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Ooyala Django – another awesome Ooyala library

Andrew Spaulding — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 04:58:07 +0000

Recently I blogged about a bunch of Ooyala code libraries written for Ruby, Drupal, and PHP, and here’s another one to add to the list.

Ooyala Django as you might guess is a library developed for use with Django to leverage the Backlot Query API to return a list of content, link the content to specific url’s, and render video content using an ooyala_video tag within your Django templates. You could even use this library with just regular python code. Kudos to Jaymz Campbell for sharing the library over on github.

Ooyala libraries for PHP, Drupal, and Ruby developed by the community

Andrew Spaulding — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 14:45:57 +0000

It’s always important to build a strong community around you, to help push the boundaries, test the limits, and showcase the potential of what is really possible with your technology.

However, there’s often some great contributions from individual contributors outside of the traditional partner base, and I wanted to give a big Oo shout out to the following Ooyala developers.

Ooyala API PHP Client Library

Vance Lucas and Company52 created an Ooyala API PHP Client Library available over on github https://github.com/company52/Phoo. The library provides a great backbone for many of Ooyala’s API’s, including content ingestion, label management, channel management including creating dynamic channels, Ooyala analytics queries and more.

Ooyala Module for Drupal

Jared Bitner of Lullabot created an Ooyala Module for Drupal that allows you to perform synchronisation and batch importing of video content managed from Backlot. Check out a video of Jared introducing the Ooyala Drupal Module or head straight to Drupal.org and download the module http://drupal.org/project/ooyala. This module is a great for managing and maintaining your Ooyala video’s as a custom content type within your Drupal site, and synchronising your content taxonomy.

Tangerine, a Ruby Gem that wraps the Ooyala API

Anthony Navarre and Craig Williams have built Tangerine, a Ruby Gem that uses ActiveResource to wrap the Ooyala Backlot API. Head on over to RubyGems.org http://rubygems.org/gems/tangerine to learn more. This is currently a work in progress, but it’s great to see this kind of content being shared for others to use and contribute to.

Do you have your own Ooyala extensions or modules? We’d love to hear about it!

YouTube and Ooyala, publishing to the worlds largest video discovery destination

Andrew Spaulding — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 22:15:15 +0000

There’s no doubt about it, YouTube is the largest video search and discovery destination. And why wouldn’t you want to be a part of that! More eyeballs is more eyeballs, and we all want a greater viewership to our content, and of course, greater discoverability.

Ooyala’s YouTube integration has been a core part of our technology platform since 2008, enabling content owners to publish to their YouTube accounts. And through the extensive integrations, Ooyala enables round trip synchronisation of content between Backlot and YouTube, moving beyond simple content push to the YouTube’s platform. This means not only is your content in sync, but your metadata is also synchronised with the your YouTube assets. Changes to your video metadata within Backlot are updated on you YouTube videos, including video titles, descriptions and content genres. Have you deleted or unpublished content with Backlot? That’s ok too, your YouTube account will be updated with these changes as well.

Not only does Ooyala offer external publishing and content synchronisation with YouTube, you can also access YouTube’s vast video library, add a video to your library and manage and playback the content directly the Ooyala video player. Not only do you increase your content offering, but this will allow you to take direct advantage of Ooyala’s Actionable Analytics, giving you unparalleled insight into your viewer engagement.

Consider the following situation, you already have an existing YouTube library of content or you’ve found the next latest viral hit and you want to grab a copy to include in your video library. This workflow is seamless, and can be easily achieved by selecting Add New Content and choosing YouTube from the menu. Ooyala’s YouTube integration will allow you to either paste in the URL to the selected YouTube video or search the YouTube library directly.

Publishing content to YouTube is just as easy. Through Ooyala’s external publishing features you can simply add YouTube as a publishing destination, enter your username and password, and select the content you want to keep synchronised with YouTube. See the screenshot below.

A complete circle, being able to pull content from YouTube, and publish/synchronise your Ooyala library with your YouTube accounts.

Ooyala Direct upload, Federer and Nadal play Ping Pong Tennis

Andrew Spaulding — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 04:56:32 +0000

Yesterday I attended the Rally for Relief at Rod Laver Arena in support of the flood victims in Queensland, Australia. Tennis pro’s, corporate sponsors and those in the crowd managed to raise over $1.8M and counting, and will be matched by Queensland Energy Resources including any additional funds raised throughout the remainder of the Australian Open. If you’d like to donate you can participate at the official Rally for Relief website.

During the final session of the afternoon Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Kim Clijsters and local Sam Stosur teamed up for some mixed doubles, followed by the men vs the ladies in some “ping pong tennis”, where they alternate shots between them.

Visit the ATP World Tour site for a full write up on the tennis stars, the fun, and the funds raised! It was lots of fun!

The video was recorded using my iPhone 4, edited using iMovie for iPhone to compress the file to 360p (original source was 720p), and finally uploaded using Ooyala Direct, the mobile publishing application for Apple’s iOS platform. This is the ultimate mobile capture and publish workflow for any field reporter.

Ooyala, the leading Online Video Platform

Andrew Spaulding — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 06:42:22 +0000

My friends and family always ask, “What is Ooyala?”. That’s if they can pronounce it first!

