Comments on: how DRM fucks academics

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 15 May 2006 11:48:07 +0000

FLV is not DRM protected content; it is freely distributable (as far as I know there isn’t even a way to provide DRM with FLV format). Content is encoded into FLV rather than another format because flash player is the most widely used & available cross-platform browser plugin.

FLV is one of many container formats for video. Container formats are file formats which package up encoded audio and video streams. FLV can wrap many different video and audio codecs (compression/decompression schemes), though FLVs from YouTube come only with the FLV1/MP3 video/audio codec combination.

Other container formats include:

AVI
ASF/WMV (Windows Media)
MOV (Quicktime)
RM (RealMedia)
MP4
MPEG

There are plenty of available FLV players for any platform, though VLC is, in my opinion, the best one out there.

Apologies if that was too technical – I wrote the video encoder for a high profile video site very similar to YouTube and thought I would share what I learned.

By: Marco Fabbri

Marco Fabbri — Sun, 12 Feb 2006 02:03:39 +0000

Hi Danah, the patched (whitelisting bug) slogger mozilla extension is at http://filelodge.com/files/room10/249356/slogger-0.6.20060201_rev1.xpi . To save youtube videos I suggest using this GreaseMonkey script http://www.joshkinberg.com/blog/archives/2005/11/greased_google.php . To watch the downloaded videos VLC Player from VideoLAN ( http://videolan.org ) is really nice; it is the swiss knife of video playing (you name a video format, VLC will be able to play it). In addition, using VLC, you can easily transcode the downloaded videos to other formats.

By: jc

jc — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 12:46:08 +0000

I’ve used VLC, it’s fairly friendly:
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

By: Jacob Haller

Jacob Haller — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 12:53:25 +0000

Wow, that is _not_ a good user interface. OK, here’s how I got it to work.

1) Open flv_viewer_0.3.osx.

2) On the screen that opens up, click on ‘Choose Folder’.

3) Navigate to the folder that contains the video you want to watch and click on ‘Choose’.

4) The videos in that folder should now have been added to the flv_viewer screen; they should be listed under ‘FLV List’.

5) Click on the name of the video you want to view. It should start playing.

By: Riad

Riad — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 11:14:14 +0000

If nothing else works, you can alwasy try to capture the video from the screen.
I know that VisualMarks, a tool for usability lab, should be able to capture video and audio together.
I have never used it though.

http://www.usersfirst.com/index.jsp?page=products

By: Riad

Riad — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 11:07:33 +0000

http://www.usersfirst.com/index.jsp?page=products

By: zephoria

zephoria — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 11:06:39 +0000

Jacob – i tried to figure out how to make that damn thing work for over an hour – if you figure it out, could you tell me?

By: zephoria

zephoria — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 11:05:53 +0000

No WoolfCamp for me – i’m speaking at AAAS

By: Jacob Haller

Jacob Haller — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 09:38:24 +0000

This claims to allow flv files to viewed on the Mac, for what that’s worth: http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/28763

By: Jo

Jo — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 06:58:44 +0000

Are you coming to WoolfCamp?