And in other news, FreewayCast.com

Freeway
1

You may have seen some references from Dan Jasker about
FreewayCast.com. This is a little site I build over the weekend,
inspired by an exchange with Keith Martin, that hosts screencasts
using the Amazon S3 storage system.

Think of it as a group video blog, and you won’t be far off. It’s
searchable, tagged, and open to anyone who wants to contribute.

http://freewaycast.com

Right now, it’s a manual process to add the Author key to your
account. If there’s enough traffic, I’ll add a more automatic self-
serve system to this, but for now, if you want to post your
screencasts, sign up for a regular account, then either e-mail me
directly or use the Contact form on the site to send me an Author Key
request. I’ll set you up as quickly as possible.

Walter

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2

Sometime around 23/9/08 (at 10:56 -0400) Walter Lee Davis said:

Think of it as a group video blog, and you won’t be far off. It’s
searchable, tagged, and open to anyone who wants to contribute.

http://freewaycast.com

Fantastic.

Just because even the greatest things can sometimes be polished up
even more, I don’t suppose there’s a way to get the S3 storage to
supply the .mov data in a form that the browser can display directly,
rather than having to download it?

:slight_smile:

k

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3

I noticed in Firefox I had to download them to watch them. In Safari they loaded up just fine.

I’m currently re-doing my previous casts for better audio tracks and hope to get them all uploaded over the next week. I have about 8-10 new screen-casts laying around and am slowly trickling them out. I need to find a place for templates as well, I got a bunch of these here that I could convert out for people on projects that didn’t take.

I’d be interested if there was a way to upload sample files as well. Perhaps, if it was an optional upload. People seem to like to have Freeway documents to look at themselves or follow along with in the video.

I’d also (hehe) be interested in selling these screen-casts as well. I know Expression Engine tutorial videos sell for a few bucks. Might make the 2-3 hours I spend on setting these up, recording them, and publishing them worth it fiscally on my end. Since I don’t have Freeway Pro at my home here, I have to go out to record these.

Perhaps when my own site launches with these on there I can setup the things I want on my end.

A whole bunch of scattered ideas, thanks Waltd for setting this up.

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4

Also, would be there a way to have download stats? I guess I miss that from MediaFire and being able to see how well certain topics went over.

Sure Keith may have won a free Audi, but I still got to see how many people downloaded a particular item. :slight_smile:

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5

Yeah, I don’t know why that happens (the download vs. play thing, that is). On my Leopard Mac, they play directly. On my Tiger Mac, they download. And Firefox is similarly skewed.

While I was testing on Sunday, I had the files on the Web server at Joyent, and everything played in the browser without exception. But once I moved them to S3, I started seeing all sorts of variability in the play/download behavior.

My guess here is that Joyent (hosting on Apache) is sending the correct mime-type with the file. S3 is hosting on god knows what – their own home-grown server, I think, and are not sending any mime-types at all, just file data. I added type=“movie/quicktime” to the file link, but that’s not enough in some cases.

The only way I would be able to work around this would be to code a complete object/embed reference, but that means that I have to figure out the dimensions of the movie, so that’s either another pair of text boxes in the upload interface or some clever technical trick to be named later.

Walter

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6

Sometime around 23/9/08 (at 13:51 -0400) Dan J said:

Also, would be there a way to have download stats? I guess I miss
that from MediaFire and being able to see how well certain topics
went over.

Sounds like a very useful bit of info. :slight_smile:

k

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7

Thanks for this, gang. I doubt I’ll contribute (lack of knowledge), but I’ll certainly watch them!

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8

On Sep 23, 2008, at 1:28 PM, Dan J wrote:

Also, would be there a way to have download stats? I guess I miss
that from MediaFire and being able to see how well certain topics
went over.

I’ve just added logging, so these stats are now being gathered. I
will add a way to see these stats soon.

I noticed in Firefox I had to download them to watch them. In
Safari they loaded up just fine.

This is proving intractable to solve from the S3 side. Amazon have
announced a new service that would fix this in an elegant manner, and
I’m signed up for the beta, but it’s not released yet.

I’m currently re-doing my previous casts for better audio tracks
and hope to get them all uploaded over the next week. I have about
8-10 new screen-casts laying around and am slowly trickling them
out. I need to find a place for templates as well, I got a bunch
of these here that I could convert out for people on projects that
didn’t take.

I’d be interested if there was a way to upload sample files as
well. Perhaps, if it was an optional upload. People seem to like
to have Freeway documents to look at themselves or follow along
with in the video.

Paul already made a similar request – all of his “Moments” are
available in multiple compression levels and sizes – so it’s just a
matter of me re-factoring the database side of things to support
this. Something fun for this weekend, eh?

I’d also (hehe) be interested in selling these screen-casts as
well. I know Expression Engine tutorial videos sell for a few
bucks. Might make the 2-3 hours I spend on setting these up,
recording them, and publishing them worth it fiscally on my end.
Since I don’t have Freeway Pro at my home here, I have to go out to
record these.

What you might do for that is put a “taster” up on FreewayCast, then
include a link at the end to your purchase site, or put an ad at the
beginning and end with a link to a PayPal or another donation system.

Another way we might do this is to put a “bounty” system up on the
Wish List. You could vote for ideas that you wanted to see made into
screencasts, or you could “vote with your wallet” by adding to a
bounty. When the dollar figure got high enough, you could claim the
bounty by posting a screencast in response to that Wish. I suppose
there would have to be some voting in case of multiple entries –
clearly there’s a lot more thought that should go into this.

Perhaps when my own site launches with these on there I can setup
the things I want on my end.

Just don’t forget to post them on FreewayCast, so there is a central
go-to location for info.

A whole bunch of scattered ideas, thanks Waltd for setting this up.

You are welcome!

Walter

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9

Most importantly the stats are going to be great. Then I’ll be able to know if a specific topic was a dud or not. I would be interested in doing a subscription service of some sort where for a monthly fee you can watch them all. Kind of like Lynda.com in a way.

We’re on the verge on something great here.

Thank you Walt for all the work you’ve done to set this up.

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