7. Week 36

Dear Diary,

Job for today, researching usage and uses of video in social media.
 

  The number of videos viewed on Facebook is up an astounding 1800% this year and is now #3 video site behind YouTube and Hulu. - http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/

Every minute over 20 hours worth of video are uploaded to YouTube:-http://www.viralblog.com

With over 2 Billion views a day YouTube has a massive audience and with the average person spending 15 minutes on the site they are a captive audience:-http://www.viralblog.com

Facebook now contains an app called videobox which allows you to publish videos directly onto your facebook page:-http://www.facebook.com/apps/

Sites like livestream have partnered with social media sites to create a truly interactive experience. You can now tweet and share your live video directyly from livestream and the live broadcast is viewable within the twitter timeline (currently depending on  browser). Livestream also offers a chat section with your video. If a user logs into the chat with a twitter account, the chat message will be tweeted along with the video feed allowing for a truly social experience and allowing the audience to grow.

Quite a lot of video embed sites offer social media buttons on their players, this is a key way of getting your media out there. It is important to make it as easy as possible to share your content. The web is supposed to be a freeflowing experience, any lag in the chain could put people off.

AMENDMENT:-

ok spend much of yesterday( after looking into social video) looking at the livestream api and managed to develop a player which looks similarly to that of the idrop players silverstream have developed. this is important fror the iphone multiplayer iv been developing.

After realising the embed capabilities of twitter I was thinking wether or not facebook would have any connections with livestream. Then i found Livestream had an app within facebook which allows you to embed a channel into facebook pages. this allows users to view your live stream, share it within facebook allowing you to broadcast to you user base.

6. Week 29

Dear Diary,
Wow i have definately neglected you, its has been 20 weeks since my last post and now im past the halfway point of my placement. Part 1 of the uploader has been deployed for use by my collleagues. This allows them to:
- Create Client
- Upload videos
- Generate thumbnails for those videos and/or upload thumbnails
- Generate deployment code
-Videos will play on different OS: Windows, Mac, iPhone and Android.
When i say Android any phone using a version later and including 2.2 will automatically use the flash player used for mac and windows machines. Where iPhone runes from a direct http link to the video.
Blackberry however is a whole new kettle of fish which i have been battling for the past few days now. The encode for the different blackberry devices are quite specific and wont work with http. so the only other option from that side of things is to stream the video via rtsp (Real Time Streaming Protocol). Which i have managed to achieve, and video will play the only issue now being that it cuts out after around 44 seconds. So the encoding of the video doesn't seem to be an issue as it plays fine up to a point. It also plays fine from the phones memory, so this leads me to believe that its a network issue.
I will let you know how i get on with that......
So part one of the system is in use.. I am currently working on part 2 which brings in projects, channels and players. Allowing for easy creation of players using my system.
videos are uploaded to projects, channels are created in projects and you are given the list of videos available to include in those channels. You create the player using the player design flash tool and then pick which channels you want to dedicate to that player and what order you want to display them in.
The real trick will be whether or not i can create a html version of the player to work on non-flash enabled mobiles and I am yet to combine my skinning tool with the flash player created already which is quite a big job.
You will be notified of my progress in due time.

5.Week 9

Dear Diary,

Browser compatibility is the bane of my life.

Working on the upload system atm for SilverstreamTV . Uploading works fine, had a few teething issues as i have stated in previous posts. I am currently working on deploying and developing the system on a live server which is quite a big deal bare in mind 3 months ago i didn't know how to code javascript or php. let alone combine it with as3, html, css and mysql.

So after developing the...upload widgets i am now using their original upload system to create an up to date easier to use and hopefully more aesthetically pleasing uploading and modifying tool.

