First of all, and the biggie, is adding on-line ticket sales to the BMTG site. All of this is being processed by PayPal. It’s now received committee approval and my final design has been tested today… hopefully it will all go live by the end of the week.
The back-end is a MySQL database containing two tables - one containing the ticket details and the other is a control table for the on-line charges. The ticket page then uses PHP to access the database and construct it’s content, including ticket tables, PayPal links and even writing the description at the top of the page to describe any processing fees (they currently intend to charge just a set charge per ticket bought on-line, but in case they want to do something more complex, such as add P&P fees or per-transaction fees, I’ve added that in).
However, how many sales it will generate I’m not sure about.. I remain sceptical (especially as there’s a 50p processing charge).
I’ve also changed the majority of the sites pages as I improve accessibility - nothing visually has changed, but a lot of code has been modified.
Meantime I’ve found a problem with my earlier change to make the YouTube code valid. It seems that when I blank the screen using script.aculo.us code, the YouTube video stays highlighted, getting the way of any photos displayed. This only occurs on one screen (the only one where video and photos are in close proximity) so I’ve had to change that back to the original YouTube code whilst I investigate further.
I use embedded YouTube, not only in this Blog, but on other sites as well. Recently this has been coming back to bite me as the code that YouTube supply for embedding is not, erm, valid. Or rather it doesn’t validate according to W3C rules.
Which means my sites have started falling foul of various on-line checkers which once were happy to say I had good sites.
Anyway, a touch of Googling and I found my answer - a piece of code that will not break validation. Hooyah. If you embed YouTube videos then this is recommended. Oh, and it apparently works with Google Video as well.
Meantime, YouTube have granted me a Directors account (cue diabolical laughter).
I recently added a nice utility named Amberjack to my Copy+ site that produces site tours.
The Amberjack technical forum has been reporting problems with some tours not working in IE. Yet mine did. They couldn’t work it out. Until they validated the HTML. Mine was clean, theirs had errors.
Well, I don’t wish to say “I told you so”, but I’ve banging on about the advantages of clean code since… well… a long time. And I guess this proved my point.
Both this and my BMTG site follow the same rules (except the YouTube code breaks it… nothing much I can do about that though) and neither have had any issues with cross-browser compatibility.
Now, let’s get one thing straight before I start… I don’t “do” video. I’m not an expert video editor/converter/whatever. So to get a chapter off a DVD onto YouTube ended up being quite a chore. But I managed it. So before I forget, I thought I’d document the process here. There’s probably a utility out there that would do all this in one, quick, go… but I haven’t yet found it.
Stage 1 - Copying the DVD
I used DVD Shrink to extract the DVD to my hard drive.
Stage 2 - Merge the VOB’s
DVD’s are held in VOB format and the chances are that the chapter you require isn’t on one VOB, but stretched across two. VOBMerge will merge VOB files together. Stage 1 of this process is required to use VOBMerge as it doesn’t seem to work directly from the DVD. However, I found that by simply doing the first process, the number of VOB’s changed and my chapter ended up in one VOB, and hence stage 2 wasn’t required.
Stage 3 - Convert the VOB
I used MediaCoder to convert the VOB to a more friendly format - in this case MPEG1, as I knew the utility used in the next stage would accept it. I pushed all quality values up to max because compression wouldn’t be an issue at this stage. I also used MediaCoder to save out the video in a more YouTube friendly resolution of 320×240, as I find this more difficult to do at the next stage.
Stage 4 - Edit the Video
I now have a VOB converted to MPEG. Unfortunately, there’s more in this VOB than just the chapter I’m after, so I used VirtualDub to remove the excess material. I then used this program to save the final file, ensuring it fits within the 100mb upload limit of YouTube. This was a struggle and I found using the DivX decoder at 1500kbps gave the best result - I fiddled this with for a while to get the best quality as close to the limit as possible. In this case, the end result was 95mb.
And that was it! Simple, eh? And here’s the end result….
Oh dear, I’ve discovered YouTube. And how to imbed videos in Blogs.
That does mean the “famous” Bungee video is now in the Magalluf blog. Oh, and the equally famous Shooting Stars skit has made it into the Borwick blog as well.
I use embedded 
..my head is getting far too big.