Re: [videoblogging] Re: Blogger templates SPECIFIALLY for bloggers
People:Donate a few bucks to Mefeedia if you use thumb generator.Interesting stuff... pretty hardcore.sullOn 11/29/05, Markus Sandy [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: i'm impressed! keep on crunching and thanks! petertheman wrote: OK, Here's an overview of the Mefeedia thumbnail feature.1) It doesn't generate thumbs for *all* types of movies. For mostmovies it does, including Flash movies, Windows media movies, you nameit. There are some codecs that it can't handle, unfortunately, but it gets most of them. 2) It takes the server about 3 minutes of hard, processor intensivework per movie: download movie, create thumbs, resize thumbs, cleanup.This is a dual processor server with 2 Gigs of RAM. 3) We do 2 movies per minute now (before we switched to the dedicatedserver we did 1 movie each 5 minutes). So far, in total, we'vegenerated thumbs for 64,695 movies. Mefeedia has 111,054 movies in its database, so we are clearly behind. More and more people are startingto videoblog, so its like a race to keep up.4) We are currently working to find solutions that don't require me topay 10s of 1000s of dollars in server fees (out of my pocket).. 5) The reason that old movies still haven't been thumbed is that thereare about 55,000 movies in the queue right now - it just takes time.We're working on solutions.So in short: hang in there. It's always getting better, and this is one of the biggest priorities we are working on :) Thanks for yourpatience!Let me know if you have any other specific questions I can answer :)Isn't this fun? Hey, for competing with Yahoo and Google I think we're doing alright ;)Cheers,PeterPS: the math below is somewhat mistaken. For each movie, we generateabout 20 thumbnails, so our total so far is well over 1,000,000thumbnails generated. i understand all thatbut do the math:there are less than 2000 feeds as of todayi think 500 videos per feed is grossly over estimating most people's *average* outputthat's 100,000 thumbs we have been told that they have been generating them for several weeks (months?) nowlet's assume only 6 weeks = 6 x 7 x 24 x 60 = 60480 minutesthat's 16 minutes per thumb and countingmore likely, there is an average of less than 200 videos per feed at this timeso 40 minutes per thumb or higher?wow, that's a lot!this still does not explain why older video thumbs are not slowly showing up for me and why some new ones aren't(no changes in codec here) Joshua Kinberg wrote: Thumbnail generation is a very CPU intensive process.Mefeedia's server must download your videos, extract thumbs and savethem, then remove the video. Not to mention there are often errors dueto various video codecs and the fact that it can be hard to decode all types and extract images.Even Yahoo! has difficulty in this area, and they have much betterserver resources than MeFeedia. Someone in Yahoo! Media Search oncetold me that it can take several days for a video to be indexed properly even after the crawler has discovered the video. Its for thesame exact reason. There is a batch queue set up to extract thethumbnails and do whatever other processing needed on the file beforeit gets indexed properly by the search engine. -JoshOn 11/29/05, Devlon [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Our thumbnail generating code got a bit behind, but it will catch up soon. On 11/29/05, Christopher Ivanyi [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Problem with using mefeedia's archive code is that it does not consistently show thumbnails for all videos. Why do some vlogs don't have pics, and others do not. That's been an ongoing problem for a long, long time.ChrisOn 11/29/05, Steve Garfield [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: set blogger to show one post per pagethat takes care of question #1you can use mefeedia's archive code to display a list of thmbnails for previous showshttp://mefeedia.com --Steve On Nov 29, 2005, at 11:18 AM, Fire wrote: Id like a template that could make my site (look and operate) likerocketboom.com (see below)I like their interface... nice and simple... with the most currentvideo automatically loading on the first page, and thumbnails of the recently archived ones below... --Steve--Home Page - http://stevegarfield.com Video Blog - http://stevegarfield.blogs.com Text Blog - http://offonatangent.blogspot.com Like Paul Revere, leading the citizen's media revolution. Yahoo! Groups Links
