Author Archives: traceypooh

IA forums now do “inline reply”

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One thing that’s driven me a bit kooky is every time I “reply to this post” in the Internet Archive forums, it drives the browser to a new form page with no context/content of the post I was just looking at!

Very pleased to finally with some coffee just make it javascript “inline reply” right at the post you are looking at, so you can reference everything you were just thinking about and how you were going to reply.

It gracefully degrades to prior behaviour for those without javascript enabled.

[The prior behaviour:
Ooh, nice post and points.
But I gotta get in there with some comments… OK, I have some ideas ready to type…
[reply button]
Say, is that Jane’s Addiction old stuff coming up on random play, I like this…
oh crap, what was I going to say again?
what post was I looking at again?
Say, is that a lower-than-normal plane flying outside?
…
]

new off-site video/audio embed codes

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We are about to rollout a “new new” video/audio player 😎

You can see it in action now with our upcoming embed codes to go with this new player.

It will allow for additional much wanted features like:
– off-site playlists
– fullscreen in many cases
– subtitles/captions

as well as the standard arbitrary width/height and “autoplay” options.

You can see some examples here:

http://www.archive.org/help/video.php

The rest is coming soon (if you are eager, you can even “opt in” now by clicking here:

http://www.archive.org/details/movies&newplayer=jw

(then take a look at one of your favorite items).

Now relax, sit back, and enjoy an archive video!

Cheers!
–tracey

new audio/video player — safari/IE improvements

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below the current audio/video player on archive.org you have probably seen by now the link:

Would you like to try our new audio/video player? (beta!)

We had some known problems in this beta rollout that affected audio MP3 playback.

Specifically, on Safari, some 30-70% of the time (and it varied widely) the MP3 loading/setup would fail.  This has been fixed.   On Internet Explorer, we didn’t have the MP3 “flash based playback” option setup using the new audio player — and the lead developer, Michael Dale, came over today and fixed that for us.   Hooray!

So at this point, I believe the audio/video player is true “beta” — feature complete with a few things to smooth out left but the finish line is close:

1) i need to add back in captions/subtitles (it’s there in the player, just need to feed them through with our playlist)

2) video items with 3+ videos may play the last video 2x.  working on that!  😎

hopefully, we can all listen to some nice archive music this weekend in peace without issues with this new player!  now grab your headphones or turn up those speakers…

-tracey

improved h.264 derivatives!

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We have thoroughly tested a newer and simpler way to create h.264 derivatives!

Changes you’ll notice:

  • More pixels!  previously 320 x 240    goes to 640 x 480 pixels
  • Slightly higher video bitrate — from about 512kb/s   to   about  700kb/s bitrate
  • Switching from mp4creator container maker to ffmpeg container + qt-faststart
  • Less back-end commands to make high-quality derivative

Nice things about this derivative (similar to prior derivative):

  • Plays in adobe flash plugin
  • Plays on all versions of iphone and ipad
  • Starts quickly, nearly instant seeking even to unbuffered areas of the video

Here’s a sample of how we do it with just 3 simple commands.  (We do/you should adjust “-r” argument appropriately to your video’s frames-per-second.  We also adjust the “640” in the “-vf scale” argument to be appropriate for the video’s *actual* aspect ratio, etc.  So for example, the 640 might become 852 for 16:9 widescreen video.  Although for our .mp4 specific derivative and playback ability on iPhone (1st gen and thus all versions), we would actually downrez that to 640×360).

ffmpeg -deinterlace -y -i 'camels.avi' -vcodec libx264 -fpre libx264-IA.ffpreset -vf scale=640:480 -r 20 -threads 2 -map_meta_data -1:0 -pass 1 -an tmp.mp4


ffmpeg -deinterlace -y -i 'camels.avi' -vcodec libx264 -fpre libx264-IA.ffpreset -vf scale=640:480 -r 20 -threads 2 -map_meta_data -1:0 -pass 2 -acodec aac -strict experimental -ab 128k -ac 2 -ar 44100 -metadata title='Camels at a Zoo - http://www.archive.org/details/camels' -metadata year='2004' -metadata comment=license:'http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/' tmp.mp4

qt-faststart tmp.mp4 'camels.mp4'

our preset file:
http://www.archive.org/~tracey/downloads/libx264-IA.ffpreset

 

For the adventurous out there, you can create this same setup by building ffmpeg on mac, linux, or windows.  Linux is easy, but personally, I’m a mac gal.  So here’s some ffmpeg build tips on the mac.

Happy viewing!