XtremeCamera

Busy Beavers Bring Video To XC

June 23, 2008

Notice many changes to XtremeCamera lately? We’ve been really busy lately and things are not going to be letting up any time soon. Thought it might be time to give my readers a little insight into why these changes are coming fast and furious and even the reason behind the changes.

All the changes you see today, from the remake of the Blog on your homepage, or the newly redesigned emergency contact page called ‘Problem?’ have been on a To-Do list for a few months, while other ones, like the Amazon Affiliate store, are completely new. There is a renewed vigor in every Admin on staff that you’re likely to see many more of these types of changes.

Video and MP3’s

The most time consuming, most demanding, addition to the community is the new Video & Audio section. Since I was the one that spearheaded this section, championed its inclusion since the days when YouTube was still a tiny website used by its creators to exchange vacation videos, I thought I’d share with you just how hair-pulling, aspirin-gobbling, blood-pressure-exploding, experience this was to get ready to unveil. It was, in a word, a ‘bitch’. And the funny thing is, this video section was never designed to be a YouTube-type service. XtremeCamera Video and MP3’s is a more of a service to our premium members than a place to come to watch videos. Let’s face, when it comes to spending hours watching entertaining (sometimes moronic) videos, YouTube pretty much has the market cornered. But more on this later…

The idea of bringing video to XtremeCamera came to us when we were outlining, in draft form, what the overall site design would be. In the overall site draft we included a page of online video tutorials. Back then, 4 years ago, we knew these would screen-capture movies that would be embedded into the tutorials page via Apple QuickTime. Since every Admin from the very beginning have been, and still are, huge Apple fans, we had no problem creating QT files for the tutorials using a product called SnapzPro. It wasn’t until earlier this year (2008) that we actually changed from using SnapzPro to a much more powerful, and expensive, product called ‘ScreenFlow’. But I digress.

During the many days we hammered out the tutorials page, how they would be done, who would do them, what topics to cover, I came up with the idea of taking it one step further and allow our members to have a video ‘profile’ clip on their Profile Page (I still love this idea by the way and I am working on a way to do it) and then that expanded to allowing members to create their own video tutorials and post them for others to see and learn from. But, 4 years ago setting up a video processing system on your own servers was not easy, and was very expensive. Bandwidth concerns were also considered. In the end we abandoned the idea and stuck to screen capture tutorials that we would produce, movies would be restricted to how-to do clips on how things on XtremeCamera work.

In 2007, a year out of beta (you can still see under some members usernames that they have been members ‘Since 2006’) I got it into my head again that we should offer the option of posting videos to the site. So I began looking for an inexpensive solution. At this point we had negotiated great terms with the company that we were using for our ‘Co-Locating’ (our servers sit in a huge company in Texas) that included a lot of bandwidth each month, so bandwidth was no longer a real concern. Anyway, after spending a few days downloading and installing just about every ‘YouTube’ clone out there I again decided against it. Those clones included so much advertising, so much ‘branding’ that no matter what we did it would always look different than the rest of XtremeCamera, and to put it bluntly, YouTube is, to me anyway, a very unattractive site, and so were the clones. As badly as I wanted to add video capabilities to our community it just wasn’t time.

Then, one day this year, I discovered a video script that did what we needed it to do. I installed it, and all the server software we needed to actually process AVI video clips into Flash Video (FLV), and most importantly, this script was template driven and should have been easy to transform into our look and feel. To top it all off, anyone could buy a license (which we did) that would remove their minimal branding from the scripts. This was the set of scripts that ultimately wound up being used for what you see today.

Getting to know these scripts well enough to be able to manipulate them to work inside our state-of-the-art OO PHP (object-oriented PHP) took months. Worse, this was a job that our PHP coder, Sean, did not have time to do. Not to mention that Sean wasn’t 100% behind the project to begin with. I don’t want to speak for Sean, but I get this feeling he doesn’t think its something that will do well in the community. Perhaps it won’t, but I could not let the idea go. I decided that I would learn these scripts, that I would integrate them into XtremeCamera, despite the fact that Sean’s OO PHP was light-years ahead of code we’re using.

What I decided to do, finally, after more than a dozen attempts, was to use the strength of Sean’s code as a frame for the video scripts. I wouldn’t even try to blend the two, just find a way to feed the scripts into Sean’s scripts. Then I would begin to work on the templates and essentially build our set of templates that matched, as close as we could, the look of XtremeCamera. I’m still not done, but the video side is functioning.

Whether or not the video side to our community takes off and becomes big is really beside the point. Like the original purpose of YouTube, we (The Admins) plan on using it to share video and mp3’s with each other (and you). I plan to upload photography tutorials, photoshop tutorials, and many other types of video. I hope that Premium members do the same. The video section is a great way to do what it was designed to do; share video and audio. Oh, and we plan contests for the best viral video (we plan to announce this soon, with a awesome first prize that will likely blow away our members). More on this when the time comes.

So, in the end, I think the video and audio side of the site is coming along nicely. Don’t be discouraged if you never see hundreds of videos online. Its not about that. This is not about the number of videos posted or the number of views, or votes, or anything else. Its all about having a way for our premium members to share video and audio. The XtremeCamera Video and MP3 section is a service to our premium members, although all members can view the pubic galleries of our members. If our premium members use this section as I describe it above than we’ve done our job. Now I know that there will be some saying that I am advocating copyright infringement, but I’m not. Although I do strongly back the real intent of ‘Fair Use’ laws, I in no way believe our site should be used to violate ownership rights to content. (It’s a fine line, I know.) Members should not upload content they know would be illegal, so if you’re confused about fair use take a look at this website and get informed. http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html

John Manzione
OnSite Admin