flash

Microsoft Silverlight, pet-named "Flash killer" by the Web 2.0 community, replicates many of the features of Macromedia Flash technology. Silverlight was first unveiled at the NAB Show, in early 2006, but it is only recently that it has gotten increasing spotlight from the industry. Somewhat intriguing, yet quite telling was that Microsoft featured Silverlight at the recently held Java One 2007, a major, traditionally M$-unfriendly annual conference of Java developers and vendors. Less surprisingly, it was the center point of the Microsoft's own Mix 2007, annual conference of web developers. Even though Silverlight is still left behind by Paris Hilton, it surely bypassed Britney in making headlines, at least - in the geek world. Judging by the enormous marketing blast, it is obvious that when it comes to Silverlight, Microsoft makes no jokes.

Why is Silverlight so important?

The new web, the so-called Web 2.0, is a two-headed phenomena. On one side it is a culture, a web-philosophy with the notions of the power of social unity, global outreach, two-way communication and extreme personalization at its foundation. On another side, it is a breakthrough in user-experience technology - Ajax being the most famous example. Ajax is great for responsive, ergonomic interfaces, the kinds you find in Gmail, Google Maps, Flickr, Meebo and every other Web 2.0 site, but it is not the only important technology driving the web revolution. New web is heavy on rich media and until recently Flash was the dominant technology for multimedia delivery on the web. YouTube would not exist without the Flash Streaming technology and Flash Video format. Many audio podcast websites have flash audio players. Fancy image galleries are driven by Flash technology enabling greater interactivity. And the list goes on...

Adobe (ex-Macromedia) Flash is a core technology of today's Web. Unfortunately, it got a wrong start back in the days. Many designers sold their souls to the unprecedented opportunities offered by graphical web and forgot that Flash is a complement to HTML, not - a replacement. This confussion ended us in the initial flood of all-Flash websites - a complete nightmare, by any reasonable standards.

You might remember that even some big media companies made the mistake. I will spare their good names, considering that they [relatively] quickly corrected the mistake, but to make a point - the confusion did not infect only amateur designers. Unfortunately, the cure was not any less damaging - many websites and designers refused to use Flash, at all. It also helped that right at the time, Ajax emerged, giving buzzers new "hot" thing to buzz about.

How many times have you been annoyed by online videos in different proprietary streaming encodings? Have you looked at the beauty of Youtube, Google Video, Revver etc. with owe? Did you envy the way they accept long list of different encodings, re-encode them into FLV and display to the users in the most friendly format?

Well, envy no more. Open-source library FFMPEG is a fantastic video encoder. You may need some help installing this beast, however. Unfortunately, friendly installation seems to be very low on their priority list. Even worse, when you spend hours struggling with the ffmpeg installation, you will find out that once encoded into FLV sound is lost, videos are completely mute! Bummer.

That is because FLV audio is mp3 and ffmpeg does not come with mp3 support by default. You will have to download and install Lame mp3 encoder first.

So, this is the bird's eye-view:

> sudo su - root
download lame, uncompress and all...
> ./configure --enable-shared --prefix=/usr
>  make
> make install