Re: [videoblogging] Re: Blogger templates SPECIFIALLY for bloggers
One way for you to generate your thumbnails for layout might be to simply upload your images into to a single directory and then use a relevant system tag to determine the file name for each image. I don't use Blogger, but I just had a look at their template code (because I know a lot of people do use it) and you could probably do something like this to create your own thumbnail layout:Each post has a unique number that is greater than the post before. The post number is stored in a tag called:$BlogItemNumber$So lets say your blog item number for your post #1 is 1 (not sure how they number).If you name your image for that post "1.jpg", you can call that image at the right time buy placing a ".jpg" at the end of the tag, for instance:img src=""http://www.mysite.com/images/">http://www.mysite.com/images/$BlogItemNumber$.jpg" /According to Blogger, the following code generates a list of the "titles" of your previous posts: BloggerPreviousItems a href="" $BlogPreviousItemTitle$ /a/BloggerPreviousItemsSo if you substituted the title tag with the img instruction above, you could get the images from your prior posts to render instead:BloggerPreviousItems a href="" img src=""http://www.mysite.com/images/">http://www.mysite.com/images/$BlogItemNumber$.jpg" / /a/BloggerPreviousItemsYou can also include post data when hovering each image by including that data in the "title field" like this:BloggerPreviousItems a href="" img src=""http://www.mysite.com/images/">http://www.mysite.com/images/$BlogItemNumber$.jpg" title="img src=""http://www.mysite.com/images/">http://www.mysite.com/images/$BlogItemNumber$.jpg" /" / /a/BloggerPreviousItemsThis sketch could of course be extended in theory to any template driven blog software. It's more of a concept and method of organization than anything else, but it put you in control of you own website. petertheman wrote: OK, Here's an overview of the Mefeedia thumbnail feature. 1) It doesn't generate thumbs for *all* types of movies. For most movies it does, including Flash movies, Windows media movies, you name it. There are some codecs that it can't handle, unfortunately, but it gets most of them. 2) It takes the server about 3 minutes of hard, processor intensive work per movie: download movie, create thumbs, resize thumbs, cleanup. YAHOO! GROUPS LINKS Visit your group "videoblogging" on the web. To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service.
Re: [videoblogging] Re: Blogger templates SPECIFIALLY for bloggers
Two more notes on this subject of creating your own thumbs:#1 If you didnt want to hunt down the item number, you could always just name your image with the same text that is used for the title, and use the $BlogItemTitle$ tag instead.#2 With the hovering metadata example below, I meant to switch out the second image with a tag for the actual post title, like this:BloggerPreviousItems a href="" img src=""http://www.mysite.com/images/">http://www.mysite.com/images/$BlogItemNumber$.jpg" title="$BlogItemTitle$" / /a/BloggerPreviousItemsOn Nov 30, 2005, at 11:55 PM, andrew michael baron wrote:You can also include post data when hovering each image by including that data in the "title field" like this:BloggerPreviousItems a href="" img src=""http://www.mysite.com/images/">http://www.mysite.com/images/$BlogItemNumber$.jpg" title="img src=""http://www.mysite.com/images/">http://www.mysite.com/images/$BlogItemNumber$.jpg" /" / /a/BloggerPreviousItems SPONSORED LINKS Individual Fireant Typepad Use YAHOO! GROUPS LINKS Visit your group "videoblogging" on the web. To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service.
