Tag: video

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Back to the Mac (Pro)

So, my Mac Pro is back in business and as far as I can tell it’s behaving flawlessly. What a shame, it looks like the video card died at the same time I was upgrading my hard drives. That’s a mighty strange coincidence, but so far it looks as if that’s what it was… just a coincidence. The whole fiasco cost me 2 weeks and $260 bucks. Meh.

The new drives are behaving well. I have two 7200rpm 1TB WS Caviar Black drives added to my originala 500GB factory-installed Seagate drive I plan to keep the original 500GB drive as my OS drive, one of the caviars (CAVE1) will have misc files, raw camera files, virtual machines, etc. CAVE2 (the second Caviar drive) will exclusively have video files. Adobe Photoshop uses the Caviars for scratch space.

So far, the machine isn’t performing better, though it’s clear  that certain operations are much faster when I’m able to take advantage of the multiple spindles. Copying from one folder to another on the same drive is slow, while copying to a separate drive is fast.

Now I can finish off the football season, finally, and author the end-of-season DVD’s for the families of all the players. That’s a largish project and while I’m sure my laptop could handle it, it would not be pleasant.

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YouTube’s HTML5 Video Player

Not sure how widespread news this is, but YouTube can be configured to play all videos using t he HTML5 Video support in your browser. All you need to do is go here and click on the join HTML5 trial button.

When you enable this, you’ll notice a few new features in your video playback controls. One of the m ore interesting ones is the ability to accelerate or decelerate video playback. Why don’t you watch this video at 2x speed:

Also, the notes are interesting as I’ve reproduced them here:

Supported Browsers

We support browsers that support both the video tag in HTML5 and either the h.264 video codec or the WebM format (with VP8 codec). These include:

Notes

  • Fullscreen support is partially implemented. Pressing the fullscreen button will expand the player to fill your browser. If your browser supports a fullscreen option, you can then use that to truly fill the screen
  • The HTML5 player has a badge in the control bar. If you don’t see the “HTML5” icon in the control bar, you’ve been directed to the Flash player (due to restrictions listed below)
  • The HTML5 player also has a badge to indicate the video is using the WebM format. If you don’t see the “WebM” icon, the video is encoded using h.264
  • If you want to find videos with WebM formats available, you can use the Advanced Search options to look for them (or just add &webm=1 to any search URL)

Additional Restrictions (we are working on these!)

  • Videos with ads are not supported (they will play in the Flash player)
  • On Firefox and Opera, only videos with WebM transcodes will play in HTML5
  • If you’ve opted in to other testtube experiments, you may not get the HTML5 player (Feather is supported, though)