ginger's thoughts

I’m excited to present the all new http://www.vquence.com/ website.

As you may know, Vquence is the online video startup that Chris Gilbey and I have created over the past months. We now have a great team of people working with us.

We’ve worked hard on our new Web presence to get a nice modern logo and Web design, to produce some good pictures to describe what we actually do, and to give a sneak preview of our technology.

Go check out the video on the front page. It’s a flash player (sorry, not Annodex yet) and has some awesome functionality hidden inside – thanks to Peter Withers, Michael Dale and Jamie Madden. Click on the video slices as they are playing. And notice how all the full videos are hosted on different video hosting sites (sorry to all those hosting providers who missed out – we simply haven’t got enough people working for us yet .

Thanks to Julian Frumar and Alister Walters for all the great design work, to Chris Gilbey and Richard McKinnon for the copy, and to Matt Moor and John Ferlito for getting the hosting under control with some cool scripts to be used for future rollouts of our final product.

Have fun!

This week, we’ve been working hard towards getting the corporate website for my new company Vquence up. As part of that, we shot videos of most of our key people in an attempt to “eat our own dogfood”: show off our slicecasting technology, which comes as embeddable vquences (video sequences). The idea is to extract slices from a set of videos, collate them together like highlights, and make them clickable – so people can click through to the full length videos.

On our website, we decided to show the vquence with a clickthrough to full-length videos hosted at different video hosting sites, including not just the popular YouTube and Google video sites, but also sites such as Metacafe, Guba, iFilm, blip.tv, Grouper, Gofish, VSocial or DailyMotion.

On click-through, we wanted to have the embedded videos from those hosting sites to start playback directly without enforcing people to make another click on the image. This has turned out as quite a challenge.

Not every video hosting site that supports embedding also supports autoplay. Here’s what I found.

The following sites provide an autoplay parameter for their embed tags (only key components shown in the code):

• youtube:
  <embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/xxxxxx&autoplay=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" />
• google video:
  <embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=-xxxxxxx&hl=en-AU" FlashVars="autoPlay=true&playerMode=embedded"/>
• metacafe:
  <embed src="http://www.metacafe.com/fplayer/xxxx/title_yyy.swf?playerVars=autoPlay=yes" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"/>
• blip.tv:
  <embed src="http://blip.tv/scripts/flash/blipplayer.swf?autoStart=true &file=http://blip.tv/file/get/xxxxxx.flv%3Fsource%3D3" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" />
• DailyMotion:
  <embed src="http://www.dailymotion.com/flash/flvplayer.swf?xxxxxx" flashvars="url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dailymotion.com%2Fget%2F14%2F320x240 %2Fflv%2Fxxxx.flv%3Fkey%3Dxxxxxx.flv&duration=68&autoStart=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"/>
• Grouper:
  <embed src="http://grouper.com/mtg/mtgPlayer.swf?v=1.7" FlashVars="ap=1&mu=0&rf=-1&vfver=8&extid=-1&extsite=-1&ml=xxxxxx" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"/>
• GoFish:
  <embed src="http://www.gofish.com/player/fwplayer.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" FlashVars="&loc=blog&gf=true&ns=false&fs=false&gfid=xxxxxx&c=grey
&autoPlay=true&getAd=false&wm=false&ct=true&tb=false&svr=www.gofish.com:80">
• VSocial:
  <embed src="http://static.vsocial.com/flash/ups.swf?d=yyyy&a=1&s=xxxxxx"/> – be warned though that their player takes a third for menu stuff

I know that both Guba and iFilm have an autoplay feature since the video on their websites plays without the need for an additional activation, but I couldn’t find out what parameters were needed or which other flash player I would need to use.

Revver simply refuses to support this feature reasoning that nobody would want a video to play back automatically without the need for an interaction. Guys – come on! Nowadays videos live on their own Web page. A person that is navigating to that Webpage and knows what they are navigating to shouldn’t really have to jump an additional hurdle just to get your videos to play!

BTW: I was unable to manage to upload a video to Metacafe from my Mac inside Firefox, although I tried for 3 days.
– worked now!

I do not claim to have tested all the video hosting sites out there. But these are a good selection and my current state of experience.

Ah yes: go and enjoy our new site – http://www.vquence.com/ – and don’t forget to check out the videos at the bottom of the front page.