Put Your Video on the Web – Web Video Conversion Software Tools for Your Mac

We have covered a variety of conversion tools here at Cogniview but in this article I want to address a specific conversion challenge that I have had to solve recently. Namely, video for the web, using a Mac.

The Challenge

What I want to do is create videos on my mac that will play in a web page on the majority of computers, with low bandwidth requirements and at a high quality.

Should be easy, right? Should be, yeah.

Actually it is very easy, you just use viddler, YouTube, and so on, and they do the conversion and put it online for you.

My problem is I am wanting to create web video for a closed membership course, therefore these videos can not be accessible to the non-paying public, and often when you share a video using a service such as those, you give up some intellectual property and ownership.

Quicktime and iTunes

As you would probably guess, Mac software is very Apple Quicktime and iTunes centric when it comes to media and especially video. When anything multimedia pops up it is going to want to throw you to quicktime to convert and iTunes or Quicktime to play.

Using Quicktime Pro we can convert video from, say DV format from a video camera, into .MOV which some computers can play due to the relative popularity of the Quicktime plugin. Even better we can convert into an MPEG streaming format that is very well regarded. This produces a high quality video stream using H.264 encoding.

Unfortunately it is under half of computers who will have Quicktime pre-loaded. I can provide specific instructions and requirements for my course, but there is a better alternative available …

Flash

FLV and SWF videos can be played by nearly all browsers, and if they can’t they will quickly upgrade because of the ubiquity of YouTube and other hugely popular sites that use it. You get high quality, limited bandwidth use, and few technical issues.

The problem is it is more work for us as video creators, and you can’t just embed the video in your page, you need a flash video player. For the best quality you will want to find software that provides 2-pass encoding, most of the cheaper software only does one pass and therefore the output suffers.

If you have the money then the best way to create flash video is to go to the source – use Flash Pro and you know it will work and be high quality. Way overkill though if all you want to do is convert your movies.

After the official software there are many providers of flash video conversion tools. A highly regarded piece of software is Sorenson Squeeze. At $299 it is not cheap, but it does do 2-pass encoding to provide the best output.

Being the cheap scrooge that I am, I wasn’t going to pay three hundred bucks unless I absolutely had to. I ended up with a solution that I am trying and so far very happy with; DV Kitchen. At only $80, and with a free trial, it seems just the business. You can see a review here.

Converting FROM Flash

Before we get on to part 2 and actually converting our files for the web, I should mention doing things in the opposite direction, converting from the web to your computer or iPod.

Say you want to save a YouTube video to play on your TV, or get a video-based course but want to view the videos on your iPod rather than sit at your desk. Well you can, using a combination of a Firefox Plugin and a little utility intended for Sony PSP users.

Download helper allows you to download media from sites you visit. So if you like the YouTube video you are on, just click to grab it. While it says it performs conversion, I assume it is wonderful on the PC but it was no good for me and my Mac. This is where PSPWare comes in, just drag and drop to produce files that will play on your iPod or other media player!

Getting Your Video Online

In the next part I will show you how I convert my video and get it online. Make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss it!

Measuring Twitter Engagement

How do you know if you are making an impact in your social media efforts?

Sometimes it can feel like you are just whistling in the wind. Knowing that people are listening is the encouragement you need to keep going, and knowing which of your activities produces results is the feedback you need in order to experiement and improve.

Measuring Twitter Success

Many people mistake their follower or friend count with engagement, but in fact a friend count, while a nice ego boost, is not a great metric. Each service has “activities”, and how much of this activity you initiate is a better way of working out how well you are doing at engaging your friends or audience. With Twitter it is all about tweets (Twitter messages), but the reactions in the form of clicks, replies and retweets is more important than just quantity.

Well, some celebrities have tens of thousands of Twitter followers. But if they are just broadcasting, with few conversations, then they are not necessarily engaging their audience. It could be a great “feed”, which would be evidenced by a great number of click-throughs, but without interaction there is little added benefit over RSS.

