between technical and creative talks. Although I am definitely a technical person, I didn't really feel like going to the coding talks. To be honest, the creative ones are a lot more inspirational, and are definitely also applicable in my work, such as thinking of different ways to present information to the user.

I'm having a bit of trouble putting my slides online here.. For the people who are interested in more info or code, be sure to drop me a line.

Update: added some of the source code used.

As promised, I'll put up some links from last nights presentation.. If you attended, I hope I got the message across, and if you're hungry for more, be sure to check out fitc, where I will do a 1 hour version of the presentation..

• Flowplayer - FlowPlayer is an open source, skinnable, very powerful flash video player..
• FFMpeg - To my opinion, the best tool out there to convert your video to flv.
  
  Binaries for OS/X are included in FFMpegX, binaries for windows can be found in Riva FLV encoder. Most Linux distributions also have a pre-compiled ffmpeg package..
  
  Remember though! Only use those for testing purposes, if you want support and support for for example WMV3, you really should compile your own..
• SWFUpload - An open source library to leverage Flash 8's multi-file upload from javascript.
• On2 Flix - An expensive, commercially backed FLV encoder.. If using the latest flash video codec is important to you, look at this product.

And there's even a small piece of the presentation recorded....

handling uploads..

Note that these scripts all assume an .mpg extension..

<?php
 
    foreach($_FILES as $file) {
 
        $newFileName = 'uploads/original.mpg'; 
        move_uploaded_file($file['tmp_name'],$newFileName);
 
    }
 
?>

Simple conversion

<?php
 
    $ffmpegPath = '/Applications/ffmpegX.app/Contents/Resources/ffmpeg';
    $input = 'uploads/original.mpg';
    $output = 'uploads/converted.flv';
    $result = `$ffmpegPath -y -i $input -ar 44100 $output 2> /tmp/ffmpeg_log`;
 
?>

Slightly more advanced..

Adjusts the bitrate, height and width, and also generates a thumbnail.

<?php
 
    $ffmpegPath = '/Applications/ffmpegX.app/Contents/Resources/ffmpeg';
    $input = 'uploads/original.mpg';
    $output = 'uploads/converted.flv';
 
    $output = 'uploads/thumb.jpg';
    $result = `$ffmpegPath -y -i $input -an -s 320x240  -f mjpeg -ss 0:2:0 -t 0:0:0.001 $output 2> /tmp/ffmpeg_log`;
 
    $output = 'uploads/converted.flv';
    $result = `$ffmpegPath -y -i $input -ar 44100 -b 320 -s 320x240 -ab 128 -acodec mp3 $output 2> /tmp/ffmpeg_log`;
 
?>

I'll be speaking at toronto's flash user-group next gathering.

It's a bit scary, as this is my first presentation.. I'll be doing a short version (20 minutes) of my presentation at FiTC about uploading, converting and distributing video using open-source components.

So, if you are in Toronto next Wednesday and you can't wait to see me screw up in front of an audience, or if you're just interested in the cheap beer, make sure your at the Resistor Gallery at Collage and Spadina. It's a little hard to find from the street, but if I recall correctly it's right next to a paint store.

It's confirmed! I get to speak at flash in the can 2007. This is great news for me, as I wanted to speak at tech conferences for a while now.. but finally I got in.

Flash in the can is a flash conference held in toronto for a few years now and it is one of the most important conferences in North America. It is actually the first tech conference I attended.

Irony is that I'm not that much into flash.. Much of my work is related to opensource and standards-based development, but in this area you can have a religion about technology, but in practice you have to set that aside for realism and pick the right tool for the job.

Currently flash is simply the number one way to bring video content to the browser in both user adoption and usability. I kind of rolled into the video thing by accident, because one of my earlier clients requested a user generated video application.. That ball kind of kept on rolling and developing video-enabled web applications has been my main role ever since.

The title of my presentation is Flash Video Lifecycle: From User To Delivery. I will be covering uploading using flash, handling uploads using php, converting with FFMpeg and delivering video using Flash.

I'm very excited, and hopefully I will be able to jumpstart and inspire the people who are into this sort of thing, but don't know where to start. If your there, be sure to say hi!