The Kyle File

Wow! This new HTML5 theme is much easier to hack on than the theme I was using.

I made some changes to my theme. My tags, post notes and comments appear to be placed better on the screen now. Take a look and let me know what you think. Man I love playing around with all this stuff. :)

I discovered the poster attribute in the video tag, along with the proper ffmpeg command to pull an image from an arbitrary video frame. So the black boxes that once characterized my videos have now been replaced with frames from the videos themselves. My code gets a little longer, but I have a template that I copy and paste from, so it’s still extremely easy to implement, and at least in Firefox 4.0, accessibility to screen readers is much better than with the Flash plugin.

In honor of the first birthday of WebM, my HTML5 video page is now up, offering the ability to watch and download the videos I post to The Kyle File. Your browser should automatically display the video players if it can, and if not, it will show you the download link for the video and a link to the version on my Youtube channel. Due to some trouble I’m having with my video editor, only one of my two videos is online and fully functional at the moment, but I hope to have the problem fixed soon.

Also, I have an unfortunate correction to report. In an earlier post, I mentioned offering downloads of video files in the mp4 format along with the WebM files. Unfortunately, due to space constraints, I will only be offering WebM files. But don’t dispare. WebM is a format that is becoming more widely supported each day, it will soon be the primary format used by Youtube, and a link to the Youtube version of each video will be included for browsers and devices that don’t yet support WebM, both on the video page and when I post a video in the future. Yes, I will still be posting to Youtube, I just wanted anadditional and easier way for people to be able to not only watch, but also download my video files.

Release the balloons and streamers and cut the cake for a big happy birthday to the WebM project, which turns 1 year old today! Thanks Google for freeing the VP8 video codec for everyone to use and enjoy, which makes this project possible and makes publishing video on the internet easier than ever, and which could even bring software freedom to the attention of the masses. Just one thing though. Hey Google, could you please show my Lift Every Voice and Sing video a little WebM love? It still wants me to install the Flash plugin in order to watch it. I still have the original file I uploaded if you need it. Thanks.