By the way, TVW’s tech director emailed me below referring to “flash in a minimal fashion.” This is the only file I found:
They should have more.
History, politics, people of Oly WA
© 2024 Olympia Time
Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑
History, politics, people of Oly WA
By the way, TVW’s tech director emailed me below referring to “flash in a minimal fashion.” This is the only file I found:
They should have more.
© 2024 Olympia Time
Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑
The front of tvw’s new site has a flash player on the right hand side of the home page under the featured video heading. Also with every search result that is recent and has video associated with it, has a preview of the clip in flash.
Problem is also that this is auto-starting. What if you have multiple video objects on a single page? It really needs to be set by default to not auto start.
Yes, Daniel. Totally lame that it auto starts, but thanks to anonymous there, I’m going to check out the previews. Might be cool, depending on what they clip out for a preview.
Emmett, the previews are 2 minutes of an event about 5 minutes in, this is just simply to make it easier for someone who may not know what hearing or event they are looking for but may recognize someone speaking. We have had many people over the years asking for this kind of feature so we decided to add it. It is not a highlight clip. Those previews can be found when you’re viewing search results.
As for the above flash? That was only linked on the site back in 2006 for the duration of the video voters guide. It’s still physically in the elections folder on our site but only for our reference use the next time I create a voter’s guide interface. There are no links to this directly in the current site.
I would like to If I may, elaborate on the flash issue. We have reasons for not jumping into all flash on tvw.org right now; like I mentioned in the email, we will not move to flash for our video content until the release of flash ver 9. Currently flv video files for a 2 hour event are nearly 500mb each, and a flash server to comparably handle the traffic streams we serve is not free (http://www.adobe.com/products/flashmediaserver/productinfo/pricing/#ft2).
We cover over 300 events in video and almost 700 in audio a year and soon that number may triple, so you can very quickly see how a 500mb file can be a problem.
TVW’s library of content exceeds 60,000 hours and as you know it keeps growing. We do not intend to remove media from the site so we have to be smart about making the right choices and balancing between what make sense to both our infrastructure/limited resources and the delivery mechanisms that allows the content to get out there on the web.
That said, Windows media server is free, and the file size for the same video is 150mb and the quality is much better.
There is light at the end of the tunnel since flash will soon support mpeg4. This format is lower in file size and much better quality than flashes flv format and arguably the windows format as well. We have a really great interface we are working on for the flash player when we implement it. Let me know if any of you want to test drive it before we launch (feedback is always welcome)
I really do appreciate your dialog; it helps us keep in touch with users of the site and helps us also be the best in the country for what we do. We should all be proud of what we have in WA State. Because there’s not many states with “TVW’s” that offer the amount of content and breadth of coverage TVW offers Washingtonians. My hope is that more us get involved and use tvw’s resources!
Scott F.
TVW & Washingtonian
If bandwidth is an issue, all the more reason these things don’t autostart.