For GoDjango I like to use HTML5 video playback for all the screencasts, but unfortunately there isn’t a good standard video type for playback. Generally MP4 (h.264) works fine for mobile devices, chrome, safari, and IE. However, for Firefox, my browser of choice, you need to have either Webm or Ogg Vorbis. I ended up choosing Webm and it bit me in the butt until I figured out the mimetypes weren’t set correctly since webm is a fairly new file format compared to others.

Solution

Make sure your mime types are correct.

Amazon S3

If your files are hosted on Amazon S3 your webm files are probably set to octet/stream. Here are the steps to change them to video/webm

1. Log into your AWS Management Console for S3
2. Choose the bucket your video is in
3. Right Click on the video and click properties
4. In the area that opens at the bottom of the page select the Metadata tab
5. For the Content-Type key click on the value text box next to it
6. Type in “video/webm” without quotes
7. Then hit save at the bottom

Apache

Lets say you are hosting the video files on your own server, but they still are working. Chances are the mimetype is still wrong and we just need to add them. If you are using apache then either add a .htaccess file or edit the current one with the following:

AddType video/webm .webm

IIS

1. Open IIS Manager and navigate tot he level you want to manage
2. In Features View, double click MIME Types
3. In the Actions pain click Add
4. In the Add MIME Type dialog box, add .webm
5. In the MIME Type text box add: video/webm
6. Click Ok

Hopefully that helps some of you out there who are facing the same issue I did. If you find any other solutions please let me know.

Recently I was compelled to learn python since it seemed like a lot of different forces were driving me to do so. After learning the syntax basics I figured I would take the next step to start learning Django since it is the predominant web framework for python, and I am a web developer.

One of the things that I found particularly disheartening is the severe lack of video tutorials available on the web. I am a huge fan of videos because I learn best visually, almost to a fault. There are a few scattered around here and there, but most are out of date. The fortunate things is Django has some of the best documentation for a project I have ever seen, but at the end of the day it is documentation and sometimes some dots don’t connect well in them.

I make the point about video tutorials because, I guess, I was spoiled in the .NET and the Ruby world where there are videos everywhere. Someone is always doing a new one. Take RailsCasts for example, it has been going strong for a long time now. I feel Django can really benefit from some kind of video tutorials as well.

Therefore I have decided to start GoDjango.com. It is a fun project, partly, because I coded the base site using Django and launched it to Heroku. I then recorded the first video and posted it all in about 30′ish hours. I plan to release a new video every week, maybe two, which is short and sweet doing something with Django or surrounding technologies.

Most of the videos are going to be 5 to 15 minute videos which are there to show you how to do 1 thing really quick to get started. I also plan to follow up with more comprehensive videos that cover in a lot of detail and are upwards of an hour long, those will be premium, but very affordable.

With that please visit GoDjango.com and watch the first video. If you feel so inclined, as well, feel free to comment here or there and leave advice suggestions or comments. Also if you would like to help improve the site by hacking on it. I have OSS’d the GoDjango site on Github

These are the slides and video from my presentation at Tulsa TechFest 2010. The talk is a walkthrough of Ruby on Rails. From install to working application. Please leave feedback on your thoughts.

Slides

Video

Project Files Downloads

Ruby On Rails Tulsa TechFest 2010 Presentation Code – Unedited or Added to

As many of you may know from my last post, yeah a long time ago, I like anime a lot.  One thing that was always interesting to me was how fansubbers did subtitles.  Well the other day I actually spent about 20 or 30 minutes and figured out how to do basic subtitles.

What I learned was softsubs. Basically an external file (*.srt) that you add your subtitles to and load them up when you play the raw video with no subtitles.  The site I learned off of was from a post on afterdawn website.  They are a great resource when it comes to audio video stuff. Anyway the directions are fairly simple.

1) Get video file.
2) Create a new textfile in that folder. I prefer to call it the video name with srt at the end. so (videoname.srt)
3) Add special codes and text
4) watch video and load the srt file.

Step 3 is what is the most difficult and it really isn't difficult at all. To do it all you need is the start frame and end frame of when you want the text to appear.  Followed by the text.

{1}{200}Hello World How are you Today

That would display "Hello World How are you Today" from frame 1 to 200 then stop displaying it.  You can also change colors and do bold, italic, and underline.

{201}{300}{y:i}I'm Italic
{301}{400}{y:b}I'm bold
{401}{500}{y:u}I'm underlined

You can also do colors too. So something like:

{501}{600}{c:$333333}I'm A different color.

Finally you can even do different fonts too.

{601}{700}{f:Arial}I'm A different font.

So if you wanted to copy paste into a text file all of the above to test it. It would look something like:

{1}{200}Hello World How are you Today
{201}{300}{y:i}I'm Italic
{301}{400}{y:b}I'm bold
{401}{500}{y:u}I'm underlined
{501}{600}{c:$333333}I'm A different color.
{601}{700}{f:Arial}I'm A different font.
{701}{800}{y:i}{c:$333333}I'm several combined into 1

After you have that done you are ready to view them. I personally use windows media player classic and the best way to use them, once the video is loaded, is:

File->load subtitles->(Browse to subtitles and open)

Here are some pictures

If you have wanted to do basic Subtitles this gives you a good start. 
I am going to look up how to do embeded subtitles next and will post on
that, hopefully soon.