vlog 4.0 [a blog about vogs]

digital interactive video exploration and reflection

Diver is, as the title suggests, an unwiedly acronymn. Got this from the videoblogging list, is a very impressive piece of software that would be ideal for teaching cinema studies. Will send ‘em an email tomorrow to find out more.

apple explanation of the Microsoft ActiveX component

This is straightforward. QuickTime should be enclosed by an object tag that has the classid for the QuickTime ActiveX component. It’s a pain to do but necessary. The QTHTML tool writes this automatically by the way. This page documents this. The code looks something like:

<OBJECT CLASSID=”clsid:02BF25D5-8C17-4B23-BC80-D3488ABDDC6B” WIDTH=”160″HEIGHT=”144″ CODEBASE=”http://www.apple.com/qtactivex/qtplugin.cab”>

<PARAM name=”SRC” VALUE=”sample.mov”>

<PARAM name=”AUTOPLAY” VALUE=”true”>

<PARAM name=”CONTROLLER” VALUE=”false”>

<EMBED SRC=”sample.mov” WIDTH=”160″ HEIGHT=”144″ AUTOPLAY=”true” CONTROLLER=”false” PLUGINSPAGE=”http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/”>

</EMBED>

</OBJECT> The structure is simple. This is compulsory:

<OBJECT CLASSID=”clsid:02BF25D5-8C17-4B23-BC80-D3488ABDDC6B” WIDTH=”160″HEIGHT=”144″ CODEBASE=”http://www.apple.com/qtactivex/qtplugin.cab”>

and then after that you write series of PARAM name=”attribute” VALUE=”value” pairs, always enclosed in their own tag. So for each value you add to the embed tag (controller, autostart, and so on) you must match it with a PARAM Value pair. The PARAM value is the embed tag attribute, for example “controller” and the value is the value given to that in the embed tag, for example “true”.

Hence if I added loop=”palindrome” in my embed tag I would need to write:

<PARAM name=”loop” VALUE=”palindrome”>

qt file formats

For future reference, this is the page at Apple that lists all of the file formats that QuickTime supports. A misunderstood point about QuickTime, it is a media player, where media means media not medium.

teaching, the web, copyright

I’m teaching something that is going to be called Network Media (aka Networked Medias). It is a first year subject that every Media student has to do. Includes basic HTML, blogs, and shortly embedded time based media and DVD design. At the moment everyone is writing a series of web pages for assessment, and I’m being besieged by questions about what images found online can and can’t be used in their work.

The short answer is that without explicit permission none. Which shocks everybody and turns into a litany of if everyone else does it why can’t we. (Yes, I have said what my mother always said, “if they jumped in the lake would you jump in too?”, and yes, it is as ineffectual now as it was then.)

Then I realised, after several days of patient explanation, that there was something very basic that I, and of course most of the students, had overlooked. All of semester one involved basic Photoshop, camera use, composition, and so on. So I sent the following to everybody. It now reads as unnecessarily harsh, though I have a lecture with them in 20 minutes so can deal with that then, but this is what I proposed:

tutorial on how to export from iMovie using 3ivx

Sean has made a QuickTime video tutorial on how to export from iMovie using the 3ivx codec. This exports compliant MPEG4 and is a better codec than Apple’s. The video tutorial is online in Sean’s video blog, you need QuickTime 6 or better to view it.

Correction sent from Sean:

I would like to point out one inaccuracy though. The tutorial can be viewed with QT, Real, or Windows Media, and should be viewable with QT 5 or later (although I haven’t tested with QT 5 in a while.) [received August 27]

Media Studies blog project

This is the informal non pr announcement. We (that is, me) have just set up blogs for every first year Media Studies student. At the moment most of them are linked from the subject blog, and from a couple of weeks ago I thought this was an optimistic start. This is part of the general curriculum review that has been undertaken in Media Studies, and it was decided to provide a blog for every student because:

• students in an applied manner would develop fundamental network literacies
• students would have a writing space that was theirs throughout their undergraduate degree which could then be used as a reflective journal across all their disciplines
• graduates in media studies need to have networked identities
• graduates in media studies have to move beyond old media hierarchies
• writing is a communicative act
• in contemporary media ecologies the distance or distinction between ‘design’ and ‘writing’ no longer exists
• students are expected to become knowledge producers, not consumers

We don’t know if this will work, some students will love their blogs, others will despise them, most I expect to accommodate them and in turn be accommodated by their blogs. Does it matter that some won’t ‘get it’? Perhaps, but numerous students don’t ‘get’ essay writing, or mathematics, or music. On the other hand by using this with essays and portfolio based assessment there are a range of learning styles and knowledge outcomes that I hope will begin to even out the hierarchies that traditional humanities based assessment has privileged.

Tags: hypertext, Network Literacy, teaching

Remember

That if you want to migrate a Movable Type installation from BerkeleyDB to mysql then in the mt.cfg file leave the local file path pointing to the DB installation as is. If you remove or change this before running mt-db2sql.cgi then you’ll just get errors. Leave the configuration pointing to your old database, then run the cgi to move it into mysql.

Why did I do this? Because I wanted to run mt-close.cgi to close old entries in the MelbourneDAC blog which was full of 1700 spam comments. Turns out you can’t run mt-close.cgi (well I couldn’t) until my blog was using mysql. It’s been a slow day blog farmer kind of day.

videoblog pinging

In blog land a ping is the signal that one blog sends to another blog, or to another server, to indicate that a post has been made. A blog may ping a central service to indicate that an update has been posted, or it may ping an individual blog to indicate that one blog post has made a comment about another blog post. So pings have proved extremely useful to help build connections between blogs. Well, Andreas Haugstrup and Jay Dedman via http://www.videoblogging.info, have established a site where you can ping when your videoblog is updated. When you post, ping:
http://www.videoblogging.info/ping
and your videoblog will be recognised within www.videoblogging.info

If you need help working out how to ping from your blog, visit http://www.videoblogging.info for help.

digitally obsessed

Digitally Obsessed is a web site that has a lot of QuickTime resources. If you go to their software page you’ll find things like QuickTime Quick Batch that does batch conversions for you, and QT HTML which generates appropriate embed tags for QuickTime on html pages. This is useful because there are a lot of attributes available and you have to double up on them to accommodate Internet Explorer on PC because of the ActiveX crapola.

massive change

Is a Bruce Mau project. Massive Change is about the relation of design to global change. Two things as I passed by today. Designers seem to have become major sort of, well not guru’s but something like a guru. I’m also thinking of John Thackara and Doors of Perception. The second thing is how Massive Change uses a very simple blog template structure. A series of single points, presented as categories on the left. Each you visit in the manner of a manifesto and there are comments being collected for each point. So it is the manifesto turned into blog dot points so each manifesto item is its own page. Jeremy and I did the same thing for network literacies – design convergence or just bloody obvious?