Muller Digital | Web Programming » Multimedia

Post, share, receive, send and download audio files

nick — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 19:21:53 +0000

Soundcloud is a free audio third-party (a.k.a. “not my problem”) service that allows you to post, share, receive, send and download audio files with anyone, anywhere. Also allows you to manage your audio files efficiently and effectively in “the cloud”.

Force YouTube to play HQ (high quality) or HD (high definition) link

nick — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 16:14:49 +0000

Add:&fmt=18 to the end of the YouTube video URL will play the video in HQ (high quality).
Add:&fmt=22 to the end of the YouTube video URL will play the video in HD (high definition).

Regular: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVvx13dpTEA
High Quality: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVvx13dpTEA&fmt=18
High Definition: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVvx13dpTEA&fmt=22

If a video is not available in HQ or HD, then they will not be able to be shown in those formats.

HTML5 – A great progression in markup

nick — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 20:11:47 +0000

Hardly a buzz-word, more the “hail-mary” of markup language progression, HTML5 brings very important tags and standards to the web.
First and foremost, HTML5 solves the question from that last couple of years of what DOCTYPE to use with XHTML.

John Resig (creator of jQuery) has the best write-up on HTML5 link to John Resig site.

HTML5 also brings three new “Flash killer” tags (when I write “Flash killer” I intend that a lot of frivolous reasons people use flash for, will be replaced by these tags, not flash will be gone).

The tag (YouTube demo) will eventually replace Flash Video, and hopefully SilverLight too, because it offers no reliance on Flash and better compatibility with mobile devices of the future. As in it is easier to detect a video format to play based on browser than to have a flash video player mobile device. Also, flash video does have some basic limitation and does sometimes hog more CPU than required to show a video. Especially if you can have a more core level video decompression happening on a machine. One issue that has been popping-up is the age old, what video codec to support. My two cents say, doesn’t really matter, browsers should try to support as many as they can and a clear winner will prevail, hopefully one that doesn’t exist yet. Van Kesteren has a good write-up on the issue, he is a bit biased though.

has less of a struggle, because MP3 is supreme and it would be great to see Soundmanager get an upgrade in using this new tag. This would replace the enormous amount of small flash mp3 players that are scattered about the web.

And

QIK – Awsome new service

nick — Tue, 19 May 2009 15:40:53 +0000

QIK

An amazing video service for your phone. It allows you to post your videos from your phone and they are shown in a flash video player. They also create feeds from your account that can be accessed via RSS, iTunes (coolio) and several other feed services. The videos you post also allow you to add a title and description. If you’re phone offers the service it can also GEO-tag your video.

The most amazing part of this service is… live video streaming from your phone, which is then saved and posted on your feed. Mind you, you have to be on a Telus / Bell network (EVDO), have unlimited data and a blackberry with a video record option. Luckily I fall into all three of those categories. Unfortunately, I have yet to produce a video worth linking. I will, when I do.

This is a great service for the following reasons:

You can create ‘groups’ who attend events; sporting, concerts, speeches, school lectures. Then you would have several feeds from that one event to grab from. In a couple months/years, someone will produce a mashable version of the feed service and have a custom ‘edit’ off all the feeds. In time the feeds will be better quality, worth checking-out.
You can chat on videos. Great for interacting with others on a lecture.
Because it saves the stream in the cloud (their servers), your video will always be saved. (you can set privacy levels of the videos too, before you record).
News reporting, good way to source out incidents that might be covered by multiple qikers. Descriptions will help search, tagging would help more (but isn’t available yet).

Good service, check it out.

Flash Decompilers, turn a swf to fla for Mac OS X

nick — Sat, 15 Jul 2006 18:04:52 +0000

Flash Gordon – The best by far.
Flare – Free, just extracts the actionscript from the swf.
SWF to FLA Converter – Not that great at extracting Actionscript, but good for extracting elements.

Opening Nikon-RAW formats in Photoshop CS2

nick — Tue, 23 May 2006 18:29:56 +0000

Photoshop by default handles a wide variety of file formats. But still there are some formats that require specific plug-ins. Case-in-point, Nikon-Raw formats.

Download the Photoshop plugin to render RAW formats: Click Here

Raw formats are the “digital” negatives for pictures. They retain all raw information that a digital-camera captures. Most off-the-shelf digital cameras convert to the most widely supported image file-format JPEG. But in reality, the picture taken is in RAW format, and then converted into JPEG for viewing purposes.

Additional video players for OS X and Windows

nick — Fri, 03 Mar 2006 17:20:31 +0000

Having trouble opening and playing files in Quicktime? Quicktime doesn’t, by default, support that many codec

There are some very good alternative media players available:
VLC media player
MPlayer

These players support a vast-number of codecs. VLC also has amazing support for dumping streaming video, loading video over LAN and several other high-end networked video operations.