TheGarage Tech Blog

If you Google “Geo Services” the front result page is all about the oilfield industry. In five years, or less, the new retail/consumer model building around the new location based geo fad — Geocaching — will replace the oilfield on the front page. I think Geocahing is here to stay and that it will be bigger than we can imagine. Within five years every consumer phone will have GPS hardware built in and have a geocache app pre-installed.

For the past two out of three weeks, intermingled with all the time wasted on trying to post videos, I’ve been splitting time from the magazine project to work on another project. Usually I don’t do that since I am a one-man show over here at my vast publishing empire and I believe in focus. And I have no one to delegate to. So for the past few weeks I’ve been writing what will be a plugin for Wordpress. Actually, two plugins that are related. One will be free for any Wordpress user and the other will be included as part of a blog membership to a new Wordpress Mu site called Gulf Coast Geocache. A private venture, you could say.

I will be giving more details on the new project in a couple of weeks. Maybe longer, maybe sooner depending on how long it takes me to finish the alpha code. It’s such a good idea I want to have something up and running, even if just a Beta version (what’s good enough for Google is good enough for me,) before I mention what a good idea I think it would be to have something like what I’m building.

The new project is a totally new idea I had a couple of months ago and have turned over and around in my mind and finally got excited about a few weeks ago. Much of the design is finished; it just came spilling out as fast as my pen could write. I love it when that happens. The database structure is created and sitting in a Mu site. I’ve also made significant progress on the programming: The abstract classes to manage the database are finished; stubs for all the methods are finished; the base class is ready to handle the creation of the base object and read and write values to a form; the first part of the admin form is ready to be tested. As soon as I get the form handling done for the first admin section the rest of the sections on the form will be cookie cutter and should go quickly.

To test the form I have to hook into Wordpress as a plugin and see what it looks like. I’ve never done that before so I have to get a handle on a few things — like using all the Wordpress hooks — and probably do some debugging on all the code up to now… but after that it should be steady progress.

I’m hoping in two weeks we will have something to look at.

The longer term project will take much longer, like the magazine, but the infrastructure will be in place and I think it is a totally cool and awesome idea.

I guess I should take a sober look at the final product of the Crappie Fishing video. I know it has some shortcomings. I could keep messing around with it for days and weeks trying to make it better but at some point you have to put up what you have and move on to the next thing, correcting the mistakes as you go.

I do want to start off by saying these videos are not planned video productions. These are videos of some guys going fishing. Same with the duck hunting video from New Year’s eve. It’s several hours of live action clipped together into a 10 minute video. I wouldn’t mind doing some planned productions, but I don’t have that going on right now.

Here are the major problems that I’ll be working on improving in the next video:

First and obviously is the audio. I do have an excuse. Mr. Jimmy knocked on my door out of the blue and asked if I wanted to go kill the crappie. I asked when. He said right now, we got to meet out at the boat ramp right now. Of course. So I grabbed all my gear and jumped in the truck. Except I forgot the wireless mic sitting on the table, which I bought explicitly and specifically for such circumstances.

Second is the encoding. A good bit still to learn with all this codec bullshit. For one thing there are way too many formats. You can tell when the marketing and legal departments are in charge at a tech corporation.

The final 20% of the Crappie Fishing video was shot with a Nikon D90 which records in .avi format. You can’t just throw avi clips into a PowerDirector timeline with the .mpg clips from your camcorder. Oh, you can mix them, but a little warning pops up telling you mixing the formats is not a good idea but PowerDirector will convert the avi video and mash it in with the mpg files anyway.

Needless to say I wasn’t happy about the mash so I SavedAs a new PowerDirector project and took every thing out except for the avi files and burned a compatible — or so I thought — mpg file, which I then used in the Crappie Fishing video. You might have noticed at the change from the camcorder footage to the D90 footage the encoder inserted vertical black bars and the wide angle is scrunched in there. Pathetic. The raw avi file is some excellent 16:9 footage shot with a very nice Nikkor 16-85 wide angle lens attached to the D90 camera body. It has to look good in the final cut or what is the use in having it.

