The Kyle File

If this works, I'll have the world's shortest Twitter/StatusNet links. :) I 😍 dot.tk

T-mobile has just changed our plans. Now we can even send and receive real email from these old phones, and my wife can make unlimited calls to landline phones and texts to cell phones in 50 countries, and all this for about $3 more than we paid last month. These guys really rock!

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.

I just found out how extremely easy it is, and how nice it looks, to include an HTML5 player for the audio and video files I post to The Kyle File. I’ll be updating my music page and prior posts shortly, and all future audio or video posts will include an HTML5 player with a fallback to a standard download link. This means that if you have a browser that supports HTML5, you will see a nice-looking player where you will be able to play the file directly in your browser, or you can right-click or navigate to the player and use its context menu to save the file to your computer. The player will automatically determine the file format that is supported by your browser and allow you to play or download it. If you have a browser that doesn't support HTML5, you will notice that there will now be two download links for each file, one for the Ogg Vorbis file and another for the mp3 file, (audio), and WebM and mp4, (video). Otherwise, there will be no difference in how you interact with The Kyle File. You can open the file with the browser and let it choose the player or plugin for you, or you can save it from the right-click menu exactly as you did in the past. This will just add choice for everyone and better functionality on the most recent browsers.

On a side note, this seems to be very similar to the way Posterous is handling audio and likely video files on newer browsers now, and I did finally find what they did with my download links, but I couldn’t get my music files to play using the “play” button, there was no “play” selection in the right-click menu and sometimes the controls randomly disappeared. Also, I find that here on Tunblr, I setup the player myself because I’m storing my files in a Dropbox, so I can title the player panel myself and I have full control over how my players and download links are presented. Enjoy the new functionality, and leave any suggestions or comments in the section below.