Video tutorials and articles on podcasting, videocasting, video channels and content management
Revised on June 2015 – JW Player 5.6 (up to version 5.10) is a Flash video/audio player created with Adobe Flex which has the capability to switch to HTML5 fallback mode if a non Flash browser is encountered. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how to install JW Player and how to embed video … Read more
Update 30 July 2022 You want to ensure that everyone, or at least most people can watch your video? Then you have to create a video that works on the web and mobile devices such as iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch and other handheld devices. This is not evident and you may count on it that … Read more
Updated 30 July 2022 Who is Jeroen Wijering, the creator of the industry standard JW player? What is his relationship with Longtail Video Solutions? This trailer to the documentary video from PictureThis.tv gives you an insight into the history of the most famous video player on the web. Many people see this player daily at … Read more
By placing all heavy files on S3 Amazon/CloudFront, you only need a lightweight solution like DreamHost for your site itself. That way you have the best of both worlds. Both services are very cheap and easy to deal with. In the past, I had my doubts regarding DreamHost (affialate link) and indeed, playing video or … Read more
In this part, which is meant for S3 Amazon account holders, we are going to focus on streaming video. Streaming has a lot of advantages, which are explained in S3 Streaming video with CloudFront. One extra perk not discussed in that article is important: when you use HD switching, the HD video picks up where … Read more
In this article, I’ll show you how to switch automatically from a low resolution video to HD video on your site. Standard, the low resolution version will play and when the visitor hits the full screen button, the HD video takes over. HD switching can work on any site, whether it is a WordPress, Joomla, … Read more
When you upload a 800×600 screen capture video tutorial to YouTube, the quality deteriorates so badly that texts in the video are hardly readable. The reason is that YouTube regards everything smaller then HD video as a free license to shrink the video to a resolution of 480 pixels wide. Viewing it full screen doesn’t … Read more
Some video converters do not get it right when converting video to MP4 to stream on S3 Amazon/CloudFront. Especially the cheaper converters like AVS Video Converter for Windows tend to have problems. Luckily, there is a trick to fix this problem. Here you find a video tutorial on how to get the correct settings from … Read more
It is a while ago since I did a test with an HD video on S3 Amazon, so I thought this might be a good moment to go for it again. As we all know, HD video on video services like YouTube, Vimeo and others play reasonably well, although they inevitably stutter at some point. … Read more
Marvelous video commercial for the New Zealand Book Council which showcases the narration and animation of a book called Going West by Maurice Gee. The video is created by Andersen M Studio. This is a stunning piece of work and each aspect of the video is worked out incredibly well. “Where Books Become Alive” indeed. … Read more
Since I write quite a lot about S3 Amazon related issues, we decided to dedicate a special category for it so that you can find everything on this subject in one place. So far, we plugged most of it in Video Channels/Networks which is a bit awkward. Therefore, if you bookmarked some of the articles … Read more
The information on this page is no longer relevant since RTMP streaming requires Flash, which ahs been condemned to death by the developer community. We leave this article in for history sake. To avoid problems with streaming video and audio, in particular private streaming, the way to go is to start with a fresh S3 … Read more
Sometimes, you do not want to show video or audio to everyone. Or you want to show it to everyone, but you do not want third parties to publish your media on their site. S3 Amazon combined with Private Streaming can help you with this. I wrote already an article on this subject, namely S3: … Read more
Private streaming MP3 is problematic on S3 Cloudfront. It often does not play and you get no error message telling you what the problem is. The fastest and best way to deal with this is to convert your audio to M4a, the format used for iTunes. I know, you are not looking forward to this … Read more
Autostart (currently known as autoplay) is an attribute of embedding code to determine if rich media should start to play automatically when a page is loaded. There is a bit of confusion about when to use this feature, so I’ve thrown a couple of scenarios on a heap to explain best practices. When is Autoplay … Read more
TimedText is a convention to place subtitles in videos without actually embed them in the video itself. This has huge advantages over embedded (hardcoded) subtitles because you can use the same video while using different languages, depending where you show it. TimedText can be used in two ways: Closed Captions or Open Captions. Closed … Read more
Creating a custom poster image for video and audio is quite simple. In the video tutorials below I show you how to capture part of the screen and turn it into a poster image. We also add text to the poster image to make it more clear what the video or audio is about, but … Read more
PrettyMay is a call recorder for Skype and in this article we show with video tutorials you how to configure the basic audio settings of PrettyMay and then we do an interview with Skype. First from Skype to landline phone, then from Skype to Skype. You will notice a considerable difference in quality on the … Read more
I was working on a video tutorial to create poster images for video and audio. I was actually planning just to show how to create a screen shot on Windows and then extract the part that is needed. When I suddenly thought, “Let’s find free software to snapshot only the area of the screen I’m … Read more
With CloudFront you can not only stream your own videos, you can make streaming videos private on top of that! In other words, you can have paid videos on your site or membership area without the fear of copying the video. You can do the same thing with expiring URLs but private streaming has other … Read more
With CloudFront, you can stream your own audio and video without using any code or installing complicated server software. CloudFront is an Amazon service which works in conjunction with your S3 Amazon account (S3 AWS). What the service basically did so far was to serve content from your S3 account to the closest server in … Read more
Here you see how you can create expiring URLs to protect your files from leeching and this time we work with CloudBerry Explorer Pro, the competitor of S3 Browser. The Pro version does not differ much from the free version when it comes to creating expiring URLs, although there are a couple of features which … Read more
You want to embed video or audio from S3 Amazon into your site? This article tells you how to deal with the code involved to get your videos and audios up and running. You can use this code in practically any cms or regular website. Now, for content management systems like Joomla, WordPress or Drupal, … Read more
In this article I explain how S3 Amazon works related to video and audio. As I already wrote in my previous article, S3 is primarily a storage facility with little software on board. Luckily, there is some good third party software around that extends the service in a quite spectacular way. But let me first … Read more
A reader asked what I thought of using S3 Amazon Web Services (AWS) for serving videos , so I did some research and found this interesting enough to share with the readers because the servers of Amazon have a couple of interesting possibilities. S3 Amazone is basically a storage space that can be used to … Read more