Re: [videoblogging] Re: Blogger templates SPECIFIALLY for bloggers
Back to the point though... Rocketboom uses MovableType, which provides excellent control over the template design. You will have to learn a little bit of code beyond HTML to do what you want, but its pretty easy to get the hang of and very well documented. -Josh On 11/29/05, Bill Streeter [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Yeah I agree with Josh, besides that's kinda the point of aggregators. You can subscribe to the video blogs you want and when you view them through an aggregator like FireAnt the web design becomes much less important. As far as the network goes, we have a network, its a social network, which is much more interesting and natural than an old school 20th Century TV network contrived primarily to capture the greatest numbers of viewers for advertisers. Bill Streeter LO-FI SAINT LOUIS www.lofistl.com --- In videoblogging@yahoogroups.com, Josh Leo [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 11/29/05, Fire [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: PS - anyone ever think of making a STANDARD template for all vlog packages that we could use to make all of our vlog sites look the same, combine the features of a webring, and thus make a giant-virtual-independant -open-source TV for the masses? I think that the ability to be different and unique is great, uniformity is boring, and webrings are very 1995...but I guess i understand where you are coming from... I like the fact that I made the graphics for my site...Pages like human-dog.com look really great and I enjoy visiting Ryanne's site to see what new interesting header she has... Rocketboom's layout works because it is updated daily...not many people delve into their archives (i imagine) I like the ability to show old videos, links to my other sites, and graphics that make my vlog Mine -- Josh Leo joshleo.com stonefarm.blogspot.com joshspicks.blogspot.com vlogcats.blogspot.com wearethemedia.com Yahoo! Groups Links Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ~-- Get fast access to your favorite Yahoo! Groups. Make Yahoo! your home page http://us.click.yahoo.com/dpRU5A/wUILAA/yQLSAA/lBLqlB/TM ~- Yahoo! Groups Links * To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/videoblogging/ * To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
Re: [videoblogging] Re: Blogger templates SPECIFIALLY for bloggers
On Tue, 29 Nov 2005 18:15:26 +0100, Amanda Congdon [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Did you try clicking view 2 on the top of the archive page? We have two different ways to view our archives, one with just the thumbnails and another with story links included for searchability. Nope, I didn't know what it meant, so I never clicked on it. Back then I actually ended up using Google like Andrew mentioned. - Andreas -- URL:http://www.solitude.dk/ Commentary on media, communication, culture and technology. Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ~-- Get fast access to your favorite Yahoo! Groups. Make Yahoo! your home page http://us.click.yahoo.com/dpRU5A/wUILAA/yQLSAA/lBLqlB/TM ~- Yahoo! Groups Links * To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/videoblogging/ * To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
Re: [videoblogging] Re: Blogger templates SPECIFIALLY for bloggers
Steve Watkins wrote: Is it possible to create a system that doesnt need to download the entire video in order to create a thumbnail, but only a little bit of the start of the file? Here is some wild thinking, that may be completely off-base. I believe HTTP requests can use a range, so in theory, you could request just the first X number of bytes from a file. This would allow for grabbing just a portion of a video and saving that out. Now, the next issue is, will that file be a valid enough file to generate a thumbnail from? Time for some testing... Pete -- http://tinkernet.org/ videoblog for the future... Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ~-- Get Bzzzy! (real tools to help you find a job). Welcome to the Sweet Life. http://us.click.yahoo.com/KIlPFB/vlQLAA/TtwFAA/lBLqlB/TM ~- Yahoo! Groups Links * To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/videoblogging/ * To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
Re: [videoblogging] Re: Blogger templates SPECIFIALLY for bloggers
question: if i have a quicktime file with a poster frame, will mefeedia use that frame as the thumb? if not, is it possible to make it do that? i would like to control which frame is used as a thumb Pete Prodoehl wrote: Steve Watkins wrote: Is it possible to create a system that doesnt need to download the entire video in order to create a thumbnail, but only a little bit of the start of the file? Here is some wild thinking, that may be completely off-base. I believe HTTP requests can use a range, so in theory, you could request just the first X number of bytes from a file. This would allow for grabbing just a portion of a video and saving that out. Now, the next issue is, will that file be a valid enough file to generate a thumbnail from? Time for some testing... Pete -- My name is Markus Sandy and I am app.etitio.us http://apperceptions.org http://digitaldojo.blogspot.com http://spinflow.org http://wearethemedia.com http://www.corante.com/events/feedfest/ aim/ichat: [EMAIL PROTECTED] msn: [EMAIL PROTECTED] skype: msandy spin: [EMAIL PROTECTED] YAHOO! GROUPS LINKS Visit your group "videoblogging" on the web. To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service.
