If you want to play your digital cam or cell phone videos on the the site you have two options.

Preferred option 1:
Convert you video to and flv or mp4 formatted video using a free video converter or quicktime pro. If you are on a mac there is a free video converted called ffmpegX There are installation instructions here

There are plenty of free windows converters also based on ffmpeg. You can download RIva ENcoder for FLV for windows

I believe they are both based off the opersource video converter command line program called ffmpeg In fact if you upload an mp4 to the site, ffmpeg converts it to flv automatically so it is best that you convert to flv format directly in order to avoid double conversion which can result in a lack of quality.

Once you have a 320x240 flv file, upload it to your journal like you would any other media and it will automatically be converted it a flash video play. I used this option for the videos in (e:paul,4738)

Option 2:
Put the video on youtube and then link it here so that the video plays in your journal. This option is better for large size videos that exceed the 7MB limit on estrip. Whiel I think most videos will stick around on youtube now that it is owned by google, I am leary about posting videos there, because as I said before at any point they could begin to charge you for your own content or remove the videos leaving you journal with the video in it, a large black hole style void.

I used this option however, for mikes murder mystery video (e:mike,587) and the windows vista video on my journal because they were both huge files.
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In order to do this sign up for youtube, follow the instructions and at the end write down the the id for your video. It is the part that ends in v=pJM39EytAYU in the url of your video file on youtube. The part after the v= is the id of your video. Simply copy that down and paste it into your journal between youtube tags like this

[youtube]pJM39EytAYU[/youtube]

The yourtube video player will be added to your journal.

This journal entry is deprecated. Please see (e:computer,42) for an update

Adobe has released an (update) beta of Flash Player 9 including versions for Linux and Vista.

The Linux release is reported to work for Fedora 6.

I couldn't get it to work completely (bad rendering and no sound) with the DR of Elive. Apparently, this flash beta will not work with ESD even if the proper ALSA libraries (libaound.so) are present and ESD uses ALSA.

The latest stable release of Simply Mepis also had no sound despite the use of ALSA but the rendering was much better.

Texstar, the maintainer of PCLinuxOS posted on the Adobe forums that he couldn't get it to work (both Firefox and Konqy crashed) with his distro. So I figured if he couldn't get it to work, I sure as hell couldn't.

--walt

Well, it seems that I stumbled upon a bug that affects how the Flash 9 beta works on the old linux box.

It's a Compaq Presario circa 2001 with an 900 MHz Athlon processor and 378 megs of RAM.

The box's motherboard has onboard sound (via 82C686A/B). Being who I am, I disabled it in the BIOS and used an audio PCI ES1370 SB-compatible card instead.

For some reason, the Flash 9 Beta refuses to work with the ES13710 even though Flash 7 did.

On a hunch, I re-enabled the onboard sound and LO and BEHOLD, Flash 9 has sound in Sabayon (Gentoo-based) with firefox 2.0 and even in Elive (Debian) if ALSA is used instead of ESD. Unfortunately, the rendering in Elive using firefox 1.5 is a bit wacky.

The beta also works in SimplyMepis which is Ubuntu-based.

As far as I know Texstar hasn't gotten it work with PCLinuxOS.

The Flash Player 9 beta for Vista, osX, and Linux is available at

Just in case anyone is interested:

Firefox 2.0 is available for MS Windows 98 and XP, osX, and Linux-686

Internet Explorer 7 is available for MS Windows XP and Server 2003


Let the browser wars continue.

--walt

It seems that the fine folks that Adobe that now own the fine folks at Macromedia have decided to change the name of the Flash 8.5 beta to Flash 9.0 beta.

Nothing has changed except the name it is claimed.

The new "9.0 beta" for Windows and osX is available at

For Linux Fanboys and Fangirls only

It is possible to experience the new Flash player using Linux with WINE with the Windows versions of Firefox and Flash

I've not tried this with the "9.0 beta" but this works with the "8.5 beta" and with the stable 8.0 release for me.

Sound and Video work ok - including (e:peep) user sounds.

However, when using Firefox and Flash with WINE for estrip.org, some frames have rendering problems. My assumption is that they don't' call it "Flash" because the content of the frames flashs on a regular basis. This bug is duplicated on both Linux boxes.

Generic Instructions

Download and install WINE for your distro.

Download Firefox for Windows and install it with WINE.

Download Flash 8.0 or higher for Windows and install it using WINE.

Here's a brief how-to for Ubuntu that gives a bit more detail:

You should be able to modify this how-to for your favie distro without too much trouble.

--walt ( (e:uncutsaniflush) )