The past few days i have been working on the database submissions and edit section. The issue came about when trying to upload a new thumbnail. The thumbnail generator takes in the video name via ExternalInterface:

  var flashvariable = window.document.swfid;
   flashvariable.changeText("hello" + orvariablename);
  window.location ="#";

this sends the variable (which would be my video name) to the thumbnail generator which would kick start the widget.

you may think whats the issue....well I'm not using a button in my edit page, i need the thumbnail generator to load when the page loads, so it needs to insert the variable straight away....i thought it was an easy onload function. Well different browsers deal with code differently i don't know the ins an outs of it. But i had to test each browser with different solutions. 

window.onload worked fine in IE, Opera and Navigator.


so we are left with Firefox, Chrome and Safari.....and also you need to get javascript to find out which browser the visitor is using.

if you check for safari before you check for google chrome, it will  for some reason result in an alert saying your using safari (if you enable the alerts) (see below) but this is how i got it to work.

window.onload function cross browser Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Chrome and lets not forget Navigator....


// detect browser and act accordingly
           
            if (navigator.userAgent.indexOf("MSIE") != -1) {
                //alert("You are running Microsoft Internet Explorer.");
                window.onload=chosenFunction; // IE Works
            }else if (navigator.userAgent.indexOf("Firefox") != -1) {
                //alert("You are running FireFox.");
                if (document.addEventListener) // Firefox Works
                {
                document.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", chosenFunction, false); // Call chosenFunction in     Firefox
                }
            }else if (navigator.userAgent.indexOf("Navigator") != -1) {
                //alert("You are running Netscape.");
                window.onload=chosenFunction; // Navigator works
            }else if (navigator.userAgent.indexOf("Opera") != -1 ) {
                //alert("You are running Opera.");
                window.onload=chosenFunction; // Opera Works :)
            }else if (navigator.userAgent.indexOf("Chrome") != -1 ) {
                //alert("You are running Chrome.");
                setTimeout(chosenFunction, 300); // Google Chrome Works:)
            }else if (navigator.userAgent.indexOf("Safari") != -1 ) {
                //alert("You are running Safari."); // Safari Works
                setTimeout(chosenFunction, 500);
            }else {
                alert("You are running some odd-ball browser.");
            }


function chosenFunction(){
 // do stuff
}


So now i have done the "not as easy as it should have been" thumbnail editor... i am now free to continue with the upload system...... wish me luck!

4.Week 7

Dear Diary,

Im sorry I seem to have neglected you. It has been 3 weeks ish since my last post. Progress so far..

All bugs have been fixed on the uploader for Flashpoint2, when ovewriting a video on upload it is no longer saved into the "Large Image" folder. I had a sudden brain wave a couple of days ago. My issue was when the php refered back to the flash to check if it was ok to overight the file. The extension wasnt sent back to the php so it through my verification off. To solve this issue i kept the extension in a session variable solving the issue and finally fixing a problem i have had for weeks. It just goes to show you if you have a problem which you cant solve at the moment, leave it and come back to it with a clear head.

The game i have been working on is nearing its climax, pretty much all the elements are in place. The maze is constructed, almost all the video elements work and the models look....well ok... good enough for a prototype. Take a look:

The only issue with the game i have at the moment is when you go to the scissors or saw in the game a video is supposed to come up and ask you why you need them.....the video comes up, but no sound is present. I have changed the volume, set to awake, asked it to loop to no avail. I like to think its unities problem.

My role in the companie diversified this week. With SkillsCymru coming up (from today through to Saturday) we were in need of some video questions about careers to add to our footage and enable students from further affar to ask questions which would then be answered by industry proffessionals. The clips chosen will become part of the final piece which will be present on the SkillsCymru website.

I was asked on Monday if i wanted to take up the challenge, so i set about researching different colleges in the north of wales, a few of which had not even started term. Long story cut short wit help of work experience attende Emma we managed to get 2 colleges to upload their footage to youtube and send us the links. I am awaiting the result from the team.....

3.Week 4

Dear Diary,

     After this week I would have completed a month at SilverstreamTV. New exciting projects are coming a foot and  Pre-development and exploration is the key.

Almost at the point of completing the upload system for Flashpoint2, a few niks here and there have been causing issues mainly due to the way i coded the system. Last two issues i had left to fix were the saving of an "id" number for the event the video was being uploaded for, the form kept returning a value of "0", after looking through my code it was a simple miss reference on my part calling an element that didnt exist, but unline flash php doesnt seem to give back "null object references" which would have saved me a lot of hassle. Will be the first place i look next time.

