twodinks.com

S3 Flowshield: Why does my video take forever to load?

Dave — Tue, 08 May 2012 02:25:39 +0000

Since this has tripped me up twice – with no excuse for the second time since Flowshield support had given me the friggin’ answer two months prior – I figured I’d post this here so I can find it again.

The reason it takes forever for videos to start playing in Flowshield is because of an encoding issue. Some encoders place all the metadata at the end of a video file. I can’t think of any logical reason to do that, but it’s something that has to be dealt with since videos won’t start playing until the metadata has been read. That means that the entire video has to be downloaded before it’ll play. Since that’s pretty much the antithesis to streaming, it’s really, really irritating. Here’s what Rapid Crush, makers of S3Flowshield, had to say:

The slow start is not an S3FlowShield or FlowPlayer issue. It is an encoding and Adobe Flash issue. In order for the flash player to start playing the video before it is fully downloaded, the metadata (information about the video) must be placed at the start of the file. Unfortunately, some encoders place this data at the end of the file instead, so the player cannot start playing the video until the entire file is downloaded and the metadata can be read. You can see more information and how to fix the files at these URLs:

http://chirale.wordpress.com/2009/05/30/video-on-flash-doesnt-buffer-maybe-a-flv-and-mp4-issue/

http://flowplayer.org/plugins/streaming/pseudostreaming.html#prepare

http://flowplayer.org/forum/2/12909

The information and proposed fixes on those sites above can get quite technical. Fortunately, there is a free and easy to use utility to fix the files that can be found here:

http://renaun.com/blog/2007/08/22/234/

I used the tool linked at the bottom and it worked a treat. A video that was taking 47.5 seconds to preload before the fix now takes just shy of 5 seconds to start playing. I can live with that.

And since one never knows whether things will continue to live on the intertubes, I’m preserving it here for posterity: QTIndexSwapper

I’m just going to drop this right here

Dave — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 17:17:19 +0000

So that if we ever get around to writing a new widget plugin from scratch, we’ll know where to look for guidance.

Add ‘first’ and ‘last’ classes to nav items

Dave — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 15:55:22 +0000

This comes in handy when you need to target the left and right (or top and bottom) ends of your navigation. Add it to your functions.php file.

Remove Post Meta or Post Info from Custom Post Types

Dave — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 19:10:38 +0000

It happens fairly often that we have a client who needs a custom post type as well as the usual blog/news feature. We need post meta and/or post info to show up for the news posts, but we don’t need that information on the custom post type since that information tends to be fairly static, and we don’t really care who the author of an attorney bio is, or who updated a used equipment list. So here’s how we pull that stuff out of CPTs.

Note that before we can write a function that addresses the custom post type, we have to add another function that makes that possible. We’re going to add this to our standardized functions file (which I’ll write about some other time).

Add Genesis SEO and Layout Options to CPTs

Dave — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 20:31:01 +0000

This is quick and easy. When you create a custom post type while running the Genesis framework, you won’t get Genesis’ built-in SEO controls or layout options. Add this to functions.php and they’ll show up.

Remove Items from WordPress Admin

Dave — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 02:09:07 +0000

Sometimes our clients don’t need access to everything WordPress offers — most often, the Links and Comments areas. Rather than deal with the confusion, we just hide what they don’t need:

Move Titles Around in Genesis

Dave — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 18:36:06 +0000

From time to time, we like pulling titles out of the normal flow of the page and put them somewhere else. Like above the content-sidebar div (or whatever div holds the page content). This causes problems, though; a customized homepage layout ends up with an unwanted title, category and archive pages display the first post title instead of the category title…etc. So with a fair amount of wailing and gnashing of teeth, and Joe’s skills at sleuthing, we came up with this solution:

Evaluate Types & Views Content; Don’t Display Empty Fields

Dave — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 17:08:50 +0000

Now that we’re all in love with Types & Views, we had to figure out how to evaluate custom fields to determine whether they should be displayed. After an hour of beating our heads against the wall, we came up with the code below. The thing that tripped us up? Check out this bit of code: msv="wpcf-wr_militaryservice". Nowhere in the documentation did it tell us that we need to prepend our field name with “wpcf-” to indicate that it’s a WordPress Custom Field. Without that, no worky. Anyway, here’s the code:

So here’s what’s going on up there. wpv-if initializes the if/then thingy. Then we created variables (mbr and msv) and the fields that the variables are drawing their value from. Then we evaluate those variables. If they’re not empty (!= ”), then go ahead and display the headers (h3) and the values of the fields. Then we close the if/then statements. Repeat until satisfied. Wet hands, wipe on pants.

CPT Single Post Template with Content Check

Dave — Sun, 25 Mar 2012 16:43:18 +0000

This code is written to work with Pippin’s Easy Custom Post Types. While we’re making heavy use of Types & Views these days (check them out, they’re effin’ awesome), we thought this code might be handy to someone out there in WP land.

We used this function to create a custom post type for listing attorneys at a law firm, saved as a post template called single-attorney.php.

Use custom field to assign content well background

Dave — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 02:38:48 +0000

Can I write a plugin that will give me the ability to upload a photo and assign it to .wrap or .content? We’ll see. The beginning of the idea is here on this post.