Most of my friends and family know that I don’t dance. It’s something I could probably work on, but I’ve never put much time and energy into it. OfficeMax has put together an incredibly viral marketing campaign that has me dancing all over the place. I love this type of creativity and once again it demonstrates the power of Flash. This dance is for you…and please be sure to link it up and post a comment if you create a nifty dance-o-gram.

A good friend of mine called this evening asking about FFmpeg for Windows. It’s been well over a year since I’ve downloaded a Windows version and was able to find a link here:

http://download.videohelp.com/download/ffmpeggui03c.zip

It’s a GUI version of FFmpeg and looks fairly straightforward to use. It definitely abstracts you from having to enter a crazy command such as:

ffmpeg -i file.avi -y -f vcd -vcodec mpeg1video -map 0.0:0.0 -b 1150 -s 352×240 -r 29.97 -g 12 -qmin 3 -qmax 13 -hq -acodec mp2 -ab 224 -ar 44100 -ac 2 -map 0.1:0.1 movie.mpg

As detailed here. Below is a screenshot of the GUI and Steve, let me know if you run into any probs and send me a copy of your masterpiece!

USAT has a very creative press release around enabling Santa’s workforce with LBS. I will let you make the judgement call on whether or not this is real, but it’s highly entertaining and has some great quotes. My favorite piece of the press release is the network topology diagram:

I think it’s very effective when companies use certain events, holidays, and hypothetical scenarios to spread the word about their offering.  One thing’s for sure, I can guarantee that no other company in their space is doing anything like this.  Genius.

A reader named Rich recently asked if I’d had any success exporting FLV to 3GPP format. I’ve exported QuickTime movies (.mov) to 3GPP in the past, but have never tried converting from FLV. I did a post last year showing how to convert MOV to 3GPP.
Luckily the syntax for converting FLV to 3GPP is nearly identical and looks like the following:

ffmpeg -i airplane.flv -r 15 -b 50 -s sqcif -an test.3gp

The source file came from this YouTube page and was easily converted to 3GPP format using FFmpeg. You can see it running in the QuickTime player here:

and this should run on most mobile phones supporting video as well.  Let’s take a quick look at the parameters:

-r set frame rate (Hz value, fraction or abbreviation)
-b set video bitrate (in kbit/s)
-s set frame size (WxH or abbreviation) sqcif stands for sub-quarter common interchange format and is represented by 128×96
-an disable audio

Unfortunately I had to disable audio because FFmpeg kept throwing an error.  I’ll have to dig into this some more and see what I can find out.  Please let me know if you’re able to encode audio and I’ll be glad to update this post.  I hope this helps.

My father-in-law recently submitted Ella’s photo to the Austin American-Statesman paper for their “Scared of Santa” section. This photo was taken last Christmas (2005) and was her first encounter with Santa. She landed the front page and you can see a thumbnail and full photo below. Both Santa’s and Ella’s expressions are priceless.