Creating movies and bloggin' em.

Ever want to post digital movies into your blog? Here's a brief how-to on how I did it for my other blog.

1. My digital camera takes quicktime movies. (These are files with the *.mov extension.)

2. I used a program by RadTools to convert my MOV file to an AVI.

3. I used Windows Movie Maker (comes with Windows XP Start>Programs>Accessories) to chop off the parts I didn't want. I then output the file to a WMV file. (Windows Video)

4. I signed up at Anywhere (for free) to store my file on the web.

5. I uploaded my file, and was able to retrieve a valid URL for it.

6. I then created my post, adding a link to my file.

TO DO: Perhaps a good embedded player post would be more attractive. I attempted this with Media Player, but got some unexpected results with Internet Explorer and Firefox.

Some things of note:
1. It's hard to edit quicktime files directly without QuickTime Pro. (~$30)

2. Many free software titles exist for AVI file manipulation. (That's the reason I converted from mov to avi.)

3. AVI files seem to have a 10 to 1 file size increase from MOV -> AVI. This is unacceptable in a web environment.

4. WMV files are nice and compressed, but lose a good bit of video quality. There are also limitations with non-Microsoft browsers.