Hana & Sarah’s blog

Now that I have converted my old video files into Flash Video files, what do I need to do to add them in my website? I wondered.

The answer: You will need to have the Flash swf component that will play your FLV video files which will be embeded in your web page. And install or save it in your website. And add addtional javascript or embed elements in your webpage. See Wikipedia page for more information.

So I spent some time googling and tried to find free or open source (So I can probably improve it after I learn Flash ) FLV flash player. In this Wikipedia Flash Video page, there are several players listed.

• Web-Anatomy FLV Player : for Web, but Free only for Non-Commercial
• Applian FLV Player : This is Desktop FLV player which we don’t need
• Martijn DeVisser’s FLV Player : Also desktop player
• Sonettic Cinema FLV Player : It has a free version . Doesn’t say anything about non-commercial , so I guess I can use it, but it says something about the latest Flash Player is required to play it. Hmm.
• Wimpy Desktop FLV Player : Desktop player
• Flowplayer embeddable video player : This is for web.
• OS FLV - the Open Source, embeddable FLV player : This is for web, too
• Moyea Desktop Flash Player : Desktop Player
• nFLV Player - Able to play unrewindable/unforwardable .flv videos : Desktop player
• SWF & FLV Player (Mac OS-X) : Desktop for Mac OS-X

Also another player , JW Media Player is well-known but it is also free only for non-commercial. According to the website, you should buy commercial liscence if you have ads in your website such as Adsense or display banners. So basically this is not a solution for me at least.

And I do not like such limitation. Free for all cases is what I would really want. So I choose FlowPlayer and OS FLV as they are under GPL licenses.
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I have been searching for some good free video format converters for a while. I have actually installed and tried in my desktop PC. The results were astonishing! Some of them do work better than the commercial ones.

Most of them are based on the FFmpeg LGPL software and other open source utilities. FFmpeg is a great piece of software, but it contains only console commands and does not come with any fancy Graphical User Interfaces (GUI). Basically these freewares that I will initroduce act as a the front GUI for FFmpeg. So FFmpeg is not for a casual innocent PC user.

I tried several freewares. Some are worthless to mention and some are very nice. There are the three finalists.

• MediaCoder
• Any Video Converter
• Super

MediaCoder

This is probaly the most powerful video format converter with the every options that you will ever need.
You can drag and drop the source files just like Any Video Converter. And you can play around with the option contol in the lower pane. Note that it shows nice little summery of the output file format and expected size if you click on the ‘Summery’ tab. When you’re done with changing the options, you click on the ‘Start’ Button to execute the conversion. The output file will be created in the same folder where the original source file is located by default.

Here is the description from the website.

MediaCoder is a free universal batch media transcoder, which nicely integrates most popular audio/video codecs and tools into an all-in-one solution. With a flexible and extendable architecture, new codecs and tools are added in constantly as well as supports for new devices. MediaCoder intends to be the swiss army knife for media transcoding in all time and at this moment, it already has millions of users from 170+ countries all over the planet.

And Here are the supported formats ( * supported as input only)

MP3, Vorbis, AAC, AAC+, AAC+v2, MusePack, Speex, AMR, WMA, RealAudio, mp3PRO*
FLAC, WavPack, Monkey’s Audio, OptimFrog, AAC Lossless, TTA, WAV/PCM, Waveform
H.264, XviD, DivX, MPEG 1/2/4, Theora, Flash Video, Dirac, 3ivx*, RealVideo*, Windows Media Video
AVI, MPEG/VOB, Matroska, MP4, PMP, RealMedia*, ASF, Quicktime*, OGM*
CD, DVD, VCD, SVCD, CUESheet*, HTTP*, FTP*, RTSP*, UDP*

When I tried to convert wmv to avi, it did work fine. But when I tried wmv to flv conversion. ffmpeg.exe has crashed and MediaCoder did not respond properly so I had to close it.

• Interface: 7 of 10
• Easy to use: 5 of 10
• Available functions/options: 10 of 10
• Stability: 6 of 10
• To Flv conversion: Didn’t work
• Final Verdict: It’s OK if you want to control all the details of the output video.

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Few years ago, I was looking for some free streaming video service solutions for my website, but couldn’t find any. There was Media Streaming Server from Microsoft, but I am using LINUX. Eventually I gave up searching that I lost interest.

But now that many movie sharing web sites are using Flash Video ( files extension .flv) I decided to take some time to learn how to embed streaming video to a website using Freewares.

Flash Video is a technology that supports streaming video naturally using Adobe Flash Player. You do not need to buy that expensive streaming media server for this. Users do require to install Adobe Flash Player in their computer in order to view this Flash videos. But most of the casual users already have the Flash installed so don’t worry. You can learn all about the Flash Video technology at Flash Video Wikipedia.

Note that if you are looking for an easy solution, you should think about utilizing sharing services such as YouTube. It’s a great service that you can upload regular movie files - such as .avi, .wmv - and it will be automatically converted to flash video. Once you upload your movie, you will get little html <embed> code snippets that you can insert to your web page.
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Whew~!
I just upgraded my old (don’t even know what the old version was) Wordpress to the latest 2.5.1 because somebody hacked into my site and added bunch of hyper links in my latest post. And it was very clever that the hyperlinks are not shown in the browser since the position of the div is out of screen. But probably search engines will see the links and increase the pagerank or simliar action could have been done I guess.

Anyway, the migration was very easy except that I had to redefine the tag keywords from the old UTW (Ultimate Tag Warrior 3) to the Wordpress.

I guess my blog was attacked by this admin-ajax.php vulnerability. They say that a hacker can run the SQL query through admin-ajax.php.

Here are some of the blogs explaining the vulnerability.

• Justaddwater.dk hacked
• Wordpress 2.5 and Security

Shortcuts are good to know if you use computers a lot. Especially they help to reduce the mouse movement which is very important if you suffer from the Capal Tunnel Syndrom.

I just read this article from Lifehacker and I found these shortcut really great! I never knew that there are shortcuts for these kind of everyday tasks. I love these shortcuts.

• Win+R: shows Run dialog
• Win+D: toggles Show Desktop
• Win+E: starts Windows Explorer
• Win+L: locks computer

If you use Firefox , below shortcut are useful too.

• Ctrl + L : brings focus to the location bar.
• Ctrl + K : brings focus to the search bar.

LifeHacker: Make Windows More Productive Without Installing a Thing