Shinichi Ono

Since Apple decided not to support flash, I have been looking for a good media player for my website.  It is a concern for any artists with portfolio site up in the internet.  Since iPhone and especially iPad are invaluable tools to show your portfolio, it is important that your website is up-to-date with the latest and compatible technology.

I must admit that I was not really aware of the changes we’re facing until recently.  I found myself looking for a new media player to add to my website without success, not realizing that we are in a transitional state.  HTML 5 is here but it is not yet a prevailing technology.  Flash is goner, at least for those who prefer Apple’s portable products.  Then what can you do?

Putting video on the website is easier than ever with HTML 5 supported browsers.  But you do want them to be integrated into your website’s design.  Wordpress is great, and many plugins have been very useful to embed and organize videos or any media files.  Only problem is that most of them use flash for their user interface.

So I was very happy to find an email from LongTail this morning that their new JW Player would be based on HTML 5 with ability to fall back to Flash when necessary.  It means that I can expect to see new plugins for Wordpress available in a near future.  But I still need to think about what codec to use.  It is a complicated world.

JW Player

I will be restructuring this website.  I am not going to change the design, since this minimalist design is perfect for may taste (based on Old Popular Yolk 2.2.2, a theme by Joshua Goodwin).

The most apparent change should be the placement of videos.  Due to convenience, I have posted them on the blog.  But it is not really a good idea to do so.  Blog post is supposed to be ephemeral that it is expected to disappear.  Not that it will be deleted from the website, but they, posts, should be forgotten after the passage of reasonable time.

Anyway I’ll start working on that.  All of them will be re-encoded, and be given a new page that should be their permanent home.

Then, I will be tweaking this and that, in search of perfection.

It came to my attention that Apple is ditching flash.  Since all my videos were encoded as .flv, this news is very sad.

I once had a hope that the flv would be the media format for the future.  I was wrong, dead wrong…  It is good thing that I don’t have so many videos right now(ha ha ha, because I knew something’s going to happen?!).

Google just released a new media file format called WebM (http://www.webmproject.org/) which looks very promising.  It is based on Vp8, the On2’s codec, and MKV will be the container.  By the way I had no idea that Google has bought On2.  For anyone encoding & uploading their own videos should look into this so that you won’t be left out from the rest of the world.

I don’t know how Apple reacts to this.  Finger-crossed for their support!

I thought I lost all my videos.

It is a time to find new media-player so that my videos would be able to on mobile devices.  Does anyone know a good player??