Validate your FLV Player

As I blogged a while ago about validating flash swf, I thought it might be useful to include this code for validating flash flv player. I think this validates for xhtml strict so should be OK for everything else.

===========================================


<!-- flash --> 
<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
 data="../vid/flvplayer.swf?file=yourclip.flv&#038;autoStart=false
8755581808731033658"
  width="340" height="286"
id="VideoPlayback">
  <param name="movie"   
value="../vid/flvplayer.swf?file=yourclip.flv&#03;autoStart=false
docId=8755581808731033658" />
  <param name="allowScriptAcess"
value="sameDomain" />
  <param name="quality" value="best"/>
  <param name="bgcolor"value="#ffffff" />
  <param name="scale" value="noScale"/>
  <param name="salign" value="lb"/>
  <param name="FlashVars"
value="playerMode=embedded" />
</object> 
<a href="http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/alternates/"
title="get flash plug-in">Flash plug-in required</a>
 <!-- end of flash --> 

===========================================

Thx to Kev for his work on this.

For the main flash validation codes, go here

I love my PHP...

I've been installing quite a few blog/CMS apps recently. Wordpress, Drupal, Movable Type, Flatpress. Also, the Maianscript Blog and a few other little apps like My Gallery and My Little Homepage.

All have lovely things about them, even the little ones, but overall I think Drupal is the best. Of course Wordpress is the most used/has lots of plug ins and lovely themes. But Drupal has fantastic multiuser features and a great interface (and also has lots of lovely themes). I think it's all down to what you want to do, and how much data you want to collect. Movable Type sits mainly in your cgi-bin, weird, but works great. Flatpress is fantastic considering it doesn't need any MySql. The small apps are fine at what they do, easy to implement and fit nicely into existing static sites.

I've also installed a beautiful Maianscript Gallery here (including full Paypal config), and will try out his Mp3 Cart and normal Cart too. Maianscriptworld rocks.

All in all, it's great to have a few apps on the go, and DB's to mess about with again, I feel more complete as a person.

P2P TV - free and legal

Free Sport TV! Follow these simple instructions, and you can watch all kinds of sattelite sports LIVE on your lobely jubbely computer:

Go to www.myp2p.eu, and check out the software page

Download Sopcast, TVAnts and others you may need/want.

Check the schedules for football, or whatever your sport poison is - follow the links and watch - it IS that simple.

Personally I recommend Sopcast. Some folks will get all the software to be sure of getting what they want when they want it. I found p2pmate a little intrusive and 'foreign'...but I like Sopcast, and TVAnts is also very good.

Do this and you will see many English Premier League football matches free and LIVE every Saturday and Sunday. There is also a lot of other sport available, like NBA, American football, F1, etc etc.

ENJOY!

Flash Scrolling Backgrounds

I had to make some ‘eternal’ scrolling backgrounds for Flash Games in the Foundation BSc Multimedia 2^nd years program. I found a great tutorial at the ever wonderful Flashkit, with a moving plane as a bonus. Very nice. The simplest idea, when you understand it, is how the background works. Two backgrounds, both movie clips, (exaclty alike), are placed end to end in a mother movie clip. The first one covers the stage, the second waits to the left, (or right) off stage. Using actionscript, the first moves along, and the second then follows it. At a given point off the stage, the first one then reappears ‘behind’ the second one, as that is now the one in view on the stage. So simple, yet initially hard to grasp when you try to get it without clues.

Vista Sucks Balls

Great video here

http://www.shoutwire.com/viewstory/110197/Vista_Sucks_Balls

More on why Vista misses the mark so widely………XP is a great OS (well, it’s pretty good, all said and done), so why mend what isn’t broken???

Thanks to Sharif for the link.

Gaming - Boring, but Good? Or Bad?

Gaming isn’t that interesting to some of us. I don’t like it myself. I used to play a few games, several years ago. I played F1, Eradicator, some sort of cross country race game, a motocross game, even a Flash golf game (can you believe that?). I’ve played Doom and Lara Croft, I’ve played that game where you drive over all the pedestrians and get points for killing people (Armageddon?). Nowadays thankfully I have more of a life.

The weird thing is, the games industry makes more money than the film industry. Much more money than the music industry (what’s left of it). The gaming industry makes more money than any other entertainment industry. It’s where every kid on the block heads when they want to have fun, good clean fun. And the finance men love that, cos it’s making them a huge wad, for little investment. Good games are produced by people with lots of ideas but no business sense. So it’s a neat equation, idea=money, with no complications.

 

But gaming is being blamed for a few problems too. The current new spate of kid shoot em up’s going on in US schools is largely put at the door of games. Kids turning into lumps of lard is blamed on gaming. Kids being anti-social gimps who only talk and interact through myspace and youtube is blamed on gaming culture too, via the evil interweb. Evil rock music spreads it’s evil message through kill bill style game scenarios, so real that you think it’s happening to you, or at least your kid.

 

Where will it end? Will your kid/you be shot at school by some weirdo dressed like a desparado imitating some old cowboy hero in a technicolor leather coat, with AK47s under both arms? Check out the evidence, or watch the Zero Hour at Columbine High Documentary.

 

So, while the RIAA is still taking poor single mothers to court over a few MP3s, the gaming industry money men look the other way while their products ‘confuse’ the younger generation into thinking that moral code means a new web page design. Or something. Allegedly. Don’t expect a conclusion here, this is an ongoing train of thought.

So Much Software

In the next few weeks I have to know the basics for Audition, Premier, Reason, After Effects, Encore, as well as new tricks in CS2 Photoshop ansd Illustrator.

The question remains, why do software developers update their software so often? It’s purely for profit, not for usability. They have us ‘over a barrel’. We have to upgrade, or the client/student/CV looks/feels less good than it should.

I’ve always thought there should be varying prices for software – intro level, intermediate and advanced. That way, no one is expected to pay for whole bunches of stuff they won’t know how to use for three years. Just think, the millions ‘lost’ to piracy every day could be converted into lyal paying customers if the price was right. I’d pay £50-150 for intro level Photoshop… wouldn’t you?