A bit over a year ago, Deanna and I rescued this cute little guy. His name is "Munch" which is short for any of Munchkin, Monchichi, and Munchausen.
He's doing great, and as a celebration of the nice autumn weather, he wanted to share some out of doors time with you all on YouTube.
I've encoded the video in Ogg/Theora -- an open source audio/video codec that's natively supported in the upcoming Firefox 3.1, using the dead simple Simple Theora Encoder.
What we really need are plug-ins for Windows Movie Maker and iMovie. That would really really rock. If you know of a better GUI app for Mac or Windows with reasonable options for encoding parameters, please let me know in the comments.
(If you're using a Firefox 3.1 nightly build you should see a yellow box to the right and if you mouse over the bottom of it, you should see some player controls become visible. Click the play button and there you have it. If you're not using a capable browser, consider trying out the latest Firefox/Minefield builds.)
Update: Dave Miller mentions in the comments that there exists a plug-in for QuickTime, available for both Mac and Windows, which will let you export into Theora any video that QuickTime can open. The great thing about this option, as opposed to Simple Theora Encoder, is that you can actually use QuickTime to set encoding options. Dave also notes that iMovie will do what ever QuickTime will do so this should work in iMovie as well. Thanks, Dave!!
Posted by: Dave Miller | November 9, 2008 10:06 PM
Dave, thanks for the tip. That's great. I had no idea. I wonder if it's just as easy with Windows Movie Maker as it is with QuickTime.
Posted by: Asa Dotzler | November 9, 2008 10:18 PM
Dave, where does one get the latest codecs? I can't tell what file I need or how I'd install it if I did find it.
Posted by: Asa Dotzler | November 9, 2008 10:22 PM
I might add (since I see you mentioned iMovie above) that iMovie's Export option does everything QuickTime's will, so that Xiph codec pack will add the Ogg export to iMovie as well.
Posted by: Dave Miller | November 9, 2008 10:39 PM
I read Planet Mozilla using Google Reader, and from it I couldn't access neither the YouTube versio and nor the version.
Posted by: Andrea | November 10, 2008 1:28 AM
Are you guys able to keep him outside year round? I know I couldn't do that here in Boise, too cold and wet in the Winter.
Posted by: Jake Munson | November 10, 2008 8:00 AM
Jake, he's an indoor bunny, full-time. He goes outside with us, supervised, on really nice days. If it's cool outside, we don't take him out.
- A
Posted by: Asa Dotzler | November 10, 2008 10:48 AM
Asa, you need to host the video somewhere that has Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * enabled...
Posted by: Robert O'Callahan | November 10, 2008 5:38 PM
Asa, the suggested suffix for Ogg/Theora videos is ".ogv", since ".ogg" has for a long time been used only for Ogg/Vorbis audio files and some people may have it hardcoded to a music player program. It's not a problem on a web page, but someone may want to download the video and play it offline.
Moreover, IMHO it would be nice to have as a fallback not only "Your browser does not support..." but also a simple link to the video file, since on Linux pretty much any video player can play it.
Posted by: Lino Mastrodomenico | November 11, 2008 5:31 AM
A lot of progress has been made on this since you first posted.
The first time I tried this, it really did not work at all well under Linux. Audio did not work at all and the video was chopy.
Now Linux audio and video work quite well even in 64-bit builds, and starting with the current nightlies, you no longer have to mouseover the area to see the video controls.
Posted by: Bill Gianopoulos | January 20, 2009 6:39 AM
If you have the Xiph codecs installed, there's a "Movie to Ogg" exporter in the Export... options in QuickTime Player. You can go to Movie Properties from the Window menu first, and edit the resolution, then the framerate stuff is in the Options for the Ogg exporter.