Finally, a lesson I seem to learn over and over again: Be sure to bring all the necessary gear. Had I brought two key pieces of gear neither of the problems I just discussed would have been an issue. As mentioned, I forgot the wireless mic on the table.

The other bit of important kit is my little AC power converter so I can plug the camera in and record continuously with the flip screen open. Without the power adapter you have to record through the eyepiece only or you will drain the battery in about 20 minutes, maybe an hour if you bought the longer-life battery. Even without using the flip screen you must judiciously monitor your juice or it wont make it through the outing.

Other than the audio the recording went smoothly. Even without a tripod and shooting through the eyepiece I had plenty of footage to work with. I really wanted some footage of a crappie actually hitting the bait but without the power converter I couldn’t just let the camera run. Other than that I still need more practice with the editing tools in PowerDirector. After a few more of these 10 minute videos I should be getting pretty good with the software. I need some standard custom intros and transition effects.

Since I don’t have very many videos at the moment and since they are only promoted in my blogs and since I have plenty of storage and bandwidth available on my hosted account, for now, I think I will host my own videos and worry about a 3rd party host when or if I need to.

When I compare the resources I get for about $8 a month from 1and1 to what I would get from, say, Screencast, it’s a no-brainer. Screencast wants $10/mo for 20GB storage and 200GB bandwidth. I get 250GB storage and 2,500GB transfer bandwidth from 1and1 in addition to all the other stuff like 50 MySQL databases, shopping cart, hundreds of email accounts, stats, subdomains, etc, etc. That’s an order of magnitude for 20% less per month. Go figure.

So all I need to do is embed a player with a link to my file stored at 1and1 and I have the same service provided by any other hosting company except for the social crap, and who needs that. I just want to store and serve my videos on my blogs. I get to pick the quality; I get to decide what is fair use; I get to manage the meta data; I retain all rights to all my content; and I don’t have to worry about my video account getting yanked by some moron working for Google.

Right off the bat I know I don’t want to maintain all the embed codes needed for each particular file type/player combo so I went looking around for a Wordpress plugin to automate the embeding. Of course there is at least fifty options available but for now I am going to give Anarchy Media Player a go. The Anarchy plugin converts a simple hyperlink to any supported media file, such as .mov, .mp4, etc, and injects the proper object embed code into the content. It does not get much easier than that. Anarchy also comes in a Wordpress Mu version so to activate the capability for all blogs simply drop the plugin file into the mu-plugins directory and that’s it.

Here is a sneak preview of my first self hosted video UPDATE: moved!

[Final video Re-posted at Gulf Coast Texas Blog]

Since I ain’t too crazy about the .wmv format and anarchy doesn’t seem to want to load a preview image for the .wmv player, I am going to re-encode for flash (.flv).  PowerDirector doesn’t support the flv format so first I have to encode as .wmv and then use a flash converter to make the flash video.  Yeah not much fun, huh?

later…

So, can anyone recommend a good flash converter? I’ve tried Eltima SWF Video Converter and it botched the conversion. Can’t recommend.  The video was playing twice as fast as the audio. I am sure it’s my fault, but too bad. Eltima SWF Converter  doesn’t support mpg or mov and obnoxously watermarks — if you could call that a watermark — the output if you don’t register. You got to give me a better experience with the free version if you want me to buy, or even register.

I also tried Any Video Converter which launches mplayer.exe on startup and immediately starts leaking memory until the program crashes. I did convert one video but I can’t seem to get it to convert to 16:9  format. Again, not a rewarding experience.

Jeez. I would really like to get a new video up some day.

Whew! I thought I was the only one having problems with YouTube’s “Upload Failed: An unknown error occurred.” Evidently, it’s not just me.

