Cooking videos that work for everybody

While someone still wonders how to get started with mLearning, a good old friend of mine was recently struggling with much more tangible and (sadly enough) trivial concerns as witnessed in the following lines:

Believe me. I spent no less than three days trying to have a bl***y mp4 video showing up in that sh***y tablet. Three crazy days, myself and a couple of colleagues unable to get it running on screen!

Actually, if you could read the whole story, you would see that in the end he found his way through the impenetrable jungle of video resolutions, framerate, codex, and such amenities. He was doing actually ok since he found a few good and effective video conversion tools, among which you might want to try Avidemux, a free video editor designed for simple cutting, filtering and encoding tasks.

More in general, the pain came when he had tried to embed the right video, in the right format, with the right HTML code that could work on each of the devices to be supported (along with their embedded web browser). And here, to be honest, I could kind of feel his own frustration.

Indeed, if you limit your needs to flash-enabled devices, you can actually sort this out by carefully selecting and integrating one of the several JS and flash-based video players available out there. But even valuable simplification attempts could not make him feel better. The multidimensional matrix of video formats, flash player options and HTML5 compatible-browsers were just too much for him. In the end, he gave up.

This is where I decided to step in, try to get just a little bit further and look at how others were making do with that.

Did I sort it our in the end? Of course no, but I’ve been surfing the web for a while, and happened to see this “vid.ly” upcoming service (still in beta as per now) by a company named encoding.com. Encoding.com markets itself as “the leading global provider of studio-class video services for websites offering user-generated and premium video”.

Besides being presented as the emerging actor in the battle between Google, Microsoft and others over the future of HTML5 video standards, this new service looks very interesting. They say vid.ly seamlessly allows playing the same video on the five major desktop browsers (Chrome, Firefox, IE, Opera and Safari),  mobile devices such as the iPhone, Android and BlackBerry (but also Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Samsung), and a bunch of gaming devices sich as Nintendo DS, Wii and PSP.

All in all, the vid.ly service actually looks smart and promising. Their reaction time to my beta activation code request was almost immediate.

If you read through their website, you can see that Vid.ly mostly deliver, out of the original video format, the right “conversion” format for each device attempting to access the video.

When a user visits a vid.ly url we automatically detect the device or browser type and deliver the correctly formatted video from a high quality CDN network.

The conversion is done as soon as your original video format gets uploaded, At that same time, a new unique vid.ly URL is sent to you via email together with a bunch of embedding options. Among which, of course, the ready-made <video> HTML5 embed script, such as the one that you can see below:

<video id="vidly-video" controls="controls" width="640" height="390">
	<source src="http://vid.ly/3e7r1e?content=video" />
	<script id="vidjs" language="javascript"
	 src="http://m.vid.ly/js/html5.js"></script>
</video>

Support for legacy Flash players is also available.

Fine. The idea is smart enough. Most probably we will shortly see something similar (maybe vid.ly itself) embedded in YouTube, Vimeo or such, providing flash-free video streaming to every internet user. At vid.ly they even see their service as a potential booster to Twitter and other social networking sites, considering the massively growing use of such services from mobile devices.

What we all need to see, now, is how the vid.ly guys will cope with our daily customers, who expect their mobile packages to be self-consistent to reduce internet traffic on the go and assure content integrity even with bad or no connectivity at all.

I asked the same question to the vid.ly guys.  Let us see what they will come back with.

___

P.S.: It’s just a pity that I could not include the vid.ly video above using their ready made HTML5 code. Unfortunately the WordPress editor does not seem to digest HTML5 tags yet…