Blodget’s Blog

I’m insert code to play the movie from my DreamHost site insead of Blip.tv.

I just used ftp to upload the QT movie to a folder on my website (on DreamHost). I then used the DreamHost control panel to convert the file. You just type in the folder and file name, set size and quality settings, and click the convert button. The conversion to flv is quick (only a couple of minutes). Along with the flv file (it uses H.264) they also put an html file and a poster jpg file in the folder with the original mov file. You can open the html file in a web editor like Dreamweaver to modify it which I did to add the text on the page.

I like the simple, clean player. Notice that it includes a button in the controller to show the movie full screen. It’s the black square on the right just to the left of the volume control icon. I also like that when the movie finishes playing, the player shows the poster frame again.

The quality of the Flash file is pretty good – much better than their old service. It looks to me to be similar to Blip.tv.

The DreamHost control panel also gives you the option to batch convert a bunch of movies in the same folder. I haven’t tried this yet.

By the way the original QT movie file was 33 Mb and the converted FLV file is 3 Mb.

DreamHost also offers quicktime streaming so you could offer QT versions if you wanted to for iPod or podcasting use.

The best thing about using DreamHost is the control and modification capabilities. You control access to the movies because they are on your own web site. You could password protect your movies folder for instance. Also the player is customizable and is controllable through javascript. For instance, you could tell the player to start at frame number 12345. And you don’t have to use their QT to Flash conversion method. You could use a better tool like the Flash Movie Conversion tool and upload your FLV file to DreamHost.

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This is just a little test movie to see if I can get my old Sony camcorder (which can record in 16:9) to work with iMovie HD. The trick to importing the movie was to set iMovie\’s preferences to NOT automatically letterbox. I compressed this in two steps – first to 1280×70 16:9 and then I compressed that version again to 640×360. This got it down from 272 Mb to 33 Mb.

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