Ooyala (pronounced oo-YAH-lah) means cradle in Telugu, a Southern Indian language. The name really describes what we at Ooyala are doing, and that’s giving birth to new forms of innovation in online video. Ooyala’s end-to-end video platform known as Backlot makes it easy for anyone to upload, transcode, manage, publish, analyze and monetize their video assets. All of this tied together gives you extreme flexibility to deliver the best possible video experience to your consumers, by understanding what they do with your content.

Over the coming weeks I will be posting exciting examples of how our customers are delivering video to the web, mobile devices and other consumer electronics.

You can even try it out for yourself!

Go ahead and register for a FREE TRIAL ACCOUNT.

Flash Catalyst learning resources

Andrew Spaulding — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 00:34:00 +0000

Since Adobe Flash Catalyst was officially announced at Adobe MAX 2008 I’ve kept a list of my favorite blog posts, videos, screencasts and links to downloads and tutorials. Hopefully these resources will help in getting you started.

For the developers, you’ll find some interesting reads on FXG and why we have gone down this path, as well as a great post on an approach towards design patterns when developing a single application for multiple screens.

If you have other links to tutorials, screencasts, skins or other Flash Catalyst related downloads/links I’d love to hear about it!

Downloads
Download both Flash Catalyst beta and Flash Builder 4 beta from Adobe Labs

Adobe Flash Catalyst beta
Adobe Flash Builder 4 beta

Learn to use Flash Catalyst
Follow a series of tutorials to learn about the Flash Catalyst feature set and what you can achieve when integrating with Flash Builder 4, and designing from Photoshop CS4, Illustrator CS4 or Fireworks CS4.

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashcatalyst/tutorials/

Flash Catalyst Team Blog: Explorations and Lessons

Screencasts and presentations
This is a small collection of screencasts from various conferences, presentations and tutorials relating to Flash Catalyst.

Kevin Lynch’s keynote from Web2.0 expo

Mark Anders’ FITC session

FlashCamp San Francisco 2009 keynotes and sessions

FlashCamp San Francisco 2009 session slides

Lee Brimelow’s two part tutorial on Flash Catalyst and Flex 4

Ryan Stewart’s Flash Catalyst/Flash Builder screencast

Mark Szulc’s Flash Catalyst beta 1 demo in 4 minutes

Other cool downloads and links
Other links I’ve found worthwhile, especially the tutorials and resources on the Flash Catalyst Team Blog.

Flash Catalyst Skin Library

Flash Catalyst Team Blog

Using FXG assets as custom markers in Google Maps

Mark Anders on FXG vs SVG

Mark Anders’ thoughts on FXG Design and Motivation

Design patterns with Flash Catalyst and Flex 4
An interesting read on an approach to creating and developing dynamic user interfaces that are targeted at multiple devices (think multi-screen applications)

Passive Multi-View design pattern: Creating Dynamic Flex UI’s using Flash Catalyst and Flex

Raising money for charity with Adobe AIR!

Andrew Spaulding — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 14:42:25 +0000

Visit www.visionair.info

I hope you can help me out and also help a good cause.

We are having a competition to raise the most $$$ for the â€œFred Hollows Foundationâ€? which gives the gift of sight to those in the developing world who could not otherwise afford a simple cataract operation.

It only takes $25 to bring the operation to one person or just $250 for ten people.

Please help this very worthy cause and help me and my team “visionAIR” win this competition.

To donate, please visit http://www.visionair.info between 4.30 pm Thursday 10 April and midday Friday 11 April.

This is tax deductible (depending on your location) and you will be issued with a receipt for tax purposes so please dig deep.

If you can encourage your friends, family and work mates to do the same. If you are able to encourage the company you work for to pledge/donate as well, that would be fantastic!

We’ve also written an AIR application as a widget so you can track the progress of the team! I’ll provide source code after the event.

A work in progress, just applied the new theme

Andrew Spaulding — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 03:49:28 +0000

Just applied the new theme, finally, after a few months. It’s basically the Grid Focus theme by Derek Punsalan. It was recommended by Chris Marmo, a friend of mine who works for Information Architects in Japan.

Just some minor tweaks to go, but I think i’ll keep it as simple as I can. If the site doesn’t work for any reason please leave me a comment. Feedback is welcome.

FlexDaddy site update

FlexDaddy site update

Andrew Spaulding — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 06:03:54 +0000

I’ve just enabled my new theme, with absolutely no mods, just a clean install of the Redoable wordpress theme. Now it’s time to make some changes, mostly small, but at least this is a start More to come soon…

UPDATE – well, the site is totally barfed in IE, and in this day and age cross platform is the go! So I had to turn it off… back to square one

Taking my sweet time

Andrew Spaulding — Wed, 23 May 2007 02:44:03 +0000

Well, I’m sure many of you have noticed that I’m still to move hosts and update the template as well. I’ve been taking my sweet time, and it’s so damn easy to forget the blog with all this work that’s going on.

This weekend I have Saturday at home alone, so I can geek out and finally update and move the site to it’s new location. Might even throw in some Xbox Live during the day if I finish the blog move on time

Flex Daddy out.