LeBlog - video

A deconstruction reconstruction

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 14:21:00 -0500

One of my recent projects involved work for the ReStore, a place in Springfield where people can buy recycled home improvements like toilets, lighting, flooring and loads more... The job was to re-vamp their page that speaks to their "deconstruction" services whereby they will come to your house and take it apart in a thoughtful way so that they can resell all the bits. There is a cool time lapse video that you can watch that shows the process. I applied my magic first by turning them on to the FlowPlayer so that they could deliver their videos independent of YouTube. Then I built this cool playlist for them so that you can scroll through all the clips with some nice jQuery work. Things got a bit more complex when I added an "accordian" interface for their FAQs. I had to use Adobe's Spry library to get an accordian to work on the same page as my scrolly playlist, but I think the result is a clean page that packs a lot of info into the fixed-width design that they already had. I processed all the videos used, encoding them into the FLV format from MOV and I prepared some slideshows using iPhoto and iMovie. My biggest coup was compressing the feature video which was almost 1GB in its raw format, down to a 14MB FLV file. That is still a big file when using progressive download, but it still works well. Soon enough I will get to work with a FMS to stream video into the player... I can't wait.

Why You and I

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 09:18:00 -0500

These three letters, Y, U and I... taught me some great lessons. Fonts, Grids and Reset as envisioned by some of the Internet's highest minds. The YUI guys at Yahoo! [More]

Video On the Web

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 12:00:00 -0500

I am seeing that video is an important chunk of what the "new" web is about. I guess it's called Web 2.0 now. Generally, that means more interactivity, more use centric. But I think it also means more bandwidth. I have decided that among all the potential areas of web development to invest some of my R&D time, learning how to deliver video online is going to be a key part of my offerings. I have been working with a really nice video player called FlowPlayer. It is cross browser compatible because it is Flash based. I am learning more and more about converting movies into .FLV (Flash Video) format for use with the player. I find it to be greatly configurable, and with some nice jQuery stuff, I can put together some cool UI for my clients. I am looking to unveil my first professional rollout this week!