Henrietta and the Chicks caught on video

Well, I tested out the video on my camera today and took some footage of Henrietta and the chicks. I have two separate files; one short for the dialup impaired, and one long for broadband users.

Below find the links. Just right click and choose save target as, or equivalent in your browser. They are full quality AVI files.

Henrietta and the Chicks 9-20-2008 short version (1.2MB)

Henrietta and the Chicks 9-20-2008 long version (46.7MB)

OK, I took care of compressing the video in iMovie HD, sharing it to an MPEG4 file, and uploading it to Google Video. So, here’s the smaller and lower quality video streaming version of the long one at Google Video:

If you want to watch it here, here’s the caption I placed on Google Video:

Starring Henrietta and her 3 week old chicks. In the background, you might also hear a morning dove and a rooster in the video. The chicks were born at a friend’s farm here in Virginia (they have raised chickens for 15 years). This is our first ever attempt at raising chickens. They are very entertaining. Henrietta is a Buff Brahma Bantams and her chicks are a cross between Buff Brahma Bantams and B.B. Red Old English Game Bantams. The movie was shot with a Samsung Digimax 530 and converted with iMovie on the Mac.

If you want to go to Google Video, the link is:

Henrietta and the Chicks

If you can’t see the video due to bandwidth limitations, there are some still shots of Henrietta and the Chicks here.

Flash Away! Youtube, et al, Time to move to Ogg video!

Adobe was bad enough before, now that they own Macromedia (Flash and Dreamweaver, etc.), they aren’t satisfied with owning the most expensive ‘must have’ unfortunately web software — they want more! They want a piece of you and me, and everyone!

Adobe Push DRM for Flash

The immense popularity of sites like YouTube has unexpectedly turned Flash Video (FLV) into one of the de facto standards for Internet video. The proliferation of sites using FLV has been a boon for remix culture, as creators made their own versions of posted videos. And thus far there has been no widespread DRM standard for Flash or Flash Video formats; indeed, most sites that use these formats simply serve standalone, unencrypted files via ordinary web servers.

Now Adobe, which controls Flash and Flash Video, is trying to change that with the introduction of DRM restrictions in version 9 of its Flash Player and version 3 of its Flash Media Server software. Instead of an ordinary web download, these programs can use a proprietary, secret Adobe protocol to talk to each other, encrypting the communication and locking out non-Adobe software players and video tools. We imagine that Adobe has no illusions that this will stop copyright infringement — any more than dozens of other DRM systems have done so — but the introduction of encryption does give Adobe and its customers a powerful new legal weapon against competitors and ordinary users through the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

Much more in the article!

I say that it’s time for the likes of Youtube.com et al to move to open source Ogg Video!

It’s so sad that when a previously free and open ‘proprietary’ standard gets ‘full of themselves’ that all of a sudden, it’s smash the users and providers till it breaks their backs!

Unfortunately, “Adobe now has an incentive to push the use of DRM: it’s only available to sites that use Flash Media Server 3 software, which starts at over $4,000 (with extra fees depending on the number of simultaneous streams).”

As if that isn’t bad enough, “Users may also have to upgrade their Flash Player software (and open source alternatives like Gnash, which has been making rapid progress, may be unable to play the encrypted streams at all). Third-party software that can download Flash Video, like the most recent RealPlayer, will also break.”

There are lots of good reasons why DRM is not viable. And here are just a few of them from the article:

Finally, there’s a classic suite of arguments against DRM that will be as true for online video as they were for music. DRM doesn’t move additional product. DRM is grief for honest end-users. And there’s no reason to imagine that new DRM systems will stop copyright infringement any more effectively than previous systems.

More in the article.

Also, I think it is very deceptive. Allow folks to make use of a format till it’s ubiquitous! THEN!!! Encrypt it and lock it up! People will ‘THINK’ it’s all the same old Flash as always — very friendly as always. They will have no idea what hit them or their computers.

Totally disgusted about this. IF THEY WERE GOING TO START DOING THIS. They should have created a totally NEW DRM’d video delivery product with a new name so we users could avoid it like the plague, and kept Flash as it was. That would have prevented confusion about what this ‘new’ format was all about, as compared to the well-known Flash format, and just kept Flash as it was.

They quietly started this crap with Flash 9.x. But it’s not till some companies start making use of this new $4,000 DRM nightmare that folks will begin to really see the head of this monster.

I think Google‘s Youtube, et al should stop using Flash and go with an open source type of video delivery system. Maybe help the open source Ogg/Theora Video Projects or some of the others that EFF mentioned in their article.