Ideally what you want is to have a good mix of conversations, in the form of messages and replies, for your links to be clicked on or produce further discussion, and for your Tweets to be re-tweeted.

Twitter Metric Monitoring

The obvious first place to look is your follower growth and retention. If your follower count is going down or standing still then you have a problem. People are voting with their feet as it were. There is a service called “Qwitter” that would tell you when people unfollow but it doesn’t seem to be working recently.

To measure your Twitter metrics beyond audience size you need to use online tools, but thankfully Twitter makes this easy via their programming API and 3rd party online services such as RetweetRank. I actually prefer to look through Twitter Search for @replies in most cases so I can read the replies rather than get a raw count, however.

Twitter Search is also valuable in seeing “mentions” – finding how often a word associated you or your organization is used, and if used in a complaint perhaps you can help the person out before the issue festers.

Counting Twitter Link Clicks

For click counting you have any number of options but my personal fave at the time of writing is http://cli.gs which despite the funny name is a very easy to use URL-shortening service with an analytical twist. Sign up and as well as shortening your URLs and saving precious characters out of the 140 you are allowed in a tweet, it will count how many times your shorter web address has been clicked. The more clicks you get, the more interesting you know your tweet was.

What’s the Point?

This is not about scoring points. The numbers are just an indication of progress, a clue to if you are making any impact. Providing the numbers improve then you know what you are doing is getting some sort of result and that you are getting better at it.

Fact is though, it is often easy to latch on to numbers as being the whole aim, rather than one dashboard for your journey toward your goal. Knowing your actual goal and how social media fits in, is the important part.

Are you wanting to increase your visibility? Sales? Donations? Business or career opportunities? Are you just hanging out? If you are using a service to merely entertain and inform yourself then all this is meaningless, but if you have a business or project reason then these metrics need to lead to those business goals, so the consequences of engagement need to be measured also.

Scribus – Free Open Source Desk Top Publishing Software

You really can get some excellent software for free now! My friend Darren from Travel-Rants let me know about this free desktop publishing software that he has used to create his ebook PDF.

Scribus is a an open source project so expect everything that entails, and all the benefits too. Yes, it has rough edges, and usability is not necessarily a strong suit, but features are being added and they seem to be on top of bugs.

All major desktop operating systems are supported, linux, windows and in my case, Apple Mac. Which is very cool because I was in the past resorting to booting up the old windows machine just because it had Microsoft Publisher on it, but now I can do pretty much all publisher can do on my Macbook without spending any money. Powerful, Mac compatible and free.

Yes, completely free!

Feature-wise it is complete enough for most small business needs. It’s obviously not going to be the kind of thing that expert DTP gurus and newspaper publishers are going to need, but how many of us require industrial strength software on a day to day basis?

As well as all the most required elements, and in particular those necessary for laying out text, there are a whole bunch of templates freely available for everything from leaflets to presentations.

The only major issue I have had is getting Ghostscript onto my Mac, without it print preview does not work.

I only just got this and installed it so I would love for you to tell me about your experiences.

The Future of Music? I think so!

Thanks to my friend Gui I have been invited to try out a cool new online music service called Spotify.

This is a music service that combines free music streaming, ala Last.fm, with an interface just like iTunes. So unlike other services that are just like radio, or where you download mp3 files for a fixed fee, this service is completely free (if you accept non-annoying audio ads every so often) or low cost. You do not download music files, but you can create your own playlists or play individual songs or albums from a very comprehensive library.

My tastes are, uh, eclectic, and even so I managed to find LOADS of songs and artists that I have never seen on other competing services.

The way Gui describes it is music in the cloud, which is a pretty good way to put the service into an internet technology context.

Think about it, we use Gmail, Google Docs, and so on, why should we have physical CD’s or download Mp3 files? Once we have ubiquitous connectivity the idea of owning music will go the way of the grammaphone.

It’s the future!

Unfortunately right now it is only available for desktop computers, but I can see it moving to iPhone and so on very quickly.

