Chapter 2: I Vant to Vatch Your Vlog
4. Click OK, and then close the System Preferences
QuickTime will be the default plugin for Safari, and for most Web browsers you might choose to install.
Figure 2-4:
Check the video files for the QuickTime plugin.
Figure 2-3:
The System Preferences for QuickTime.
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Chapter 2: I Vant to Vatch Your Vlog
Windows Media Player
On Windows XP computers, the default video player is Windows Media Player, which plays, among other files, .wmvvideo files. Although most videobloggers use QuickTime for compressing their videos, there are quite a few Windows users out there as well — and some of them even use .wmv files, so it’s helpful to have Windows Media Player in your toolbox when you go out to watch the vlogs.
Just as QuickTime is available for Windows, the Windows Media Player is available for Macintosh computers. Windows Media Player runs as a stand- alone application, as shown in Figure 2-5.
The interface is similar to QuickTime, with a standard File menu for opening files, and the play, rewind, and fast-forward buttons below the video window.
Windows Media Player lets you change the user interface using skins, which are available in QuickTime, but are not as common. You can change the way the Windows Media Player software looks, as shown in Figure 2-6.
To change the skins from Windows Media Player, select View➪Select Skin from the menu bar, and choose the skin you want to use. You can also down- load more skins from the Internet if you like.
Figure 2-5:
Windows Media Player.
Flash Player
Shockwave Flash movies are a very attractive option for video files. The Macromedia Flash program is fairly easy to use, and the creator has a lot more control over how a Flash movie will display and play on the Internet.
Many users have experience with interactive Flash animations, where the user can click the animation to have it do something or react to the user input. With a Flash movie, you can do the same thing. The creator of a Flash movie can even change how you watch it — say, make it impossible to rewind while you’re watching the movie, or prevent you from saving the movie to your hard drive. Although Windows Movie Maker and QuickTime can also do this, the majority of people making video for these formats don’t use it, whereas a surprising number of Flash creators do.
Personally, I’m not a fan of Flash movies for that very reason. I like to rewind movies when I’m watching them, so Flash’s ability to disable the most basic VCR functions doesn’t sit well. It’s a bit like having 20 minutes of previews on a DVD and not being able to skip past them, if you know what I mean. It gives users the feeling that you don’t trust them, as if the content is supposed to be more important than the user’s ability to distinguish whether he or she wants to watch the movie. I think a lot of videobloggers are leery of giving that Figure 2-6:
Use the skins in Windows Media Player for a different look.
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impression, so not many of them use Flash video in their vlogs. However, a lot of viral video Web sites and video-sharing communities (such as YouTube and Veoh) douse Flash for video, so it’s probably here to stay.
But if you come across a videoblog that uses Flash, make sure you have the Flash Player. Flash is fairly ubiquitous, so most computers already have it installed. But if you don’t, or you’re not sure, pop over to Adobe, which now owns the whole Macromedia product line (www.macromedia.com) to down- load the free Flash Player. From the navigation bar at the top of the screen, click Downloads, and then click Get Flash Player.
Because the Flash Player is primarily a Web-browser plugin, it doesn’t really have a standalone application. Instead, you launch your Web browser and open whatever Flash video file you want to watch.
Because Flash files are interactive, computer viruses sometimes masquerade as Flash files. Do not open an .swffile that you receive in your e-mail from anyone you don’t know and trust.
Video-Enabled RSS Readers
After you have the video players installed, now it’s time to make vlog-viewing painless. See, if you went out and visited every videoblog you wanted to watch every day, you would spend about ten hours a day downloading and waiting to watch the vlogs — leaving you no time at all to make your own vlogs. That’s no fun! So what you need is some way to have your computer go out, grab the videos for you, and save them so you can watch them whenever you want to. Fortunately, that’s the kind of tedious task that computers are great at doing.
Fortunately, several software programs already exist that do this for you.
They rely on a technology called RSS, which stands for a lot of things, but Really Simple Syndication is a good way to think about it. RSS is a quick, easy way to take online content (such as blogs and videoblogs) and let people download the content into the RSS viewer of their choice. The syndicated content is called a feedbecause it works like a newsfeed or a stock ticker.
(Lots more details about RSS appear in Chapter 13.)
You might also hear about Atom, which is a similar and related online syndi- cation technology. Although I talk mainly about RSS in this book, if you have an Atom feed available, you can use that just as easily as RSS.
FireANT
FireANT, shown in Figure 2-7, is an RSS reader made by some of the pioneers of videoblogging. Because it’s made by videobloggers forvideobloggers — with videobloggers as beta testers — it is arguably the very best vlog RSS reader out there. It’s what would happen if software developers went out and asked, “What would be the perfect RSS viewer for this type of medium?” — and then created it.
FireANT is available for both Windows and Macintosh computers. It plays any media file that your computer can play. You can subscribe to podcasts with it if you have an audio program that can play the podcast’s audio file (usually .mp3), and you can even display PDF documents if you have a PDF reader such as Adobe Acrobat installed.
FireANT won’t play files if you don’t have a viewer installed. For instance, if you don’t have Windows Media Player on your computer, FireANT won’t be able to play .wmvfiles. Similarly, if you don’t have QuickTime, it won’t play .movfiles. That’s why I have sections on those programs first — you have to have them installed, or the rest of the stuff won’t work.
Figure 2-7:
FireANT is a good choice for watching video RSS feeds.
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You can download and install FireANT by visiting www.fireant.tv.
Subscribe to a Vlog in FireANT
When you first install FireANT, there are several popular videoblogs already in the list of Channels. This lets you get started and gives you an overview of videoblogging fast, but you might want to go out and find some videoblogs of your own to watch. With thousands of videoblogs available, there’s bound to be something that sparks your interest.
Subscribing to a videoblog is easy in FireANT — just follow these steps: