One of the hardest parts about doing video on the Internet in the past has been knowing what video format to use. With the rise of video sharing sites like youtube the answer these days seems to be Flash video. It is very easy to create Flash videos and display them using FFMpeg and a free player.

Here is a tutorial on how to create the Flash video files: One-stop Installation Guide for Create a Linux Server-side FLV conversion environment.

Here are a couple free Flash video players:

FlowPlayer
Flash Video Player

You can also create your own Flash player if you like either with the Flash studio tools or something like Ming. For simplicity I would recommend using FlowPlayer to start with since it works well, is completely free, and has a number of features that can integrate with meta data in the Flash video.

Now go make the next youtube.

Tags: flash, video

I've been trying out Ming SWF output library in PHP for a few days and I thought I would give the Ruby extension a try to see how well it worked. It turns out that it is kind of old and busted but it is fixable.
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Not long ago I was curious about using Java to look up DNS information so I decided to put together a little DNSBL/RBL checker so I could experiment with Java DNS lookups and some PHP/Java communications. There isn't a lot of Java DNS stuff out there but it was easy to tell that the tool for this job is the DNSJava library.
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For fun I recently pimped out a ruby script that I had written for some testing with a little color and a spinner. If you have never used ANSI escape codes before I've put together a simple script that shows how easy it is.

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At work we have been using DNS Black Lists for a long time to deny spam coming into our email systems. There are a number of places you can check to see if you are on one of these lists but I figured I would write my own web 2.0 version. So here it is my own DNSBL checker. I believe it has most of the major lists on it but if I find more I'll add them. I'm also going to try to post more about how it is all put together.

For the longest time having POP3 messages stored in one large file bothered me. I found out however that you can easily convert the single file storage into Maildir style storage with fetchmail and procmail. Here are the steps I used to fetch mail from a POP3 mailbox and store the messages in Maildir style folders.

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After my post about capturing full page screenshots with firefox I started wondering if there was a way to do screencasts using Linux. It just so happens that you can. There are a couple different options if you want a pure movie of your desktop but I was more interested in a flash version. I found what I was looking for with this tutorial on how to record videos of your desktop that uses vnc2swf.

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I recently needed to replace twm as the window manager I used under VNC. I wanted something light so I looked at: blackbox, fluxbox, and flwm. These window managers have been around for some time and are probably available as binary packages for most distributions.

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I've put together another 5 ImageMagick command line examples as a followup to part 1. These examples are a little more advanced and include some extra information on techniques.

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If you have ever wanted to manipulate images under linux you probably have used Gimp. This isn't your only option and if you want to do things from the command line a better option is to use ImageMagick's convert utility.

I've put together 5 simple command line examples that I have found useful. This is just a sample of what you can do with convert. To see more examples and get more explanation of options see: ImageMagick v6 Examples.

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