Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen | solitude.dk

I have just updated the Embed QuickTime plugin that allows you to post QuickTime easily to webpages. The biggest change is that the plugin now comes with 'share' code giving your visitors Copy & Paste code for posting your videos to their own sites. Yes, like YouTube without the ugly Flash. Additionally the Metadata plugin is now included in the download and you no longer have to download it separately to start using the advanced settings.

The Drupal 6 module and the Wordpress plugin have been updated in the same go.

To celebrate I give you a birdie you can share:

Today I received an e-mail from a user of the Embed QuickTime plugin who was having problems embedding video streams from his Second Life music performances on his blog. Specifically, his stream was opening in the stand-alone QuickTime Player rather than being embedded. It turns out you can't directly embed a video stream. The solution was to create a reference movie pointing to the streaming video and embed the reference movie on the site.

A step by step guide:

1. Open QuickTime Player
2. Open video stream: Enter the rtsp:// URL and open it. Your stream should start playing in the QuickTime Player.
3. Go to "Save as…"
4. Do not save as a self-contained movie, but save as a reference movie. Be sure to name your file with a ".mov" extension and not the default ".sdp".
5. Upload the new file to your webserver.
6. Embed the new .mov using the Drupal module, Wordpress plugin or using the stand-alone code generator.

The result will be a thumbnail on your website that flips into an embedded QuickTime playing the streaming video when clicked.

After making my Embed QuickTime jQuery plugin into a Drupal module I've continued and translated it into a Wordpress plugin. As the Drupal module it has these features:

• Inserts the jQuery files and the required javascript code on pages automatically.
• Inserts a code generator on the Write page. The code generator makes code you can copy and paste into the editor's "Code" view.

Go ahead and download the plugin. Install it by unzipping the file and uploading the folder to your wp-content/plugins folder. Activate it on the Plugins page and you should now see the code generator when you go to write a blogpost. The plugin has only been tested with Wordpress 2.3.1 and the default theme.

David Wolf has made his MA Exegesis—Vidgets: The Development and Use of Interactive, Network Based Video Works—available online and it's worth a read. The paper deals with these questions:

• How can new audio-visual works (vidgets) be created to explore and utilise the capacity for real time interactivity and network awareness found in everyday computer technology?
• What can we learn by looking at the use of real time interactivity and network/environmental awareness in the histories of media and art practice and how can these this inform the development of new works?
• What happens when video media art works shift from being fixed and self contained ‘objects’ to dynamic, distributed systems inviting user interaction and performance?

David has been working with interactive works using QuickTime for years using both LiveStage Pro and Quartz Composer. This is an excellent overview, be sure not to miss the appendix containing a complete list of his works.

I have translated my jQuery plugin for embedding QuickTime movies on webpages into a Drupal module. It has the following features:

• Inserts the jQuery files and the required javascript code on pages automatically on all node pages.
• Inserts a code generator on add node forms (for enabled node types) that allows to send the correctly formatted HTML to the body field automatically. If Javascript is disabled it degrades gracefully and a code example is shown in place of the code generator.

You can download the module — all required files are included and there's no need for you to grab the plugin separately.

The module was written for Drupal 6 using the new Drupal.behaviors object and menu system. It will not work for Drupal 5 and below. It should be straightforward to backport as the module is very small.

Installation notes: Enable the module, edit the content type you wish to enable the code generator for (the setting is under "workflow"). The module has two access permissions: administer embed quicktime (users can enable/disable embed quicktime for node types); embed quicktime moves (users see the code generator on the node add form). Note: Setting the access permissions only affect the code generator. Anyone who can post the correctly formatted HTML will be able to post embedded QuickTime movies.

If you use the Metadata plugin to set options as described on the jQuery plugin page you need to use Full HTML as your input format in Drupal. I used Filtered HTML and it garbled the attributes and the metadata was lost.

