Dear Rich, Thank you for the schooling. Did not know it was possible to embed G Videos. Will give it a try. Tim Will take this further off list.
Richard Pyle wrote:
Thanks Tim,
One possible solution to the 1080 issue will be (soon to be released, released?) Flash Player 9, which will support up to 1920 x 1080. It will not run in full screen mode at this setting unfortunately. It will be in H.264 format, as used in MPEG 4. FLV files are FLV files
- which may not be the panacea everyone desires but it may
allow some of the high-res content to get out in the wild, sooner than later.
Good to know!
The choice to use Youtube over Google was an easy one. Youtube allows one to embed the video in an html page, Google Video does not.
That's what I used to think also -- but it's not true. To wit:
http://www2.bishopmuseum.org/testvideo/videotest.htm
Look at the source code, and you'll see how simple the embedded link is, and what you have control over (e.g., size, subtitles, etc).
In fact, it was this feature that sealed the deal for me on Google Video. Until I realized this, I was looking at YouTube for the very same reason.
My feeling is that the supplemental information surrounding the video can aid in familiarity for the user. The more images available to a user trying to make a determination of an unknown taxon, the better. However, Youtube, and Google for that matter, may (read will) switch to an ad based format. Ads appearing on/in vouchers are not appealing for obvious reasons. Scientific video services are coming into being - Sci-Vee, for one. Not sure whether they offer an embed feature, have emailed them and will hopefully know shortly.
I agree with all of your points above. Google Video seems less ads-based than YouTube, so my hope is that for embedded videos, at least, there will be some reprieve from ads. In fact, another reason I like Google Video over YouTube is that I don't like thatlittle YouTube watermark -- which itself is sort of an ad. Of course, since they're both owned by Google, I suspect they will eventually merge.
Metadata - if anyone can send me a template that I can employ now, even something rudimentary, I will use it and re-post the species pages prior to the conference. The data are there/here.
Ditto!
Latest page with all recommended improvements so far-
http://utc.usu.edu/factsheets/CarexFSF/new/carex_oligosperma_species.htm
Very nice! You might consider caching lower-resolution copies of the JPEGs (e.g., Habitat and Infructescence) for faster display. This is another topic I've wanted to learn more about and ask others how they deal with it. I've not quite graduated to the point where I can create on-the-fly resized images (JPEG2K sounds promising, though!), so I cache copies of each JPEG in 5 sizes: 50px, 150px, 300px, 800px, Full-res (all numbers indicate image width). That allows me to deliver fast tiled pages like this:
http://www2.bishopmuseum.org/natscidb2/?w=BPBM&s0=Centropyge&lst=i
Or pages with intermediate-size images like this:
http://www2.bishopmuseum.org/natscidb2/?w=BPBM&id=-1513740931
Or pop-ups with larger images (click the image in the above link):
Actually, the second link isn't quite right -- it goes to the large image: http://www2.bishopmuseum.org/PBS/images/JER/large/1306009233.jpg
It should get this copy: http://www2.bishopmuseum.org/PBS/images/JER/small/1306009233.jpg
Obviously, it would be better to scale the images on the fly, like Bob described for JPEG2K.
But anyway, that's a whole 'nother conversation.
Aloha, Rich
Richard L. Pyle, PhD Database Coordinator for Natural Sciences and Associate Zoologist in Ichthyology Department of Natural Sciences, Bishop Museum 1525 Bernice St., Honolulu, HI 96817 Ph: (808)848-4115, Fax: (808)847-8252 email: deepreef@bishopmuseum.org http://hbs.bishopmuseum.org/staff/pylerichard.html
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