2FKD

FlowPlayer is a Flash media player for the web.  It’s a nice alternative to Jeroen Wijering’s FLV Media Player, although I’d never knock the latter.  It’s still arguably still the best.

One reason to use FlowPlayer is its GPL license.  There aren’t many reasons to build it from source, as the precompiled SWFs work identically.  The only reason I was curious enough to try it was to change the embedded logo in full-screen mode.  FlowPlayer is offered with a “commercial” license, which nets you FlowPlayer minus that logo.  That doesn’t sound like much of a benefit to me.  I’d want a logo there - just not that one.

It occurred to me that CentOS, the free Linux distribution based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, is able to do exactly that.  They take RHEL, swap out logos and the “Red Hat” phrases, compile, and that’s about it.  It’s a nice way to work with Red Hat without forking over the cash, and it’s legal thanks to the GPL (I’ll still take Debian/Ubuntu any day - enterprise be damned).

This is tangential, but I’m noting it because I’m publishing these instructions simply because I figured it out and there isn’t a lot of good information out there to this effect.  These instructions are based on a somewhat outdated post I found that didn’t make an OS distinction and turned out not to work as written on Macs.

One note before we continue: I’m a developer, and if you’ve read this far I’m assuming you are, too.  I didn’t investigate some of the more basic prerequisites typical for development on Mac OS X, as I’ve got the Developer kit installed, as well as MacPorts and Fink.  If these instructions don’t work for you, make sure you’ve got the basics ready to go.  We’ll only be using two external tools you probably don’t have, and we won’t be installing them on the system itself.  For the record, I’m running 10.5.2.

Here we go:

1. Head over to the FlowPlayer project page and download the FlowPlayer sources.
2. Download swfmill v0.2.11 to the same directory where you downloaded FlowPlayer.  As of this writing the current version is 0.2.12.  This version does not work with FlowPlayer as it’s currently written, so I’ve linked to the older version.  It is possible by the time you read this that a new version that does work is available.  Google accordingly.
3. Download the mtasc Mac OS X package from the Motion Twin web site to the same directory where you downloaded FlowPlayer.
4. Open a Terminal, cd to the directory where you downloaded the archives, and extract them:
   $ unzip flowplayer-2.0.1-src.zip
$ unzip mtasc-1.12-osx.zip
$ tar zxf swfmill-0.2.11-macosx.tar.gz
5. Copy the binaries into their respective directories:
   $ cp swfmill-0.2.11-macosx/swfmill flowplayer-src/bin/swfmill/
$ cp mtasc-1.12-osx/mtasc flowplayer-src/bin/mtasc
6. cd into each directory, rm the Windows binaries, and symlink the Mac OS X versions:
   $ cd flowplayer-src/bin/mtasc/
$ rm mtasc.exe
$ ln -s mtasc mtasc.exe
$ cd ../swfmill/
$ rm swfmill.exe
$ ln -s swfmill swfmill.exe
$ cd ../../

7. At this point you should be in the flowplayer-src directory. It’s time to compile!
   $ ant
8. If all went according to plan, you’ll see some text output as the compile progresses. You should see the following lines at the end (your build time will vary):
   BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 22 seconds
9. You’ll find the various players in the build/ directory.  As a quick test, open FlowPlayer.html in a text editor, and look for ../FlowPlayerDark.html. Remove the ../ at the beginning so it just reads FlowPlayerDark.html. Next, search for http://flowplayer.org/video/honda_accord.flv and replace it with a reference to another FLV (the original doesn’t currently exist on the FlowPlayer web site).  Save the file. Open it up in your favorite web browser, and you should see the player.

That’s all there is to it.  Feel free to get in touch if you find anything amiss.  This just worked for me.

This is the first post here under a new category by the name of Addendum.  I’ll be using it for miscellaneous items that aren’t necessarily Links, or don’t warrant a whole post.

I have fallen in love with this track.  You should check it out.  It’s a remix of Max Sedgley’s Happy.

If you’re looking for a good time with some of the best guys around, Darrell’s house can’t be beat.  On the topic of one of his recent drunken sexual encounters, he shared a choice quote:

She’s not a gymnast… More of a salmon.

FTW!

Best ad I’ve seen in ages.  Thanks to E for the link.

When Apple announced Apple TV Take 2, I was bummed to see no mention of streaming radio.  It seemed like such a simple way to add value to the product.  After upgrading my box to the new software, I took a peek, saw there was indeed no radio, and went about enjoying the many other great new features.

A couple days ago I was fooling around in iTunes and discovered that you can create a playlist and drag individual stations from the station browser to it.  That playlist will show up on the Apple TV.  I opened it up, picked ETN.fm 1, and was thrilled to hear music most of my friends hate.  Zeke and I listened for a bit, and went about the evening’s business.

Yesterday as I was preparing for my workout I figured I’d tune into the radio on the Apple TV.  I hit Play and after a moment it resumed the same stream.  Sweet!  Not my favorite style of stuff, but hey - it’s free, and I’ve never heard it.  I got down to business.  About halfway through I was taking a breather and figured I’d change the channel.   I paused the station, tapped the button to see the playlists, and was rather surprised to find that the Radio playlist was gone.  Thinking perhaps I’d managed to navigate to a different menu inadvertently, I took a look around to see if there was any clue.  There wasn’t.  The odd thing of it is that I could hit the Now Playing option, and restart the paused stream.  The indicator even showed the 20 of 71, telling me where in the playlist I was.