Re: [videoblogging] Re: Blogger templates SPECIFIALLY for bloggers
i'm impressed! keep on crunching and thanks! petertheman wrote: OK, Here's an overview of the Mefeedia thumbnail feature. 1) It doesn't generate thumbs for *all* types of movies. For most movies it does, including Flash movies, Windows media movies, you name it. There are some codecs that it can't handle, unfortunately, but it gets most of them. 2) It takes the server about 3 minutes of hard, processor intensive work per movie: download movie, create thumbs, resize thumbs, cleanup. This is a dual processor server with 2 Gigs of RAM. 3) We do 2 movies per minute now (before we switched to the dedicated server we did 1 movie each 5 minutes). So far, in total, we've generated thumbs for 64,695 movies. Mefeedia has 111,054 movies in its database, so we are clearly behind. More and more people are starting to videoblog, so its like a race to keep up. 4) We are currently working to find solutions that don't require me to pay 10s of 1000s of dollars in server fees (out of my pocket).. 5) The reason that old movies still haven't been thumbed is that there are about 55,000 movies in the queue right now - it just takes time. We're working on solutions. So in short: hang in there. It's always getting better, and this is one of the biggest priorities we are working on :) Thanks for your patience! Let me know if you have any other specific questions I can answer :) Isn't this fun? Hey, for competing with Yahoo and Google I think we're doing alright ;) Cheers, Peter PS: the math below is somewhat mistaken. For each movie, we generate about 20 thumbnails, so our total so far is well over 1,000,000 thumbnails generated. i understand all that but do the math: there are less than 2000 feeds as of today i think 500 videos per feed is grossly over estimating most people's *average* output that's 100,000 thumbs we have been told that they have been generating them for several weeks (months?) now let's assume only 6 weeks = 6 x 7 x 24 x 60 = 60480 minutes that's 16 minutes per thumb and counting more likely, there is an average of less than 200 videos per feed at this time so 40 minutes per thumb or higher? wow, that's a lot! this still does not explain why older video thumbs are not slowly showing up for me and why some new ones aren't (no changes in codec here) Joshua Kinberg wrote: Thumbnail generation is a very CPU intensive process. Mefeedia's server must download your videos, extract thumbs and save them, then remove the video. Not to mention there are often errors due to various video codecs and the fact that it can be hard to decode all types and extract images. Even Yahoo! has difficulty in this area, and they have much better server resources than MeFeedia. Someone in Yahoo! Media Search once told me that it can take several days for a video to be indexed properly even after the crawler has discovered the video. Its for the same exact reason. There is a batch queue set up to extract the thumbnails and do whatever other processing needed on the file before it gets indexed properly by the search engine. -Josh On 11/29/05, Devlon [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Our thumbnail generating code got a bit behind, but it will catch up soon. On 11/29/05, Christopher Ivanyi [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Problem with using mefeedia's archive code is that it does not consistently show thumbnails for all videos. Why do some vlogs don't have pics, and others do not. That's been an ongoing problem for a long, long time. Chris On 11/29/05, Steve Garfield [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: set blogger to show one post per page that takes care of question #1 you can use mefeedia's archive code to display a list of thmbnails for previous shows http://mefeedia.com --Steve On Nov 29, 2005, at 11:18 AM, Fire wrote: Id like a template that could make my site (look and operate) like rocketboom.com (see below) I like their interface... nice and simple... with the most current video automatically loading on the first page, and thumbnails of the recently archived ones below... --Steve -- Home Page - http://stevegarfield.com Video Blog - http://stevegarfield.blogs.com Text Blog - http://offonatangent.blogspot.com Like Paul Revere, leading the citizen's media revolution. Yahoo! Groups Links
