Topic: Patrick Stewart Knows What Makes a Good Movie

[Cools]

This could've been the best movie ever

[PyroMenace]

lol, that was awesome.

Patrick Stewart is the fucking man.

[JacksRag(e)]

haha, awesome. 

And is that Ricky Gervais?

[Quemaqua]

I do believe it is.

And yes, that's funny as all get out.  I had to control my laughter at a couple parts so as not to wake Julia.

[Cobra951]

Hahahahaha!  I've never seen Extras, and I didn't bother to read anything at youtube.  So I started out thinking this was for real.  That made it all the funnier.   

[Xessive]

Haha that was hilarious

Patrick Stewart is awesome

[iPPi]

Video has been removed .

[Cobra951]

I managed to download the flv file, with a helper site.  The only app which I've found so far which plays this flash-video format is the one the site has linked--and it kinda sucks.  If anyone wants, I can make the 9981KB file available via my FTP.

[Cools]

Can you do that for me Cobra?

I'll see if I can convert it to something usefull and upload it to a public server.

[Cobra951]

No problem.

[Removed. Bug Cools about a conversion.]

Edit:  Let me know when you have it.  I don't want to leave it exposed on the public folder forever.

[ScaryTooth]

Extras is a great show. Not sure if it's still on anymore though. It was hilarious.

[Cools]

Thanks Cobra, I got it.

[Cobra951]

OK, so it's your baby now.   

[Cools]

Windows Media
Quicktime

Download away. I'll keep it on the server for the next couple of days.

[iPPi]

Awesome.  Thanks cools.

[Antares]

Why would you even bother with quicktime?

[Xessive]

Why would you even bother with quicktime?

Well, I guess he figured WMV for all the Windows people and Quicktime for all the Mac people. Quicktime videos run like a dream on Macs, but WMV's need extra stuff and some tweaking to get them to run ideally on Macs.

[Antares]

hahaha, that was awesome.

[iPPi]

Gold.

[Cools]

Why would you even bother with quicktime?

Originally I was going to post only the Quicktime movie, just to piss of Que.
That and converting to .mov was a single step for me, while for WMV I had to touch a PC.

[Ace_O_Spades]

I wanna see that movie... starring patrick stewart

wow that sounds gay

however, it would have comedy value

[W7RE]

HAHA, that was awesome!


Thanks for converting it, cools.

[Xessive]

Hmm, apparently I can play .FLV files in ZoomPlayer just like any video. Interesting.

I should figure out how to extract them. I might need your guidance, Cobra.

EDIT: I installed the VideoDownloader extension. Pretty sweet!

[Cobra951]

Zoomplayer?  I may need your guidance.  Never used it.  I'll go search for it.

[Cools]

Hmm, apparently I can play .FLV files in ZoomPlayer just like any video. Interesting.

Any idea which versions? I can make you some sample .FLVs to test it out.

[Xessive]

Well my ZoomPlayer is v4.51 beta RC1, and the FLV is played is the one Cobra made. I think that's a Flash 9 based file.

I'm just happy I didn't have to get an individual FLV Player.

[Cobra951]

Well, it doesn't work for me.  It won't show the FLV file on the open-file dialog box, and it gives me an error if I right-click the FLV and do an "Open with . . ." Zoom Player.  Looking at their FAQ page, it seems that this player relies a lot on external components (filters, codecs).  My guess is that you have some sort of Macromedia filter installed, maybe as part of some program you had installed earlier.

[Xessive]

Hmm, I do have the K-Lite Codec Pack installed. I just noticed I do have the Macromedia standalone Flash Player installed as well, so that's probably it. Although, oddly enough the FLV won't play in the original Flash Player at all.

The file plays in all my media players actually. I just tested it with WMP, Media Player Classic, and ZoomPlayer (again just in case). I also noticed that my ZoomPlayer will play regular Flash .SWF files too.

[Cools]

Although, oddly enough the FLV won't play in the original Flash Player at all.

No, that's correct behaviour. The Flash player runs SWF files. FLVs are videos encoded in a special format to be played inside of SWF files themselves. So you can't just run FLVs without having a corresponding SWF (or an SWF that lets you pick which FLV to play) in the standalone player by itself.

[Cobra951]

In other words, Macromedia is forcing you to do things their way in their software, but other players let you have every freedom which is technically easy.  That surprises me not one bit.

So everything is as I suspected.  The good news is that there is some way to get general media players to recognize and play FLV video files.  Another (maybe better) option would be to locate some one-button app which takes FLV and spits out SWF.

[Cools]

In other words, Macromedia is forcing you to do things their way in their software, but other players let you have every freedom which is technically easy.  That surprises me not one bit.

In Macromedia's defense (now Adobe), FLV wasn't created as an end user delivery video format. You're not *supposed* to download individual FLV files and play them in some player. They were developed to facilitate Flash progressive downloading and streaming of video files into SWF files embedded in web pages without having to embed the full video in the actual SWFs (which would result in large files and is hard to update because you would need to recompile each time you released a new video).

FLVs are there to add another depth to Flash web application development, not to be used as standalone video files.

[Cobra951]

In other words, Adobe is forcing you to do things their way, because they want to hide the actual video from you, so that you have to be online and use their software to watch it.   

[Cools]

You got it!

In all honesty, I think FLVs are very nice from a developer standpoint. You can stream videos into Flash dynamically, prevent people from actually downloading the videos (I get that request A LOT from businesses) and since a lot of users have Flash installed, it works almost universally.

Let's look at it from a user stand point: online players are often very basic, you have to keep the page in focus for it to not stutter and I hate busy sites that don't let you download an WMV or MOV alternative...