Posts Tagged ‘video’

We love to talk up the dearly-departed VisualHub and its new, open source progeny Transcoder Redux around here. I’ve never seen a way to convert video from one format to another more quickly or easily–whenever you see a video clip anywhere on a Stratepedia-hosted site (or the handful of kucrl.org sites we handle), there’s a good chance VisualHub or Transcoder has touched it at some point.

One thing that’s not a problem for us, but may be a problem for you, is that these applications are Mac-only. Over the weekend I learned about a Windows program with similar features to VisualHub, called FormatFactory. I know absolutely nothing about this software other than that it exists and that it’s free. If you’re a Windows person and need to convert video, check out FormatFactory and let us know what you think by leaving a comment on this post.

A few weeks ago Amber waxed rhapsodic about VisualHub, our go-to choice for quick and easy video conversion on the Mac. In a classic case of really unfortunate timing, between the times she began and finished her post, the software’s developer shut hit doors, effectively discontinuing the product.

All is not lost, however: The developer released his source code to the general public, meaning if you know a little bit about how to compile code on a Mac you can get VisualHub’s open source successor, FilmRedux, up and running on your Mac. It’s actually not very difficult–there’s a nice write-up on the process on WikiHow–but it does require some software for programmers that, more likely than not, isn’t on your computer. The good news is that software’s free as well–it’s just the developer tools that are included on the Mac OS installer DVD (you can also download these tools from Apple’s developers site, but it’s a pretty hefty download).

I just noticed a link to another article on the subject, with links to compiled versions of both FilmRedux and PunyVid (iSquint’s successor). It says they’re for Mac users who don’t have Leopard (OS X 10.5), but you might give them a shot as well if this whole compiling code thing is more than you want to deal with.

Thanks to thriftmac for pointing out this new development.

As a followup to Aaron’s nice introduction yesterday, I want to invite you to join in my love affair with VisualHub.  In my opinion, this software is one of the coolest things to happen to video in a long time.  Professional Developers may also find this software useful for Powerpoint presentations.

VisualHub allows you to convert many popular video formats (think .flv, .mov, Quicktime) into the specific format you need.  Sorry PC users, but as of now this is only available for Macs.  I probably use VisualHub at least once a week to convert a video from Quicktime format into a raw Flash file in order to upload it to our Learning Labs site.  You can take VisualHub for a test drive here and download a free trial version.  The website also contains very reasonable pricing options and an awesome help manual.

I’ll tell you a story about a real life situation where VisualHub came in very handy.

Once upon a time a very nice lady, we’ll call her Patty Graner, came to us with a problem.  Patty needed to insert a few video clips into her Powerpoint slides but the video we had was already in .flv (Flash) format.

So I…

1. Opened VisualHub
2. Dragged my .flv clip into the window
3. Selected MP4 (Quicktime) as my conversion choice
4. Clicked the Start button.

Check out the one-minute video below to see just how simple the whole process is.

VisualHub Demo from Stratepedia on Vimeo.

A few minutes later I had the same video in a format better suited for Powerpoint slides and Patty lived happily ever after.

The End.

*A note from Amber: Ironically, in the hour that it took me to create this post, Techspansion (the creators of VisualHub) have decided to close down their website.  Visualhub.org is still available but I’m not sure how long it will stay up.  I will post more information about the future of VisualHub as soon as possible.

Eric Langhorst was the keynote speaker at MACE and actively contributes to his blog, Speaking of History.   Today he gave a shout out to our buddy Flip! I just love it when my blog entries intertwine.   Langhorst is constantly coming up with new ways to make his lessons interesting for his students while selecting tools that are affordable for the district.

Check out his Flip project here.

Are you, or anyone you know, using video in your professional development?  Tell us about it!

Skype, the popular conferencing application that lets you conference with others for free, has received an overhaul in version 4.0. A beta version was released yesterday. While in the past the interface has focused on making audio calls as easy as possible, this version shifts that focus to video calls.

Unfortunately, the beta is available for Windows only–Mac versions of Skype tend to lag. I’ll fire up my Windows partition sometime today to give this a try myself, but for now, if you use Windows (2000 or XP listed on the site; not sure about Vista support) download the Skype 4.0 Beta and give it a try.

If you’ve never used Skype before you’ll need to create an account–it’s free and painless. Computer-to-computer calls are free (the person you’re calling must also be a Skype user). You can also call to or from traditional telephone numbers through add-on services.

I recently ran into the problem of having people not be able to play a DVD that I had burnt for them. They were using it on their computers and it seemed to be isolated to the PC users and I couldn’t figure out for the life of me what was causing the problems. However, I think I now have a solution!