The script I have been using the embed videos on this blog is not very flexible and it doesn't work in Internet Explorer. For a while I have been wanting to rewrite it using the excellent jQuery library. Finally I took a couple of hours last week to write it and the result is the Embed QuickTime plugin. From the website:

Embed QuickTime is a jQuery plugin that helps you embed QuickTime movies to play directly on your webpage, instead of redirecting your video to a separate page or forcing you to embed a video using Flash. It changes regular image links to the embedded QuickTime video when they are clicked. It works with .mov, .mp4 and .m4v files.

The problem this solves is similar to the problem solved by vPIP — the script that many videobloggers use. Why did I choose to write my own script instead of using vPIP?

• Leaner source code: The three javascript files vPIP uses clocks in at a combined 117KB. That's way too much just to embed a video. jQuery is actually included in this, but vPIP doesn't take advantage of jQuery (using it only for the thickbox). The Embed QuickTime plugin is 1.5KB plus the 27KB of a packed jQuery and we're down to a much more manageable 29KB. That makes Embed QuickTime 25% of vPIP's size.

• More freedom: Sometimes you need to set some of the more esoteric QuickTime options. vPIP supports very few of these while the Embed QuickTime plugin supports all the options for embedding QuickTime movies. This is something I ran into as I was writing the script. One of my recent videos needed to loop and that's something I would not be able to in vPIP.

• Simpler embed HTML: Related to the point above vPIP's embed HTML contains much fuzz because you are forced to set many options even if you just want the defaults. I want cleaner embed code that I can write from memory if I have to and I really don't want messy inline javascript.

• Faster code generator: I have a video URL and a thumbnail URL. That's all I want to paste in. The Embed Quicktime plugin automatically sets the size of the QuickTime player to the same size as the thumbnail image (unless you tell it otherwise). vPIP's code generator is cumbersome, but it still doesn't give me the options I need. For example it doesn't give me the option to remove the "close" link from the embedded video.

As the name suggests the Embed QuickTime plugin only supports embedding QuickTime movies. For my purposes, it would be trivial to extend it to support multiple formats. At the same time, this would be a good time to consider if you really need all those video formats in the first place. I only post in QuickTime, have never received complaints and I enjoy the freedom the QuickTime format gives me.

Give it a try if you want an easy way to embed QuickTime movies on your webpages. I've set it up on both Blogger and Wordpress in minutes. If you use it let me know what you think.

Networks are noisy, the world is noisy. Loss is one manifestation of this noise. Rather than hide from this, or pretend that isn't there I think the very aesthetic of our work should celebrate noise as the productive expression of difference.

Videoblogs are not digital TV or DVD. Noise is an integral part of the medium, and the sooner people realise that we can free ourselves from statements such as “compression ruined my sunset shot”. Because, honestly, no one gives a shit. Not as eloquently as Adrian Miles above, but same difference.

Pollas asked for some tips on compression a couple of days ago. When I found out Michael Verdi was about to post a new compression tutorial on Freevlog I held out. Michael has taught me everything I know anyway. Michael's tutorial uses 3ivx, but I think you can get similar results using the h.264 codec that is shipped with Quicktime 7. 3ivx has the advantage of being playable in Quicktime 6 — it's up to you to decide what you want.

I uses Michael's settings for 3ivx with some important differences. Freevlog has always reccommended a datarate of 600 kbits/sec (75 KB/sec). The result will be files that clock in at around 4-5 MB/min. This is huge overkill in my opinion. Personally I use 160 kbits/sec (20 KB/sec) — you can still get quite crisp video with 3ivx. These files end up around 1-1.4 MB/min. As Adrian puts it: Any modern codec can make any bit of video look good at 4MB a minute. The real advantage of these new codecs is that you can now compress harder.

Nb. Quicktime changed their interface from version 6 to 7. Quicktime 6 lists the datarate in KB/sec, Quicktime 7 uses kbits/sec.

Unless I have a lot of fast movement in my video I also halve the frame rate. Since my source footage is 24 fps I compress it to 12 fps. If you're shooting in PAL the source is 25 fps so you can halve that to 12.5 fps. Unless you're making a video of a hummingbird in flight no one can tell the difference.

