I've gotta rant a bit on this because I'm using it so much at the moment but CBC's video player on their website is busted..
I'm watching a show called "Dragons' Den" which is the idea that entrepreneurs get to stand up in front of 5 "dragons".. which are just rich people who have done well in the business world. They're all in different areas so in effect they all have different interests in where they may want to invest cash. Of course to those that are giving their pitch they would want the skills that these people have.
Anyways.. good show, interesting and funny at times. They've cut the material well and presented it in an interesting and amusing format.
My issue: the video player constantly hangs on something. The only way to get it going again is to reload the whole page.. which means you have to watch the nag commercial again. The main problem isn't too much that in a way, for somebody who is trying to watch a series of videos it's absolutely infuriating that you can't just skip past this commercial like you can after you've watched it once, but the controls lock up again (disable) and you're stuck pressing your mute button and waiting the 30 seconds or so.
What's happening here? Well, my idea is that it's failing to clear the cache or something that goes and loads the next file. There should be some failover that recognizes the fail or the fact that there is no video loading. Then it should tell the user what is happening. There also is no buffer indicator, when the buffer empties there should be something that says "rebuffering video" or some kind of animation or something. I've said it time and again, with any application make sure the end user knows something is going on and it's not hung up.. cripes.
Also, if you have walked away from the computer for a bit and have paused the video and come back to play it, the connection to FMS has died by now. It does not try to reestablish that connection and then just sits there. You can try to click one of the thumbnails but all you get is another commercial and then the above problem. Seek bar usually doesn't work at this point either, time doesn't' register etc.. Not on par from what I expect from CBC.
Good thing about it all is that I'm quite sure they are using FMS to stream these files out. Saw it in a packet sniffer but my first clue of course was that you can seek to any point. Good job there, obviously they don't want people downloading the FLV files and then sticking them online without the commercials. When it works it works well.
If you work at CBC and happen for some reason to be reading this, fix the player please. It's not nearly as polished as it should be and provides a bad end user experience usually after about 2 videos and commercials. Practice best practices, if you are going to do a job, do it right and do it fully from the beginning and test thoroughly before release!
Ok.. off my soapbox.
Just wanted to post a link to Vivek's blog entry on his recent discoveries on using the JScrCap screen capture utility. This has been something that ALL FMS devs have been chomping at the bit about, it's been a VERY frustrating process on how Adobe has kept so much of the really good functionality (and money making for that matter) proprietary. Anyways, check it out.
Just a quick update to a post I made a while back on project management online apps that we're actively searching these apps out and doing research. I'll definitely post back on a review of it all. Thanks again to all that let me know what they know about, your input has been invaluable in my search for the right app.
We've got a new free video tutorial up on FMSGuru.com called "Setting up a timer on the server side to start an event". In this tutorial we cover how to set up a timer on the server side to simulate playing a live event by creating a server side stream to play a video. This could be useful for all kinds of applications that need to do something at a particular time or when something should be triggering it like a particular amount of users etc. The client side is simple and in AS2 as the server side coding is where the focus is at in this tutorial.
Check it out when you have a moment, it's the first tutorial I've done in the Mac OS environment.
For the tutorials on fmsguru.com I've been using Techsmith's Camtasia application within parallels on Windows XP. It's worked fairly well but I've noticed sometimes that the end of the tutorial's audio isn't matched up with the video.. what the heck? and you can't edit that later in the studio making it a little difficult to fix in post without using some other video application. Not something I want to get into.
This off sync issue is generally because Camtasia doesn't have enough resources to manage what's going on. That sucks.. I've got a macbook pro here with 4 gig of ram and 2 cpu's, that's pretty good. I upped parallels config to allow for all kinds of crazy amounts of memory and cpu, but no dice. In fact, if I have too many apps open (4 maybe) it doesn't seem to do much good at all.
Which led me to restart my search for a mac app that does screencasting. I originally didn't bother because I saw that Techsmith was trying to put out a mac version of their software, but the delay is just too long. I feel for them, but have no more time or patience to wait and see what comes out.
The interesting thing is that on their blog they have others that aren't too happy and they've made an effort to point out other apps that are out that do the same or close to the same thing. Great! Good opportunity to go check them out, since I am now in need of something.
The first one that I looked at, which I knew about from a while back, was iShowU. They have a couple of versions, the basic and the pro version. I found the basic version worked rather well and did some what most of the things I needed. No studio to play with messed up parts though. That's the pro version. All in all, quick, easy and produces great quality videos straight out of it that can be played in the latest flash player (h.264 vids).
Next up was ScreenFlow. This app I found very nice at first glance. The UI is nice, works well enough, but from what I expected from such a nice UI, I wasn't getting in functionality. No real editing ability, you drag a video in and you have to also drag in the audio.. weird. It worked reasonably well but was more expensive than even the pro version of iShowU. Quality of the video also seemed a bit lower than iShowU. It also seems geared to adding different kinds of effects, I have no need for those. You also can't seem to select an area to record, it just records the whole screen and you have to edit that later.