I haven’t done any formal testing to prove this, but all of this seems to be unintended behavior.  The Apple TV is configured by default to sync as much content from the host machine as possible, but it has always been possible to stream whatever content is in iTunes on the host machine that for one reason or another (disk space constraints or user choice) aren’t copied to the device.  The original Apple TV software required the user to explicitly choose a host machine from which to stream, but the Take 2 software makes the whole process automatic.  If iTunes is open and properly configured, the Apple TV will automatically mix in the host’s content with the synced.  It’s pretty elegant, and makes the process as seamless as possible.

Well, the Apple TV saw the Radio playlist in iTunes and made those “tracks” available for play.  I had assumed when I first discovered the trick that iTunes was pulling down the stream and passing it back to the Apple TV, but knowing that the host machine wasn’t on when I tried it the last time, it’s obvious that the Apple TV is pulling the stream down on its own.  This proves conclusively that not only is the Apple TV capable of playing streaming radio, but also that the Apple TV software already has a working implementation of it.

What the fuck?!

Apple takes the time to do the gruntwork of building out the actual implementation and explicitly chooses not to allow the end-user to make full use of it?  There are many Microsoft fanboys out there who’ll say that’s just the way things are with Apple, but it wasn’t until this particular issue came up that I actually felt like I’d lost something as a result.  This device has been crippled in a specific way, and I can’t think of a single reason to justify it.

I’m the kind of guy who tends to agree with the decisions Apple makes.  Certainly not all the time, but on the whole I think they’ve managed to figure out a business model that makes me feel like it works for me as much as it works for them.  I make a living hammering away on a MacBook Pro.  I use an iPhone to keep in touch with email and the web when I’m away from the desk.  Apple makes some stuff that I miss when it’s not there.

I’m also the kind of guy who always turns to iTunes or Amazon MP3 when I hear a track I want to own, and it’s rare that there’s something I hear I can’t find legally.  Hell, the very night I discovered all of this I bought one of the tracks I heard streaming on ETN.fm from iTunes!

It’s a shame this company places such limits on its own products.  I totally get Apple not going out of its way to put Flash on the iPhone, but I don’t get Apple explicitly avoiding functionality when it’s already taken the time to implement it.

Stephen Colbert to Hussein Ibish on tonight’s Colbert Report:

 So there might not be any god but Allah, and Mohammed might be his prophet.

Ibish’s response:

 I don’t know, and neither do you, and neither does anyone else.

Rock on, brother.

I try.  I really try.  I try really hard to believe that those red states are filled with good, honest, intelligent people.  They don’t really think that evolution is just a theory, or that we’re all really cousins.

I do believe most of them are good at heart, and that they often believe they’re being honest.  But that intelligence thing… yeah.  I don’t think I’ll ever believe to believe that nonsense.

I haven’t blogged in a solid two years.  I point that out right off the bat, because while everyone on earth was catching blog fever I was getting burned out.  Having blogged nearly constantly since the age of fifteen, a full eight years of blogging had worn me out.  When you think about it, that’s not particularly surprising.  It’s tough to do something regularly for any decent length of time without getting bored with it, and that seems to be particularly prevalent lately.  Truth be told, I chalk most of it up to testosterone.

That isn’t to say that I stopped enjoying it; my problem was that I invariably ended up in a place that you couldn’t describe as tangential without blushing due to the massive understatement.  There were moments where I would write something, post it, get a response, realize I was wrong, realize that I was wrong because of that fucking tangent, and the only thing left to do was make an attempt at convincing myself I had actually been right all along.  If there’s one thing I’ve been accused of during my prolific 25 years, it’s arrogance.  Granted, I don’t like to be wrong, but I do a fairly good job of letting logic be the basis for my arguments.  As a result, I tend to be right.  I find it difficult to believe that someone of reasonable intelligence - certainly a mind capable of logic, at the very least - wouldn’t end up consuming my words and asking for seconds.  The number one justification for a red stamp of arrogance is being unyielding in debate.

As one person put it to me:  “It isn’t that you’re right.  It’s that you’re sure of it.”

So, I’m trying something a little bit different.  As I noted, it’s been a while since I did any kind of blogging, and I can already tell that my writing has suffered for it.  That being said, I’m not making an effort to tell people about this one.  It’s a domain no one knows, and in reality few are ever likely to know.  I’m no longer making the assumption that anyone actually cares what I have to say.

When I left my college town of Tucson there were few with whom I maintained regular contact, and after being here well over a year that number is fewer still.  I should probably be saddened at this fact, as those years in Tucson were a blast, but walking away from that life has placed a renewed strength in the friendships that remain.  I’m going to have some work to do beating back the tangents, but it’s been a long time since I’ve been able to say that I feel like I’ve got anything worth saying.

That’s an opportunity you have to take.