What do you think? Is this the future, or am I so wrong you just have to put me right? (and not just in music tastes!) … let me know in the comments …

Software to Create Your Own Ebook and Download Ecovers

You know when you go to a site and they say “download our ebook” or when you land on a sales page and they have 3D graphics of DVDs, books and audio? Those are called in the trade “ecovers”. They are not the real product, just an illustration representation of the product, but they do help create visual appeal and encourage downloads.

ecover software

In the past I have had to have a designer create them for me, at a cost of $70 a shot. This is not cheap if you need lots of them done, or if you need to change them over time. I realized this was a daft approach recently as I have been working on an online course with 12 modules, all of which requiring one of these graphics, and where the titles of them might well change. On top of this, I intend to do a freebie download about Excel right here for this blog.

So I started looking around for how I can create them, and you know what? It’s easy!

OK, you do need to be able to create the basic, flat cover image, but minimal skills in a photo/bitmap editing package suffices. The tools do the rest, converting your 2D cover into a 3D box, book or CD case as required.

There are two main approaches.

Photoshop plugin – This uses Photoshop tools in a kind of macro/wizard, where it does all the tweaks and distortions necessary to achieve the effect. The plus is it’s all in Photoshop, the minus is it requires the full and expensive Photoshop CS, which is overkill if all you need is a few covers for your ebook downloads.
Dedicated software – These packages vary in price or quality, but they get the job done and you can usually try before you buy.

As I am a photoshop elements user I had to go with the second route, and hunt for dedicated software. Most of the software I turned up was for PC users, but I did manage to find a pretty decent tool for Windows and Mac called Box Shot 3D.

Box Shot 3D

This sofware allows you to create 3D graphics representing books, CDs, DVD, and also change angles, perspective, shadows and lighting. It’s all very intuitive and the results are not bad (see the graphic at the top of this article).

What do you think? Would the graphic make you want to download? Know of any better options? Let me know in the comments …

InkScape – A Great Free Illustration Software Tool Download

Would you like a free alternative to Adobe Illustrator or Coreldraw? If so, I think I have found a great download for you.

This week I have been working on logos and other graphical bits and pieces for client websites. Now, I am not a graphic designer, but I do get called on to do this kind of thing, mostly tweaks and making sure elements fit where they need to go.

My tool of choice is the cut-down Photoshop, Photoshop Elements. It does pretty much everything I need. But Photoshop is a bitmap paint tool, a photo editor as the name suggests. When you need to edit illustrations you need to work with “vectors”, files that are made up of points and lines.

I wasn’t about to buy Adobe Illustrator for a one-off task. Thankfully the open source community has really come along in leaps and bounds, the software tools the free software folks produce is as feature complete and powerful as commercial software, so I knew there would be an option out there. Just check out the mainstay alternatives of the common business software choices:

Microsoft Office = Open Office
Photoshop = Gimp/Gimpshop
SQL Server/Oracle = MySQL

It wasn’t much of a search to be honest, almost immediately I found InkScape, and what a tool it is!

As you can see from the screen shot below, it is exactly what you would expect from an illustration application, allowing you to edit lines, fills, nodes. Also you will see that on my Mac I am running the X11 windowing system to load the software.

Inkscape

You can download the software for free from the Inkscape site. Everything installs easily, just like any other desktop application.

In use it can be quite quirky, for example it took me a few tries to work out graduated fills, but that is only to be expected from open source software as the volunteers who work on these tools like to spend time on the glamor or glory jobs, not making it easy to use!

I am so happy I found Inkscape, I am sure it would make a great addition to your software tool collection too.

Crumb Trail Navigation in WordPress

A website with blog building project I have been working on recently is Modern Eco Homes, and again it is a WordPress as CMS solution. For this project we wanted to give the existing site a usability makeover. As well as navigation problems, we also wanted to give a little SEO lift.

Back in the day even my hard coded sites would often feature a crumb trail. That is where you can see where you are in the site hierarchy from Home -> Parent -> Current page.