Like I always say, the people running these ginormous companies are not any smarter than the average smart guy, they just happen to be in charge. Let’s all watch as Google  destroys YouTube. Idiots.

The most recent candidate in the search for a new video sharing service was Screencast. I had high hopes going in, signing up for a free account almost immediately. The ability to store and serve my unre-compressed video while retaining full ownership of the content (read some of the Terms of Service for other free video hosts if you don’t understand what this means) even had me considering the premium account.

As a quick test I tried to upload the same Winter Tour video that I uploaded to YouTube yesterday. I wanted to see the results of YouTube’s harsh compression next to the alleged untouched file streamed from Screencast. Unfortunately the upload failed without giving me any information as to why. After several days of messing around with what I now consider to be the sleazy world of video hosting, it’s one strike and your out.

There’s got to be a better solution out there that doesn’t cost hundreds of dollars a month.

Since I really want (need?) to get the video from last week published I’ve tried a couple of other things to get the upload to YouTube to work.

I tried the uploader integrated with CyberLink PowerDirector and… no bueno. I re-encoded the video file and tried the uploader again; I re-encoded at a much lower resolution and tried the CyberLink uploader with that; I tried YouTube’s uploader with the freshly encoded file. I simply can not upload a damn thing to YouTube.

It’s a good thing the lo-res file didn’t upload because I would have had to delete it. With my producing skills at the noob level the actual raw imagery in the vid has to be decent or there is no sense in putting them up.

Since there are millions of videos being uploaded to YouTube, I can only conclude that the problem is not with YouTube but lies with the connection or my PC. I am going to try the upload from a different computer but I’m thinking CMA cable is looking like the next likely culprit.

I’ve been looking around at some of the YouTube alternative video hosts because me and YouTube are not getting along. Bottom line, trying to upload a video at YouTube is the pits. You guys at Google have a gajillion dollars; show some pride.

I made two quick videos this past weekend and one feature (10 minutes on YouTube.) The first two were only 52 seconds and while they were successfully uploaded they both took multiple attempts over several hours to complete. The feature length is DVD quality and comes in at about 500 meg. Since Sunday I’ve tried at least five or six times to upload the video to YouTube and every time it’s like getting spit in the eye. Hey, Google, a freaking progress indicator would be nice so we aren’t sitting around like a dumbass wondering if the upload has crashed, or is the encoding just really, really slow today. Show some pride.

So I started looking around at some of the YouTube alternative video hosts. I signed up for Veoh, started the upload… and after about 2 hrs the upload crashed. At least they have a status bar and you can plainly see your upload has crashed. I downloaded Veoh’s PC-based download helper but I haven’t tried it yet. At least with a download manager you can start the transfer from where it crashed.

I’m not too crazy about Veoh’s TOS. Or any TOS for that matter. It’s best just to not read them because only an idiot would agree to 40 pages of legal mumbo-jumbo just to use a crappy piece of software.

I’ve been to a couple of the other more popular hosts, too, such as Viddler, and Vimeo but haven’t set up an account yet. I’m going to try to upload the video on each service, simple pass or fail test. nothing fancy over hear in TheGarage.

In the meantime my video languishes.

The whole deal makes you feel like you’ve been tricked into tongue-kissing a monkey or something.

Or, uh, DesignFlux

Slagsmålsklubben – Sponsored by destiny from Tomas Nilsson on Vimeo.

I don’t get it, but it’s cool. Maybe the video is about the fact that they can make a video like that.

Even though my lab is a hi-tech secure environment containing the secrets of my vast publishing empire, I offer this rare look into the inner workings of TheGarage:

I was surprised that the Gulf Coast Magazine main page had any page rank since it is brand new and isn’t being updated regularly yet but it had a rank of 3 almost from the beginning. A testament to my brilliance at SEO.

However, I knew if I didn’t start getting some new content posted to the magazine I would start to see some page rank evaporate but I didn’t expect to see it go to zero overnight. But it did.  A testament to my brilliance at SEO.