The last one was Screenium. While I didn't end up actually trying the software I do think that it probably solves the basic purpose. The one thing that just stopped me wasting anymore time was that it didn't have any ability to edit the videos after other than adding in "hot text". I've no need for that either. I think that if I was going to sell a screencasting piece of software I would provide a high quality video of the demo. The video demo they have up makes my eyes hurt.. it's just too blurry. I hope that isn't the output it always has. The guy that mentioned it though says it's pretty good though, so I thought I'd post up here.
Hopefully this short review has been helpful to some. If you know of any others then please let me know.
First time ever encountering such a nasty client so I'm quite curious... what do you do when a client rips you off? It's not quite that easy of course, this particular client is in Florida and we're on the west coast of Canada. Not exactly close to each other.. in fact it's just about the farthest you can get on this continent, nor the same country.
This is the first time I've come across a client who has decided that paying their final invoice isn't worth their time and is blatantly not paying, not answering phones and not responding to emails. They're almost 4 months behind now and I think that if they were somewhere near me, I'd have a police officer knocking on the door instead of me. But alas.. they know it and I know it, they're far away.
What do people do in situations like this? Eat the loss? Find some way to legally get to them? Warn others so that they too don't get ripped off?
You may be wondering how the client got to a point where they received a product or service without pay. Well.. they did pay their first few invoices, the thing is that this is the final invoice, the work is complete now and it worked out that there was some extra stuff done (fully agreed on) that required extra cost. No problems supposedly until it came time to pay. We reach 3 months and he says "the check is in the mail". I laughed on the phone and said "really?" Which got him off on a tirade..
That check never arrived.
Since then, radio silence except for one email that promised payment but of course nothing has shown up.
I'm a bit at a loss. No pun intended, but I'm getting the idea that if a client rips you off and they're in a different country, there's not going to be a heck of a lot you can do. The FMS community is pretty small though, he may go elsewhere to get some work done. If anybody who is doing FMS stuff wants a heads up on who this client is then let me know. Not sure if it's worth posting who they are publicly, I don't care much for public bashing, looks cheap. But the last thing I want to also see is somebody else get taken for their services with no payment.. bleh.
This amused me so much that I just have to post it up. A movie trailer for office 2010... quite well done for something that doesn't exist.
This is nice to see finally, some good material on deploying FMIS on a large scale. There's always been the issue out there that the edge-origin configuration of FMS is just a tad too expensive for most. Some have gone ahead and built their own framework for the failover and clustering of FMS and it's gone well. So it looks like Adobe has finally seen perhaps that edge-origin sales aren't quite there? and gone ahead and put out an article on how to do your own failover/clustering system in FMS with code, not software.
Good on them. Too bad the PDF won't download for me... not sure what's up with that, I'll try again tomorrow or something. Go check it out here though in case it works for you.
What I will say worked for me and has great documentation is the other piece they just put out, LiveStreamCast. This is sample code and docs to support it (I read them over, they're quite good) in making said failover application with an origin, intermediate and edge node system. All on FMIS. You don't need to buy the edge-origin configuration. Nice.
Check that out on the FMS tools page.
That title may be a bit odd to understand so here's what I want to do. I've searched for quite some time but there just isn't anything that is either working or is documented that I can find..
I need to use Coldfusion to allow members to download zip files. Now, I don't want the location showing up or the ZIP file link can just be distributed freely without login. Either that or how do I protect a directory from any download? But really what I want to do is allow members to click on a link and download a ZIP file, but I don't want the location of the file on the web server to be known.
Anybody that can help with this?
I'll post when/if I find an answer too, I just can't get the right search query? or something to get the information I need. I know it's possible with PHP, lots of results turn up for that, but nothing for CF.
Hulu streams live the Michael Jackson memorial. So long King of Pop. While there were some issues over the years I definitely have a lot of respect for him as an entertainer that gave everything he had to his dreams.
**edited to remove the SWF of the live event**
So long dude, you rocked a lot of people's worlds.
Here is something that I thought rather interesting, the ability to game from your computer without installing anything but the flash player and a web browser.
Another link to a blog entry on it
Very interesting but I find myself wondering how on earth they are going to make it run for thousands or even hundreds of thousands of users. Those are big streams coming out of their servers and the computing power required to run the game as it is with just maybe even 5 users must be pretty high.. I know my computer used to run hard on some shooters with the graphics turned up high. I don't play much at all anymore but I'd be willing to give this service a try if given the chance. Seems like a good idea. No installing on your computer, and a wide variety of games to play. Even photoshop in that demo!
All running in the flash player.. makes you wonder how the flash gaming community will get along with that because you just can't make flash games that can even come close to competing with "real games". I wonder if/when they release a production version of this if it will have an impact on game creators for flash. Will be interesting to follow.