I mentioned in creating Flash videos using FFMpeg that you could use Ming to create your own Flash video player. I've added a patch to the ruby -ming extension for video streaming so now it is possible to create a streaming player with both PHP and Ruby using their Ming extensions. The following examples show you how.
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After playing with the Ruby Ming extension a little more I found that they don't have support for SWFVideoStreams so I made a patch to add it. The patch also fixes the beta issues I described in building the ming ruby extension.
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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:
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.
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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It just goes to show that even the most redundant sites in the world have their limits. Amazon is mostly unusable ATM because they tried to sell XBox360s at $100.
A while back I explained how to compile the ImageMagick extension for PHP and this past week I got around to creating some example code to make some of the command line examples I have in ImageMagick command line examples part 1 and ImageMagick command line examples part 2.
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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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A few days ago when PHP 5.2 was released one of the things that caught my eye was that it now includes the JSON extension. For anyone doing AJAXy type stuff JSON is an easy way to martial your data between your server side language and javascript.
For the longest time I've been using the older PHP JSON library to do JSON with PHP but now that the extension is included in the core I decided it was time to test it out. I took a couple of minutes and converted my DNSBL checker as a test since it has a fairly large data-set that gets converted and sent back. The json functions provided by the extension are probably easier to use since the JSON library needed you to create an object first but that wasn't a real issue. After making the change I could tell JSON extension was faster than the library. After a little digging I found that someone has done a little extension vs library testing and claims the JSON extension is 153 times as fast as the library.
I finally kicked my 64 bit install to the curb and am now running my AMD 64 desktop box in 32 bit mode. I decided that I had had enough of random crashes and having to compile things special every time I wanted something new. Having just upgraded from FC5 to FC6 on a couple other boxes I decided it was worth installing fresh on this box. Once the new install was finished I started looking into the new desktop enhancements that come in FC6 and after a little digging I ended up at the Beryl project.
For anyone who hasn't seen it yet Beryl is a fork of Compiz that changes the way your normal X desktop works. It adds different types of OpenGL based effects and works with Xgl, AIGLX, and the latest NVidia binary drivers.
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.