PROBLEM:
It is my understanding that when a computer company installs a DVD player in their machine, they package a player and set of video encoders/drivers with that machine. This is why the DVD seems to play on some machines and not on others. Different manufacturers use different software to interact with their DVD player and it’s not consistent across the board. Mac computers seem to have this pretty well covered and are able to process a wide range of media with no problems. Also, since it’s one company, they have standard hardware/software installations. If you’re on a PC, it’s kind of hit and miss. The standard Windows Media Player requires that you have a plugin to handle certain burnt DVDs and I believe it costs a small sum to purchase. Or it could be just a problem with older versions of the software, I’m not sure.

So what can you do about this?

SOLUTION:
A very helpful IT person at my office recommended a free, open-source program called VLC Media Player. You can download it at: http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

This program is supposed to be very versatile at playing any number of video formats including DVDs which is great since video is becoming increasingly popular. Although I have not used it on a PC, the MAC version seems to work great and some internet searches reveal it to be a legitimate and popular solution. There are versions for all different types of operating systems, so all of you Linux users out there can enjoy this as well!

If you try this with (or without) any success, please leave a comment and let me know how it works!

Video sites like YouTube and Google Video are great sources of materials for your presentations. But what do you do if you don’t have an Internet connection in the conference room or lecture hall in which you’re presenting? Better safe than sorry–save the video clip to your hard drive so you’re ready to share it, connection or no.

There are several video formats these days, all jockeying for position to be the dominant player in this growing market. Flash video is used by most video sharing sites due to the near-ubiquity of Flash Player. However, Flash video is primarily designed for a web browser and does not lend itself to offline viewing (such as being embedded in a PowerPoint stack). Luckily, converting video from one format to another is increasingly easy these days. TubeTV, a free conversion tool, might be the easiest way to accomplish this. TubeTV can’t grab video from every site–for example, TV-on-demand from Hulu, ABC, and other networks won’t work–but most sites that offer video sharing options work great.

TubeTV requires a Mac with OS X version 10.4 (Tiger) or 10.5 (Leopard). It also requires QuickTime 7.2 or higher (free and probably already on your Mac) and Perian, a free video conversion utility used behind the scenes. If you don’t already have Perian you’ll be prompted to download and install it the first time you start TubeTV.

Download TubeTV to get started, and move it into your Mac’s Applications folder. Open TubeTV–it kind of looks like a web browser because, in part, it is.

Let’s check TubeTV’s preferences to make sure video gets converted to an appropriate format. Open the Preferences window (open the TubeTV menu, then select Preferences) and click Downloading.

For most presentation purposes, iPod format is probably suitable. If you want video to be saved in the highest quality possible choose Apple TV–however, keep in mind that many online video sources aren’t saved in a quality this high, and there’s no way to improve quality once it’s been reduced.

While we’re here, note where your converted files are destined. In my case they’re saving to my Downloads folder, but if you want to change that to a different folder (say, your Desktop) you may change that now.

Close the Preferences window to return to TubeTV’s main page. We’re now ready to grab and convert a clip.

Using your web browser, (I’m using Safari), find a web page with the video clip you want to save. Here’s a good one to start with. Pause the video if it’s already started playing, then go back to TubeTV.

Click the Grab button (shown above; a glove) to load the same web page in TubeTV. Now, click the Download button (black, downward-pointing arrow) to begin the download and conversion process.

Depending on the length of the clip and the speed of your Mac, conversion will take anywhere from a few seconds to several minutes. When it’s finished, check the destination folder you specified earlier to find your new file:

This is a standard MPEG-4 video file, which you should be able to embed directly in a slide or play with a standalone media player like QuickTime or iTunes (I personally prefer using a standalone player so I can easily adjust the video to display at full screen).

What about Windows?

TubeTV is a Mac-only product. However, I’ve read good things about a similar program called Ares Tube, designed for Windows, and VConvert, a Web-based conversion application. If you’ve tried either of these, let us know about your experience with a comment below.

You know that commercial in which a humanitarian in a developing country visits his proud family back home through a high-definition, big screen video conference? Looks pretty slick, right? Everyone should have such a device in his or her home or place of work, right? Well, here’s what they don’t tell you–it’s not cheap (as in, I did a little research and it looks like each unit starts around $15,000) and uses more bandwidth than you and I combined have coming into our homes. Well, nuts.

Low-resolution video conferencing via computers has been around for some time now, but as anyone who took part in our great Marratech experiment a couple of years can tell you, setup is no cakewalk. Even today, I was trying to connect with someone using iChat AV–arguably the most easy-to-use video conferencing tool out there–but vague connection errors kept me from my call. This is frustrating enough as someone who halfway knows what he’s doing–I can only imagine how it feels for someone who’s trying out video conferencing for the first time.

That might be about to change, though. Two companies have announced plans to develop a high-definition video conferencing device that connects to a flat panel TV and allows people to interact over a standard consumer-level Internet connection. Just plug it into your TV and network connection and start talking. There’s still quite a bit we don’t know about this new product, such as price and compatibility with other conferencing devices, but on the surface this could be the magic video conferencing device we’ve been waiting for.