Some technical talk again. Geeks only.
I have added some technical updates, which should improve functionality of this site. 'Should' as I haven't done any elaborate testing yet. It all works on my PowerBook in the Safari browser, though...
First of all, I finally managed to make a server side script that can generate
SMIL files on the fly which
iTunes and
FireANT accepts.
It required some effort of my hosting provider, as they had to set a mapping so that .mov files in a certain directory are being treated as .php scripts. At the moment, this is required as the RSS aggregator applications iTunes and FireANT completely ignore the Content-Type and Content-Disposition headers that are being sent by the .php script.
So what's this php generated SMIL doing?
For now, one thing it does is adding the overlayed graphics 'play movie' which you see on the website. Besides this, it automatically appends the MartijnTV credits at the end of the targeted movie. This is useful because I don't have to add the credits anymore when editing a video for the web. Maybe even more important, it saves precious server space. And it can even save some bandwidth. if you have QuickTime set up to cache movies, it will load the credits video only once and use the cached credits for all the videos that you watch. And an extra feature which is made possible because of SMIL is that the credits movie is linked back to my web site. Try clicking it!
The third thing I tried to make with the SMIL wrapper, was some kind of preload mechanism. Normally, when a SMIL is being loaded using QuickTime, you'll see a white window with a little QuickTime logo and some wobbling dots, indicating that something is going on there. Might be loading a file, might be something else... I was not very satisfied with this, because it's a bit confusing. It's not giving any information on what is being loaded, how it is progressing, how big it is, et cetera... Because QuickTime's implementation of SMIL is very, very limited, the 'preloader' consists only of a graphic that says the video is being downloaded and an overlayed piece of text telling the size of the file. This little piece of text is formatted as QTText and the size of the video is being inserted on the fly using php. This is a bit more accurate feedback than the wobbling dots although far from perfect and not at all without flaws. For example, it does not work when QuickTime is set not to play movies from the web automatically when downloaded. My 'preloader' relies on the immediate-instantiation parameter of Apple's implementation of SMIL. This parameter is set to true for this example, which means that when the SMIL wrapper is loaded and automatically triggered to play, it will wait to play until the elements (video, graphics, e.g.) in the SMIL are fully downloaded. The SMIL contains a sequence of the actual, targeted video and the credits. In the sequence, just before the video comes a few seconds of the graphic telling that the video is downloaded. To have QuickTime wait and show this graphic while the video is being downloaded, I've put a short glimpse of the same video again at the very beginning, underneath the informative graphic. Because the immediate-instantiation is set to true, the sequence pauses and continues playing when the download has finished. On my machine it works. Please let me know if it's no good on your computer.
The results of my effort so far, was not the result I had in mind. Although it made a nice exercise.. What I want to try, is to add some integrated functionality or interaction into the little videos. Simple things like incorporating the reactions that have been posted at the end of the video, voting inside the video, interactive/branched movies, links inside the video images (for example, go to other people's websites by clicking on someone in the video), links to next and previous episodes, ...
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