The reason that the Lothlaurien Films page is still only “Coming Soon” is that I'm trying to determine how to place actual video on a webpage.
I realize that many people feel that streaming video is the be-all and end all.
I'm not a big fan of streaming video. It has its place but it also has problems. Ideally, I want to allow people to watch video on my webpage without requiring some proprietary video player, but I also want to provide the option of being able to save actual video files on your own computer. Although I am no expert, my understanding is that in the early days of computers and the internet there was a non-proprietary sound format called OGG, and a non-proprietary video format called "OGG Theora" (named after one of my personal heroes, the seriously cool and brilliant Theora Jones, who worked as Edison Carter's controller on the awesome “Max Headroom” TV Series from the 1980's.)
This is different than embedding a YouTube video, which I can do very easily as a cut and paste on my Lothlaurien's Lore blog hosted on WordPress.
After all I did manage to get my introducing lothlaurien.ca contest entry film finished so I could enter the CIRA Show Us Your .CA Contest.
And of course, this is the first video I've ever uploaded to YouTube so you can see it there too.
My video editing software will allow me to save the soundtrack in OGG, but doesn't have any provision to render the whole in the OGG Theora video format. I know too many linux users who can't see YouTube on their computers. And I certainly don't want to limit my viewership. So when I get it together, this is where the first Lothlaurien Film should come to roost. Until that happens, you can see it on the
But I always expected to put my video online here except I haven't quite got that bit figured out. i was up late poring through my “bible” HTMLdog, both the book and the website where I discovered this is a thornier issue than I knew. As I understand it, the new version of HTML 5 is supposed to address these problems. I realize that most people think streaming video is the be-all and end-all, but I have accessibility issues. I emailed my parents the link to my video entry. When they told me they would have liked it more without the pauses, at first I had no idea what they were talking about. When I played it for them here I discovered the problem: they live in a rural area and their internet is on dial-up. So when they watch streaming video, it stops and starts. And in this case, three minutes is too long; they had only been able to see half of the movie. This is an issue that many sites don't take into account at all. There are still a great many computer users who do not have access to broadband. Which is an excellent reason for wanting to distribute any films that I do in a format that people can save to their own computers and watch at their own leisure. In time, that will be a big part of this page. And that doesn't even begin to cover my biggest problem with flash: security. Having to download a new version of flash when some external website tells you to is incredibly insecure. And people wonder why viruses and malware spread online so easily. Meantime, feel free to enjoy my introducing lothlaurien.ca contest entry in the Lothlaurien's Lore Blog Today is supposed to hit sixteen degrees celsius. The unseasonably warm dry Canadian winter we have had is giving us another extraordinary unseasonably early spring day. All of the critters are out and about frolicking in the trees, and since the leaves are onlly buds this is too good a day to let go by without taking phots. So that's what I'll be doing. I wish you as nice a day as I plan to have in the magical forest of lothlaurien!
17 March, 2010