The last difference is that unlike Michael I leave the minimum quality slider in 3ivx at 10% instead of bumping it to 50%. Andrew Baron recommended setting the maximum/minimum sliders to 95%/6% for a dratically smaller file size. I haven't tried this, but it's worth a shot.

Finally Adrian Miles recommends not forcing a keyframe at a set interval. Both 3ivx and h.264 are supposed to handle this automatically for best results. In addition Adrian has put up a comparison of 3ivx and h.264 at low datarates (Quicktime 7 required).

Metadata Hootenanny (via Adrian) is an application that lets you add metadata to Quicktime files easily. It looks really cool, but unfortunately it only works on a Mac. Does anyone know of a similar application for Windows? A Google search returns the piece I wrote on adding metadata in Quicktime Pro. I'm looking for a something a little easier than Quicktime Pro's interface. I'd rather have a lean application than a feature rich one (preferably something in the $15 range). The ideal solution would be Apple improving Quicktime Pro, but failing that I wouldn't mind paying a little bit for a small application that can manage metadata in Quicktime files.

As the trend has been lately this is inspired by Adrian Miles. It is actually six movies playing simultaneously. Three large movies and three identical, but smaller movies. Only one of the large movies is in view at the time. You can click on each of the smaller movies to bring that one to the front. Network congestion means that the smaller movies will not be in synch with their larger counterparts. No big deal.

The movies are not looping. At first this was a choice on my behalf — I like the idea that the viewer becomes the editor and makes the cuts. And once the movie is done playing it's done playing. You will never be able to ‘see it all’. After watching my own movie I don't know if this is too frustrating. Unfortunately my demo version of LiveStage Pro has expired so I am unable to open the project and change the movie to loop.

Without further introduction here is my first interactive Quicktime experiment that I built from scratch. It is a tour of my hometown Aalborg one Danish winter day (yes, the idea for this movie is that old).

You can use this movie as a template!

Like Adrian's Rhizome 1.2 and Rhizome 2 you can download a copy of my template and create your own versions of this movie! First download a copy of the template:

• Download Quicktime Template (solQT.mov)

The next step is to create your three movies. Shoot some footage and compress the hell out of them — remember the viewer has to play six movies at the same time. Bandwidth is a concern here. You should save a large and a small version of each movie. The large version should be 320x240 pixels, the small version should be 80x60 pixels. The small movies should not contain any sound! Otherwise all three soundtracks will play at the same time, confusion will be the result. You should now have six movies (three different movies in two versions each).

Upload these six movies to the web. While you're at it upload the Quicktime template (solQT.mov) as well. The next step is to tell the Quicktime template where to find your six movies. Go to the Totally Amazing XML Generator. There you should create a track list which contains three movie tracks and three video tracks. The movie tracks should be the URLs to your large movies, the video tracks the URLs to your small movies. Do the movies in the same order in both lists. In the end your track list should look something like this:

Click the ‘Create XML Document’ and save the resulting file as solQT.xml. This is important! Make sure that the ‘QT’ is uppercase. Upload this solQT.xml in the same folder as the one you uploaded the template file (solQT.mov) to. And you're all done. All there's left is to call up the template file in your browser (or directly in the Quicktime player) to see if everything worked.

Using the demo version of LiveStage Pro I modified Adrian Miles Rhizome 1.2. I changed it in two ways. First the movie now takes three inputs. Two movies and one audio track. It's a request from Michael Sullivan. I don't know what he's going to do with the audio, but it's there now. Secondly the movie now relies on a different XML format. This format is more extensible, and the brand new automatic XML generator is awesome. You will need to generate a track list of two movie tracks and one audio. Save the XML file as rhizomeSol.xml. As before this XML file needs to be in the same directory as the Quicktime template you download below. Read Adrian's blog entry for more thoughts and instructions.

• Download Rhizome 1.2 Solitude Edition