TEK » video

Youtube to Powerpoint

Kelvin — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 23:20:03 +0000

Recently I worked with some students who were working on Microsoft Powerpoint presentations in which they wished to embed YouTube videos into. After checking the copyright conditions of the said video’s I looked to using Firefox’s DownloadHelper addon to download the video then Visualhub to change the format to .wmv .

The download went fine but when I tried to change format I continued to get errors. As this had never happened to me before I did some research and found that since YouTube went HD any of the videos uploaded recently have a slightly different .flv format which seems designed to stop conversion.

After trying a number of different ways around this issue (converting using ffmpeg and DownloadHelper itself etc) I managed to ‘crack’ it by doing the following:

Downloaded using MacTubes as .mp4
Converted to .wmv using Visualhub

Students then very happy

Free Documentaries

Mark — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 09:09:12 +0000

One of the good things about doing break time duty is that you get to talk to staff that you would normally not get to know. You also find out things that you didn’t know and some of them turn out to be useful. Top Documentary Films is a site which catalogues a bunch of free documentaries found on various video sites on the web. I scanned a few and some were English with foreign subtitles, others vice-versa and regular English no subs. Using the VideoDownloadHelper plugin for Firefox I can transfer these videos to our internal PHP Motion server so that students can watch them without cranking through the bandwidth. Another great resource.

Time for some inspiration.

Mark — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 09:28:18 +0000

There are times when I start to feel a little stale cocooned in my world and I have forgotten to look outside. Thanks to my new iPad I found this as I browsed video podcasts on iTunes.

Facebook Apology

Richard van Dijk — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 08:02:56 +0000

I have to say after watching this video I did feel a bit like the complaining about privacy is a bit rich considering that people pay nothing for Facebook. We all like privacy but then you can’t blame the company for wanting to make more money can you?

Four Chord Song

Richard van Dijk — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 09:31:35 +0000

A little light relief. Australian comedy group ‘Axis Of Awesome’ perform a sketch from the 2009 Melbourne International Comedy Festival. Footage courtesy of Network Ten Australia.

See http://www.axisofawesome.net/ for more details of the comedy trio including Jordan Raskopoulos, Lee Naimo, & Benny Davis.

Bad Gramma, the video.

Richard van Dijk — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 01:16:09 +0000

Despite Evan distracting me with good humoured music, after a revisit of jamesatwar we watched Bad Grammar. At the end of the video it thanked HotForWords which made me curious So with a click I found the site of Marina Olvova. Not that it needs much explaination but as wikipedia states the theme of Orlova’s YouTube videos, which begin with the tagline “Intelligence is Sexy”, and of her website is tracing the origins of English words. This video from AP gives some insight or the site is here.

PHPMotion Redux

Mark — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 06:55:02 +0000

Back in April 2008 I did a post on a YouTube clone called PHPMotion which was then in version 1. The software is now in version 3 and we have just installed it on our school server. The latest version is still a bit of a pain to install, it runs on PHP and MYSQL like wordpress, but is not as well supported or documented. The bottom line is you better be keen but you will save a heap on bandwidth and be able to give access to all those great videos available online. As well as YouTube videos you can also add clips from DVD’s. If you did this on YouTube they would quickly receive a take down notice from the copyright holder but with PHPMotion only accessible from the internal network people in the outside world are non the wiser – of course you must own the material to start with. As a Hard Materials and Graphics teacher I find some fantastic instructional videos on using tools and techniques which I can now share without using extra bandwidth.

Version 3 also has photo sharing which means you can keep photographs of students safely in the gated village if you so wish rather than using public photo sharing like Flickr.

If you want any help setting up a video sharing server let us know and we will see what we can do to help.

Unlock Moodle Potential

Mark — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 07:12:27 +0000

One of the effects of the latest flu pandemic is that a school can be shut down at anytime. Our particular school policy states that we will provide materials online while students are away so that they may continue with their studies. Unfortunately in a practical based subject that is a little difficult and rather than reinvent the wheel I went trolling for links to existing material. I have to say that Workshop Technology is not well represented online in New Zealand, something I would like to rectify given the time. What I did find were these videos showing the potential of moodle in secondary education – check out these great videos by MoodleFairy.

Everlong

Mark — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 09:06:17 +0000

I downloaded the guitar tab (sheet music for guitar) for “Everlong” by the Foo Fighters about 2 years ago now. It’s one of those songs that I love, especially the acoustic version, but every time I try and play it I put it back in the “too hard basket”. It also happens to be one of the songs on Guitar Hero World Tour which I score quite highly on guitar and that prompted me to have another go on the real guitar.

I have basically taught myself guitar recently from downloading tabs of songs I know and trying to replicate them but without having any proper tuition sometimes I am stumped. Then it occurred to me to go to YouTube for a guitar lesson and no kidding, I was playing Everlong within about half an hour. Even my wife said it sounded good.

I picked up a couple of key points from the video. Firstly I needed to tune my E string down to D and boy did that make life easier. Most importantly the teacher talks about holding shapes with your fingers on the frets. Trying to apply numbers and fingers and frets from a diagram is hard but when the guy says make this shape with your fingers, then move it here, then here it all becomes clearer.

I could go on to apply lots of profound educational speak about the way people learn but take whatever meaning you like from this. Instead I encourage everyone to learn a musical instrument using the internet and I hope you get as much satisfaction as I do.

Newsmaker.app Great Fun

Richard van Dijk — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 08:00:38 +0000

Since Learning@School we have been waiting for the release of Newsmaker for Mac and PC. Now we have our full site license we can move on from our enhanced garageband podcast to full video.

In using the app I have found it to be very simple with a small installed size (27mb) and a very quick learning curve. Overall I can see students being able to write and draft their work in this and then publish in a number of periods. The results of which will be both fun and a positive experience of using video and IT for our staff who can often be put off by the time required to produce anything with video.

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitchtext from wikipedia

At $500 NZD for a site license I felt it was a reasonable deal.Boinx TVwhich I had looked at is $199 USD for a single License and was possibly a bit to complicated for most staff (although I have brought the machiest bundle in the hope it will be unlocked for our official school newscast but hey thats just the tech snob in me as my year 12 and 13 class would say.