monline

There's a "well known" bug in all recent Flash Player versions on the linux platform published in the last couple of years. It makes it impossible to display text with the proper fonts in certain languages using an out-of-the-box linux + Flash Player installation. In the linked bugreport people already figured out the solution: one has to specify a font with the required language coverage in the fontconfig configuration.

There are a couple of gotchas with this setup. Eg. I wanted to install on a Debian 4.x server and the installer reported that the platform is not supported.

iShowU is a screen recording application, ie. it allows you to record videos of your screen (or a part of it) into all kinds of video formats (anything that your Quicktime supports). I've googled a little bit in the topic and this app seems to be one of the more capable and sophisticated ones on the market. What might be interesting to fellow gamers is that you can record screen of almost all kinds of games (eg. World of Warcraft, as demonstrated here). Check out this link for a short tutorial on how to set up iShowU (what settings to fine tune) if you want to put the result on the web via streaming.

We're developing a video-conference app at my company and I wanted to test it at home with the MacBook Pro's built-in iSight. However it did not work. It turned out that the new iSights are in fact USB cams and you've to right click any flash movie and select "USB Video Class Video" as your active camera.

There are a couple of gotchas with this setup. Eg. I wanted to install it on an Opteron and the installer reported that the platform is not supported.

In embedded videos (or Flash apps in general) you can specify the width and height in the "WIDTH" and "HEIGHT" parameters of the <OBJECT> tag. But do not forget the space occupied by the controls (button bar, etc.)!
Eg. in case of a Google video the player consists of a video pane and a control bar. The latter takes a fixed 27 pixels in height. So if your video is 160 x 120 and you want to embed it by scaling to double size (without distortion of course), then you have to specify a width of 160*2=320 pixels and a height of 120*2+27=367 pixels.

In my previous post I went into details about flashvars used by embedded Google videos. Originally I wanted to get that list so I can set the initial scaling mode of a video using a flashvars parameter. Unfortunately this is not possible. Here's why ...

You can embed a Google video in your webpage by including either an <embed> or an <object> tag in your HTML. You can grab the required code for embedding directly from the Google Video page.
One can see from Google's embedding HTML-snippet that there're some parameters that googleplayer.swf can interpret and use. I was wondering what other parameters are there, so I digged a little bit inside the Google video player.

I've found a site with an amazing collection of wonderful Flash-animations. Take a look at Levitated.net, it's worth the time.

Here're direct links to the main Flash-collections on the site:

1. sketches and applications
2. open source

I've tried to embed a Google video on a page of my website and ran into several problems with the original HTML code that you get from the "Embed" link on the Google video page.