Even though WordPress features the concept of page parents and children, it doesn’t have crumb trail built in.

Luckily Yoast has a plugin that is perfect.

All you have to do is install the plugin and drop in a tiny piece of code into your page template and ta-da, nice and easy crumb trail navigation. I am sure you will agree, it works well …

Eco Outdoor Furniture 2014 Modern Eco Blog

I love WordPress, but the WordPress community really rocks!

Twitter Timer Sends Timed Twitter Reminders

Twitter has rapidly grown far beyond the original “what are you doing” status service idea. More and more wonderfully creative ideas are surfacing around Twitter, such as this reminder service called “Timer“.

The idea is you send Timer a direct message in the following format:

Twitter Reminder

So the number of minutes, followed by a space, followed by the reminder message, eg.

Twitter Timer Sends Timed Twitter Reminders : Codswallop

This would send me a reminder in 5 minutes saying “call Peter”.

You get the reminder as a direct message in the following format:

Twitter Reminder

So my previous example would look like this:

Twitter

Not only that, because it is sent as a direct message, you also get an email. I don’t have my Twitter hooked up to my phone number, but I would assume if you did it would send a SMS text message also.

Now providing I remember to add a reminder I have no excuses for forgetting things

Pretty neat isn’t it?

RSS to Email MailChimp

mailchimp If you have a blog then you need to provide email access to your content. Very few people outside of blogging and tech audiences understand RSS but everyone understands email.

Up to now most people have used Aweber, Feedblitz and FeedBurner for this, but now they have a new competitor.

MailChimp is a commercial service that takes the idea of “blog to email” and builds it out to be a professional email software tool.

Yes, if you have more than 100 subscribers you have to pay for it. So already it is different to Feedburner and Feedblitz. There are more features though, so it is really more in competition with Aweber.

Now I love Aweber. I have written about how bloggers should use Aweber before. That said, MailChimp is really going for it with additional features that Aweber do not have. Some very cool, but more advanced like an API for programmers.

MailChimp starts at $15 for 500 emails so is competitively priced with Aweber, and there is a free trial.

You can see the full details of what you can do at the MailChimp site.

WordPress as a CMS

I have been on a bit of a love-fest lately about my favorite blogging software, WordPress.

This is because I have been using it more and more as a Content Management System for traditional sites, rather than just as a blog platform. Combined with the fantastic Thesis theme I have never been so productive as a website builder.

It really is a delight to use, both as a developer and as an end user. If the client can use Hotmail then they are sure to be able to edit their own site in WordPress. This sort of functionality used to cost a lot of money (and still can) but WordPress is capable, flexible and free.

Some people get confused though thinking what I am suggesting is to have a blog look and feel, but that is not the case.

A traditional website can be built very quickly and you would be hard pressed to tell the difference between a WP based site and a hard coded one, on looks alone.

Whites Recycling Solutions is a site I am working on right now (excuse the lack of graphics, it’s a work in progress). The client has already been in and tweaked the content before I even got around to teaching them the system, how is that for ease of use?

You will see the home page is static content, while the “blog” style page is in a tab, under “news“.

No technical fancy work was required, it’s just a settings/reading option:

Reading Settings WordPress

People who are used to hard-coded or traditional CMS systems often worry about being able to cater to the sorts of request clients often have, such as “I want it to look like this apart from on that page”.

No worries there either, you can have custom page templates which are then selected from a drop down when editing the page, or you can do what I did on me and my friend Ryan’s Credit Card Pundit site and introduce a little WordPress logic.

We wanted the banners for the various types of credit cards to appear on every page apart from the credit cards page, which would have just been ugly duplication.

It couldn’t have been easier!

code

Translated into English we get “If this is not page ‘8′ then do the following” – easy, eh?

The one problem with WordPress is keeping up with the upgrade cycle, I just wish they would release patches separate from functionality upgrades so people could keep up.

Other than that, I LOVE WordPress … can you tell?

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