My Monkey Do

A Log of Coding Solutions

open source

HTML 5 Flash Fallback Video Player w/ RTMP

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There are a ton of video player that use HTML5 with flash fallback.  A few years ago I found one named JW Player.  This was a great player that was fully featured.  Keyword being “was”.  I was developing a website that would be using this player, but for the time being I used the free version of the player because I was hoping for a promo code to show up.  As I was developing the site, the company that owns JW Player upped the price from a simple $79 fee to a yearly $99 fee.  This was a big jump in price and developers complained a whole lot, including myself.  (i got the CEO to respond! woohoo!)  but no changes came of it (as of now anyway).

 

When One Door Closes…

Onto a search for a new javascript player that could do HTML5, Flash fallback, and RTMP streaming when flash is used.  A few players I found were jPlayer, videoJS, MediaElement.js, Flowplayer.  Flowplayer costed about $99(to remove the watermark) plus I wasn’t sure if I needed to purchase the flash player for flash fallback.  Confusion is not good to a potential buyer.  jPlayer was the most popular of the free ones, but I couldn’t get the RTMP to work with my video for some reason.  I got the sample to work, but not mine, weird.  videoJs scared me because I saw a post were the flash fallback used Flowplayer which means I could not use it commercially without purchasing.  Would’ve been a legal disaster if I used it and didn’t pay for it.  MediaElementJs was the only one I had no opinion.  It was actually the least popular of all the open source players.  But then I saw that it would be in WordPress core 3.6!  Case closed.  MediaElement.js would be the replacement.

 

Another one Opens

As it turns out MediaElement does not get Firefox to fallback to flash if I use a mp4 video file.  It simply errors out.  It does however, support the webm format.  The WebM format is sponsored by Google and is supposedly the next industry standard for web videos so it would be a good thing if I converted to it.  I found a free converter called Miro Video Converter to convert my mp4 to webm format.  In the end I have a video player that will be integrated into WordPress, a more standard video format, smaller footprint for HTML5 users (mp4 size: 163mb webm:78mb), and no money spent… but a whole lot of time spent looking for this… oh well, the client wins at least.

 

The Old

JW Player, mp4 format

The New

MediaElementJS (WordPress 3.6), webm format, Miro Video Converter

Convert Mac dfont files to TTF format

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Windows only accepts TTF font files while Mac format’s their font into Dfont format.  This tool by Peter Upfold lets you convert those beautiful Mac fonts into windows format.  Then with your TTF fonts you can upload them to http://www.font2web.com/ or http://onlinefontconverter.com and make web fonts!

http://peter.upfold.org.uk/blog/2008/03/11/dfontsplitter-convert-dfont-files-to-ttf/

What to do about PostScript type files?

Say you thought you had a dfont file, dragged the file into the tool above and got an error saying it’s not the right format.  Well, Looking more into the file you’ll probably find that you have a PostScript Type 1 file.

What I did was go to http://www.adobe.com/type/opentype/Type1-2-OpenType.pdf and find the OpenType format of the font you want to convert.  Then go to somewhere like http://www.fontpalace.com/.  There you can download your font in OTF format and it can be used everywhere.

prettyPhoto undefined description

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Problem

I had “undefined” showing up in the description of my lightbox whenever I left out the “title” attribute in my link.

 

Solution

I am using jQuery 1.6.2, the examples used 1.4.2.   To resolve the problem, look to change something like this:

 

if(pp_descriptions[set_position] != ""){
				$pp_pic_holder.find('.pp_description').show().html(unescape(pp_descriptions[set_position]));
			}else{
				$pp_pic_holder.find('.pp_description').hide();
			}

to this:

if(typeof pp_descriptions[set_position] != 'undefined' && pp_descriptions[set_position] != ""){
				$pp_pic_holder.find('.pp_description').show().html(unescape(pp_descriptions[set_position]));
			}else{
				$pp_pic_holder.find('.pp_description').hide();
			}

 

search terms used:  prettyphoto undefined description
source: http://forums.no-margin-for-errors.com/discussion/1915/when-there-is-no-title-element-displays-undefined/#Item_3

 

 

PuTTY

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PuTTY and its related tools are a free version of Telnet and SSH for windows.  It has been available since 1999 and I have heard about it since way back then, but I haven’t had a real need for it until just recently.  I used to use the SSH Secure Shell commercial client, but since that is technically not free to use for non-commercial use I decided to switch.

Uses for me

  • Login through SSH using Public Key authentication
  • Converts a Linux private key to a PC-usable key
  • SCP and SFTP clients

Download

PuTTY can be found here: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/

Open Source Licenses

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Originally published by Zack Rusin, found by using the WayBack Machine. I am not a lawyer and do not know legal stuff.  I posted this here for my reference and in case the wayback machine loses the page.  If this posting itself violates some kind of license let me know and I’ll take it down since I have no clue about licenses. The information here may or may not be out of date. Take it as a starting point to find out the differences between the licenses.

 

http://mymonkeydo.com/example/open_source_licenses.html