YouTube Edu

A bit late to the game, just discovered YouTube’s Edu offering of videos from university partners. They describe it as “videos and channels from our university and college partners”. Without taking the time to dig deeper, I wonder what it means to be a partner and how a college or university gets to be one.

A quick browse through the videos shows big names like MIT, U Penn, Carnegie Mellon, Hofstra, Tulane, and others. I took a peek at an MIT lecture from 2002, apparently a prof’s review lecture before exams. Ever wondered what an MIT lecture on Electricity and Magnetism might look like? Go on, be brave: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=js9SLJ2TU2c

Fortunately there are videos with content other than straight recordings of college lectures, interviews with Noam Chomsky for example.

I’m looking forward to browsing a bit more. First quick impressions: interesting, worth exploring, curious about the value.

Who da thunk?

academic earth – videos from Berkeley, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, Yale

Here’s one to look into: videos of university lectures from the big names at AcademicEarth.org.

Their mission statement:

“giving everyone on earth access to a world class education”

Noble, eh?

convert video podcasts to audio only

Some podcasts come in video format only (like Flash Game University), but my lovely old Nano is not video capable. Sooooo, I’m going to try this out very soon:

http://www.legalandrew.com/2007/03/10/how-to-convert-a-video-podcast-to-audio-only/

Update 11 august 2008:

Looks like the suggested software, MediaCoder, is mainly available for Windows. By “mainly” I mean that you can jump through a dozen hoops to get it working on OS X, but why bother? Instead I’m off to try this out with VMWare and Windows XP, see how it goes…

Media Coder

Yes! This works just as in the instructions from andrew, nice. Only one file refused to be converted, no idea why. But watching one video while sitting at the computer won’t kill me. And I have a bunch of audio that I can listen to on my ipod. Excellent.

extracting audio out of an mp4 movie

This is the next step from the previous exercise, where we converted a dvd into ipod movie format, chapters and all. Great for the other part of we that has a video ipod. Those of us with “only” a nano that doesn’t play video need an audio-only file. So the next step is to get the audio part out of that. (Handbrake unfortunately doesn’t offer an audio only option, at least not that I can tell.)

So we could go back to the dvd probably, but for now I wanted to try to get the audio out of our freshly baked mp4 file. It’s not too difficult after all, and many tools exist out there. A quick test with ffmpegX worked fine, pulling out the audio into several formats (mp4, aac, ac3), taking only minutes each time. (I fumbled with the different formats looking for one that included chapter marking.)

Problem is, those didn’t seem to bring in the chapter marking. Picky picky picky. But chapters would make listening to individual lessons on the dvd much, much easier: there are parts that really are not necessary to hear repeatedly, so skipping around to specific chapters would be nice.

So we got audio. One big hour and a half chunk of it. Next challenge will be to pull out just the audio but this time with chapters. It might be necessary to go back to the dvd for that one… stay tuned. So to speak.

playing dvd movies on video ipod

The short story: Handbrake rocks, just get it (mac, windows, linux or source).

The long story…

We bought a great dvd to learn some more about open tuning guitar at Stefan Grossman’s guitarvideos.com. Thing is, after watching a couple times, we might want to practice without having to get out the dvd and turn on the computer. Not to mention that it’s not the most comfy place to play guitar, sitting in front of the computer.

Among the lucky ones, we have an ipod that plays video. Logical, right, we should be able to play the dvd on the ipod? That would be so much more convenient to listen to or watch than using the computer to play the dvd. Wouldn’t even need to have the visual, really, even just the audio would do.

Well, first things first. The dvd needs to be converted to the proper format for the ipod, mp4 video (the gory details of formats are beyond me). A little googling later, and I downloaded a free, open source application called Handbrake.

It doesn’t get any easier than this. Absolutely user friendly, worked-the-first-time-around satisfaction. Yes! With one page of instructions and screenshots you’re on your way. Handbrake spares you the details of formats and bit rates and all that with many preconfigured output format options, tucked away in a nice drawer of presets. All we had to do was point Handbrake to the dvd in the drive, pick the ipod video preset, go for a nice jog in the woods, and bingo! When we got home we had a freshly converted video ready for play on the ipod (it took about an hour on a Macbook Pro 2.33 GHz Core 2 Duo).

Initially we thought we’d aim for audio only, but after seeing the video we thought, mmmm ok, we’ll keep that! It looks fine, quality is quite good for our needs, and there happens to be enough space on the ipod for the video. Today anyway. (File size was about 500 MB for an hour and a half of video.)

The chapter structure was preserved, so skipping through on the ipod works great. Happy happy happy.

Just for the heck of it, I’ve continued the experiment and am trying to pull out the audio so I can play that on my don’t-need-no-stinking-video nano ipod. But that’s a different story, maybe later…

So why is it called Handbrake anyway? Something about parking on a hill? Switching gears on a slope?

del.icio.us for learning 2.0

A short video on how to use delicious for learning purposes. Unfortunately, the quality of the video embedded in the page is only barely acceptable, due to the small resolution stretched to a bigger size.

The speaker, Kathleen Gilroy of the Otter Group, provides a good introduction to delicious, how it works, and you can use it to share your links and access other people’s links. It includes a quick how-to followed by specific examples of how del.icio.us can help you when researching the web, or working with groups.

Kathleen’s speaking style is a tad stiff, but she gives a very good overview and nice concrete examples.

The video lasts nice and short 8 minutes, definitely worth a quick listen/look.

More video encoding, this time online: Hey!Watch

Robin Goode of MasterNewMedia.org has reviewed an online video encoding service called Hey!Watch.

Some of the strong points listed by Goode: lots of formats, fast, easy-to-use interface, API for building custom apps, encode for multiple devices, etc. The review lists other options at the end as well, making it a useful bookmark to hold on to.

Hey!Watch offers free accounts, though Goode says that the $40 per year cost is well worth the time saved for publishers dealing with video on a day-to-day basis. Unfortunately Hey!Watch don’t offer any information about cost on their site, requiring you to register first before listing a single price tag: bleh.

video to flv or swf converters

These will be tested, just a virtual post-it note for now…
[update: notes added after testing]

Test object: convert 1.79 Megabyte QT .mov file, 40 sec, 320×240, no sound

Results:

Vertical Moon’s Video2swf
easy to use interface
converts to swf with player included
quality seems comparible to original
mac and windows
45 $US

Riva FLV Encoder
simple enough interface
relatively quick conversion
converts to flv (not swf), so have to integrate with flash player manually
quality seems good
windows only
free download

Both tools seem to do the job needed. Given that Video2swf will output both to swf and to flv formats, and is available for both Mac and Windows, the extra cost might be worth it. At 45 $US it’s not all that expensive. If you just need to make flv files from your videos and you’re on Windows, the free Riva FLV Encoder will do the trick.

FAQ for Flash Video

This interactive FAQ helps you figure out how best to encode your videos for Flash:

http://flashvideofaq.com/

Flash video player

http://www.jeroenwijering.com/?item=Flash_Video_Player

Tested this in a word press plug-in and it works well so far. It’s worth checking out how it is to use it alone (as an alternative to the media player component that comes with Flash ide).

Along the same lines…

Convert video to flv format without the pleasure of using Flash (to each his own;)):

http://www.on2.com/consumer/flixstandard

Looked at this product when it was windows only and had a very good impression of it – it’s available for both windows and macintosh now.

And here’s a freebie to test too:
http://rivavx.com/index.php?encoder&L=3 (windows only)