03/11/11 17:04:13 ¶ ●

Mac OS X Screencasts NEWS 11.03.2011

This is not the place where I usually talk about news made to Mac OS X Screencasts, but I don’t feel like I will be recording a “news video” soon. In fact I feel exhausted and tired.

A couple months ago, almost right after I made the German Mac OS X Screencasts website go live, I knew I had to overhaul the whole backend of Mac OS X Screencasts. I call that project “MOSX Projects" and it’s still a long, long, long way in the making. This project includes:

• Making everything more accessible for German and English visitors to either website.
• Re-encoding all videos so they will play on an iPad/iPhone.
• Re-encode all German videos so that I can upload a preview for the German website. (Currently a lot of screencasts on the German website are English.)
• Restructure how files are saved on the server. At the moment this is a mess. I have my system, but I changed it 2 or 3 times before. I never had enough time to move all the files to their new location, because that would mean to change every single link in the articles. You see hopefully how this is a huge project, as there are over 150 screencasts published on Mac OS X Screencasts.
• A couple other things I don’t want to talk about just yet, but you can trust me(/us) we have some pretty nice plans for Mac OS X Screencasts.

So what did I do today? I did one of the peskiest things on that list, which is:

Open every single article and replace the embed code with a HTML5 compatible equivalent … manually¹

I began at 13:00 and it took me until 16:30 to finish. Today I saw a lot of mess. Fortunately I saw all the screencasts I made from the beginning until now. They changed quite a lot and I’m pleased to see how my skills changed over the years!

Replacing means that screencasts hosted on macosxscreencasts.com have a HTML5 fallback, whereas YouTube videos are now embedded via iframe code, rather than the old embed code.
The screencasts hosted on macosxscreencasts.com won’t play on an iPad/iPhone though. The quality settings, especially for older screencasts, are just too high. Newer ones, like this one should play fine. It took me quite a while to figure out how to encode them correctly. Luckily I had help from a friend.

Why do I write such a long blog posting about something so trivial? Well, in fact this is one of the biggest steps MOSX Projects needed to make, and what I just did is the result of about 6 months of work. (Figuring out the correct encoding settings, figuring the HTML5 player out, etc.) I have annoyed so many support people, some of them weren’t very useful nor friendly, but that’s just how human work, I believe.
Anyway, the screencasts should play, and in the future should also play on your iDevice. In case you want to make my weekend become awesome, please consider a donation. (No PayPal account required)