My second issue is the image/video flash uploader interacting with php. The uploader was set up to send the filename with full extension to php, I modified the php to section off and check the extension and send the files to seperate folders depending on type. The issue i have been having has been with the overwrite function which does not send the extension so the video is saved straight into the image folder, should be a quick fix though i will have another look into it today.

Now for the exciting developments, I have been asked to explore the world of Unity3D a 3D gaming engine built with the capability to export to multiple platforms from Wii to pc and now even to iPhone.
Unity3D can be coded using Javascript, C# or Boo(Python-inspired syntax) since i have some base knowledge of Javascript thats the route i plan on going.

For ease of use Unity3D is brilliant, there are so many facilities available online for learning how to use it. Unity itself has free tutorials and files for your learning purposes and getting started is quick and easy. Also a very good thing about Unity is the fact that for the base package it is free and you get a 30-day pro trial when you download, so there is no excuse.

2. Week 3 begins

Dear Diary,

     This is the third week at SilverstreamTV , began with the fearful thought of databasing and building flashpoint2. The upload and store facility for SilverstreamTV's videos and thumbnails. First started with a "quick" layout sculpturing of the upload page deciding to go with a purely DIV based design. Later deciding that there is nothing wrong with the straight edge and ease of the solid structure of tables. Would never of combined the two in normal circumstance but if it works and works well "there is no point in over complicating things". So using notepad++ no hint of Dreamweaver here.

Once the main structure was down there was the case of quickly constructing the database using php and MySQL then attaching the form to a php file. yea easy as that...hmm. Had a few issues with the fact i kept forgetting to clear my cache and being a fresher at php and MySQL but once i got past a few teething issues the foundations were down. There was then the case of sorting out the checkboxes so they actually gave back values whether they were ticked or not which was a quick "if null else" statement and the base php was done.

Next Is the javascript and flash connections. The uploader needed to tell the form what the name and format the video was uploaded in. Then the Javascript needed to send that data to the thumbnail creator so it has a source to play ready for the thumbnail screenshots. This is all using "External Interface" which allows you to pass values either way two good resources for finding out how to do this were http://simplistika.com/  and http://blog.deconcept.com/code/externalinterface.html . That is one of the beauties of the internet,  learn useful pieces of code and they post them up online to solve issues other people are having. So far i have successfully got to the stage where the video uploads the thumnail player plays, now i need to send the address of the thumnail to the form ready to save into the database. Which is hopefully just a duplicate of the uploaders system but when is anything that easy....

1. In the Beginning

Dear Diary,

    This week has been a good one, met the team which I will be working with over the next 12 months. A selection of experienced professionals from the world of broadcast and TV. My line manager is Alex Byrd, IT manager and multi-media developer at SilverstreamTV  with experience throughout the media industry.

SilverstreamTV as a company, works on web video both live and recorded supplying intricate video delivery systems for the world wide web. Filming at many events such as 'World Skills UK', 'Home Building and Renovating Show', 'National Home Improvement Show', ' Buisnes Travel Show', 'Shetland round Britain and Ireland Race', 'Subcon 2010' and 'Dorset County Show.

With a lot more people wanting their events recorded and/or streamed live SilverstreamTV have the technology and the know how to deliver. A thriving and dynamic team made up of multi skilled members has allowed the company to grow with the industry.

This placement is the perfect opportunity for me to develop in a variety of skill areas and see how the industry works from the inside.  From recording to production to the coded fabric which holds the back-end together.
My main role is a developer, working on the facilities which will make uploading the content easier.

First task is to create a thumbnail creator, This will be created primarily in flash. The idea is that to prevent the need for the video producers to have to copy a section of video resize and upload individually. Once there video is uploaded, it will play through the player, the user can stop at a point and press a button. The thumbnail and larger image will be created and saved in a database ready to be implemented in the player.

The program is currently using flash and php and will eventually implement the use of databases.