You may have noticed I’ve been pretty scarce for the past few weeks; as you may have guessed, Leela Grace has finally arrived. I went into labor on Wednesday, November 12th (good thing I decided not to attend FlashCodersNY that night!) and gave birth to “little” 8lb. 3oz. Leela at 4:33am. Everyone’s healthy (though sleep-deprived) and I plan to return to “active duty” early in 2009. I’ll try to keep up with comments and questions, but if it takes me a bit longer to reply, you’ll know why!

p.s. Yes, that is an Adobe t-shirt… finally found a use for all those Xtra large shirts, hehe.

Geoff is “the man” when it comes to YouTube’s embeddable player framework… he gave us some insight into the nextgen YouTube player, and shared some user-gen gems.

Some tidbits:

• Use MTASC!
• To prevent playback outside of the YouTube player, they require a token to be passed back and forth. This required them to create a ‘container SWF’ that loads in the actual player SWF to allow the Player to be cached, saving them TONS of bandwidth.
• Widescreen and standard versions supported
• Custom skin colors
• Easy to add new features, easy to enable/disable on the fly. Runtime modules (separate SWFs for each feature) are used instead of having all features built into the player. These modules are internal only, but you can use the API to add some customization. i.e. annotations (closed captioning, speech bubbles, interactive hotspots!)
• Targeting 40 different languages for player (about 19 now)
• Keyboard controls (playback, volume, etc) Can be turned off.
• Can use an AS2 wrapper to use the player in AS3 projects.
• Robust javascript API to control/receive events via the webpage. This can be used to synchronize slides/urls/etc with video, create chapter links, etc., etc.
• Uses pseudo-streaming (you can jump ahead to parts of the video that haven’t downloaded yet, even though it is progressive video.)
• onStateChange events, etc. to keep track of how users are interacting with your video.
• Maximum time between keyframes has been decreased to 2 seconds, for better seeking.
• Chromeless Player available: http://code.google.com/apis/youtube/chromeless_player_reference.html (only has YouTube watermark and loading spinner)
• JW Player integrates with the new framework, so you can embed YouTube videos into that open-source player. Slide (FaceBook widget) does the same.
• YouTube GData API gives you access to YouTube data in XML format. Allows you to build a YouTube clone, using their bandwidth (but still has the YouTube watermark, of course).
• AS3 player is in the works (chromeless player will be first)!
• 10-minute limit: Register as a developer/partner, and get around this limit. Quality/file-size limit has been increased to 1GB.
• Audience question: “Any plans for a Silverlight player?” Answer: “Aww.. c’mon… [laughter]” (translation: Um, no.)

Get help: http://groups.google.com/group/youtube-api

Get Geoff’s presentation: http://tinyurl.com/5vytgz

Dan Lacivita from firstborn: workflow and process of 3D/Video projects.

Dan offered some tips:

• Video looping issues; they often use PNG sequences for short loops. Just be sure to synch up your framerate (they used onEnterFrame script to control the playback speed).
• Encoding and compression. For their Lowe’s project, they decided against H.264, due to color saturation issues and player requirements. Started with On2 Flix Pro, but they were dissatisfied with the compression of high-motion clips. Ended up using Sorenson Squeeze with On2 VP6. Tip: Always use a CDN to deliver the video content, don’t let your client skimp on hosting!
• Trick for creating a dynamic mask: can use a PNG as an overlay to shade items on the Stage. Read the values in AS, and control the Z-depth according to the bitmap data/pixel values.

My friends over at FlashBrighton just alerted me to this amazing use of video in Flash — this company has designed a camera system that records full 360° movies. You can actually click and drag while the video is playing, looking at the scene from every angle. You’ve gotta see this!

http://www.immersivemedia.com//index.php
My heart’s all a-flutter. Amazing stuff.