[via:Joel Spolsky]
25 February 2010
12 January 2010
The current status of Youtube video quality/fmt’s
I’ve been posting Youtube links with the &fmt=18 format parameter for some time (example), but it looks like I’ll be checking if a “35″ version is available for all non-HD videos I publish here from now on. For HD material, I think I’ll default to &fmt=22 until I get faster hardware and more bandwidth.
If the video player’s HD or HQ button doesn’t light up when a video is loaded with a specific parameter, the requested version doesn’t exist.
Quote:
There are lots of fmts, and not all work with every video … :
my %fmtdesc=(
37 => “1080p mp4 (full-screen HQ)”,
35 => “high flv”,
34 => “standard flv”,
22 => “720p mp4 (full-screen HQ)”,
18 => “medium mp4″,
17 => “mobile 3gp”,
6 => “high quality flv”,
5 => “low quality flv”
);
Only #18 seems to work when it is not listed in the fmt_map, all others must be listed in order to be supported. Also, my text descriptions may not be completely accurate.
[via:Olli Sulopuisto]
18 December 2009
Content farming: conquering the web by producing cheap content based on search stats
“Most media companies are trying hard to increase those numbers, to boost the value of their online content until it matches the amount of money it costs to produce. But [...] instead of trying to raise the market value of online content to match the cost of producing it — perhaps an impossible proposition — the secret is to cut costs until they match the market value.”
You might have noticed how Sturgeon’s Law (“Ninety percent of everything is crud”) lives its own rampant life on the Internet in the form of these ad filled sites with unbelievably shitty how-tos and fake advice. But wait a year or two until clustered ponds of shit like eHow, Cracked and Livestrong might begin to mimic journalism. Quality media has only started its long, stinky journey down the rabit hole/drain pipe of the Intertube
Also: An interview with Demand Media CEO Richard Rosenblatt
[via:Olli Sulopuisto]
4 November 2009
3 November 2009
Here’s a how-to on configuring Apache’s cache expiration headers with .htaccess (link).
I get noticeable performance gain through this. The article’s headers settings allow my host‘s caching service (Squid accelerators), to serve unexpired, static content to clients without first sending 304 requests back to Apache.
EDIT: Squid reverse proxy examples
16 February 2009
9 January 2009
16 November 2008
Embedding higher quality Youtube videos (“&fmt=18″)
I’ve hardly linked to or saved a Youtube video without adding “&fmt=18” for the last six months, but embedding higher quality videos was a mystery to me.
The trick turns out to be the addition of &ap=%2526fmt%3D18 to the end of the url part of the embed code.
Embedded below is footage from the last moments of the sixties.
18 June 2008
Create a tar.gz archive of a directory while preserving permissions of files and sub-directories
tar -pczf name_of_your_archive.tar.gz /path/to/directory