I've used VideoJS before and it's great.

Avoiding multiple formats is impossible, just for sound there's no format that all browsers support (not even WAV!) Same thing for video as well:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_v...rowser_support

I'm actually in a rather unique (and favorable) position where none of the videos will have sound. That being the case, does that make it any easier to narrow the list of formats?

Also, are you taking into account the Flash fallback included with the JS plugin?

Both the VideoJS and MediaElement sites list as an option only using mp4 and using the included Flash plugin as a fallback for non-supported browsers.

It's great that Heroku is incredibly talented, but they fail at the number one use case: deployment.

I entered in the errors that I was receiving, and the error should not have happened if the file system was created properly (ie, no runtime errors). It took going to different sites + SO to find out that maybe the key was the issue and how to reset it.

Heroku's site, oth, makes it all look like a an easy 1-2 step. Now that I can't get my product up, I can't even send them an email.

I wonder how many people tried it out for 2 or 3 hours, then after working through 3 or 4 errors, said **** it. You can count me as one.

i have done zero seconds of research on this but:

i think the node.js people are writing their webserver in node.js, hence integrating with node.js is straightforward . no one serves non-node.js code with a node.js webserver because there's no real reason to do that.

well the ability to roll your own and customize your server and integrate with your app, at least as i understand it, is only one of the touted benefits on nodejs. isn't also supposed to be super lightweight and efficient and support concurrency well? so those would be reasons, wouldn't they? anyway i'm sure i'm missing something else here....

<whining>

Oh, my god... Who wants to do all this crap manually? If I had known it would be so much work, I would have done my project in PHP, or at least dual-installed a Linux distro a really long time ago.

With that said, I'm looking at Linode right now, since that seems to be the only one that doesn't care about what programming language + database you use.

I'd rather do homework.

</whining>

I've been working with this recently too. I think that I've decided on using JW Player with Flash/RTMP and HTML5 fallback using one mp4 file over CloudFront (two different distributions, same S3 bucket). It seems to work well cross browser/device.

My thoughts were that doing it this way helps to keep the UX consistent but I would have preferred to use Flash as an HTML5 fallback. When using HTML5 with Flash fallback and a single mp4, FF and older IE users would see Flash and everybody else would see HTML5. Doing it this way, basically, everybody but iOS users will see the same thing. Also, RTMP is pretty nice.

I'd really like to hear what you decide on and why.

It works straightforwardly for us (and I assume many others) so I'm not really sure you can say they "fail" at their number one use case. Although it certainly seems fair to say that they fail your use case.

sysadmin is the worst. as someone who did not do this until recently, i strongly advise that you just bite the bullet and learn it all yourself. sirens along the banks of river webdev will lure you with dreams of "simple setup" and "1 click deployments out of the box," but somehow it just never works out.

Based on what I've played around with, MediaElement.js (what I've used the most) and VideoJS allow for what appears to be an identical experience whether HTML5 or Flash is being used.

I can't speak for JW Player because I've never used it, but those seem to resolve the issue of HTML5/Flash support.

RTMP is pretty cool, but it seems like it would be a much easier to use one of those plugins to have HTML5 video with a Flash fallback rather than depending on something server side.

Basically my overall plan roughly looks like:

1. Upload files to S3
2. Save file info to DB
3. Encode with ffmpeg (using Amazon SQS to queue encoding jobs)
4. Update file info in DB
5. Serve video files from S3

Are you using a different approach?

Hi Dave.

Just thought I'd let you know that I just spun up an EC2 instance, loaded my standard LAMP stack and various tools, configured SSL, and updated DNS.

Full app deployment in about 20 minutes.

Knowing how to do it yourself means if something goes wrong, you're not sitting there sobbing and helpless.

this

EDIT: or at the mercy of those who will happily charge you $125/hr for "2 hours of work" for what would have been a 10 minute fix on your own

I'm probably just going to use pandastream to handle transcoding. Their API is decent and for $99 it's not really worth while to deal with it myself. Otherwise, basically the same.

I was reading the docs and it doesn't appear that they supports PostgreSQL.

I have tons of cascading triggers and indexes, which I'm not too chuffed about re-writing in MySQL. I'm just more comfortable working with PostgreSQL. Actually, trying to find good documentation on using PostgreSQL on a server is bad enough. Combine that with Clojure and... blech!

I was reading through the Linode docs last night, and I think I'll go ahead and use them. Doesn't look too difficult, although the quantity of work is pretty long, but yeah, it doesn't hurt to get the general idea down for myself. I'm not decided on which Liinux distro to use, though I'm partial to Arch because it has a very small footprint though I'm thinking that the other distros have the minimal command install so the difference shouldn't be too large. Regardless, I'm going to go ahead and dual-install on my machine in the very near future.

I'm also afraid of the labyrinthine payment schedules of AWS and Heroku. I'm thinking that the issue wrt to Heroku was that the program file is to large. Linode is only $20 to start and I can move my other sites over so it's basically free.

dave AWS just gives you your own machine, so of course you can use postgre.

you can also get a micro instance free for a year which will probably be enough for what you're doing. it's quite cheap unlike heroku.

Hehe. So floundering around here...

this c/p from aws:

Relational Database Service (RDS)
750 hours of Amazon RDS Single-AZ Micro DB Instances, for running MySQL, Oracle BYOL or SQL Server (running SQL Server Express Edition)‡‡ – enough hours to run a DB Instance continuously each month*
20 GB of database storage
10 million I/Os
20 GB of backup storage for your automated database backups and any user-initiated DB Snapshots

That confused me, but there does seem to be some tutorials on installing Postgres + PgAdmin in EC2.

I think I'm going to take a screenshot of this and set it as my background:

sirens along the banks of river webdev will lure you with dreams of "simple setup" and "1 click deployments out of the box," but somehow it just never works out.

Pure poetry.

Might be slightly dated (slicehost has now moved to RackSpace), but I learned pretty much everything I know about servers from here http://articles.slicehost.com/

So, uh... Anyone ordering their Surface today?

125$ for 2h is dirt cheap though :P

I've played around with ANTLR (3.4+ANTLR Works) a bit today. First I tried it with Python as a target language but that required too much fiddling because they lag behind the official release. I'll just work with JAVA for now and hope they catch up eventually (or spend some time setting up the Python stuff)

I'll use it for a >toy grammar over the next weeks, will report how it went if anyone is interested.

There's also an updated beta book by PP which I'll probably end up getting eventually. For now I just used internet documentation though.

You mean the tablet that requires a keyboard? *snicker*

daveT, wrt learning linux / sysadmin / setup techniques, you might be interested in finding an old computer and going through http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ on it. Strikes me as the sort of thing you might like? Obv takes a while though, and not ideal to tie up your day-to-day computer doing nothing but compiling libraries on a full screen command line all day! Vague correlation with the recent talk of learning low-level programming languages - imo learning low-level linux can be quite helpful when it comes to dealing with the setup and configuration of higher level applications / stacks.

LFS is mad fun, recommended!

If you want an extra challange use something like diet libc

i';ve used antlr for a school project 8 years ago. it was a piece of cake for a simple algebraic/boolean grammar

Yeah fiddling with the config was the only real problem so far. Rest was fairly smooth. Looking forward to just hacking in the grammar...the fun part will be actually doing interesting stuff with the parser i.e. generate certain code pieces from logic.