Tim Halbur's blog

Over at Planetizen, we recently launched a project we're very excited about: Planetizen Courses. It's a major upgrade from our previous educational offerings, which were Moodle-based and mostly text. The new site is completely video-based, with instructors using screen capture software and cameras to capture their actions and their faces for a personal, one-on-one feel.

So I'm not a Drupal expert, and I don't play one on TV. What I do do is use Drupal everyday, using Urban Insight's flagship site, Planetizen. I'm a perfect test audience for Drupal usability, because I can give a detailed perspective from a user standpoint.

In my last post, I recommended software for audio conversion. I promised to do the same for video, which is easier said than done. Video is particularly tricky.

In my last post, I gave some tips on talking to media providers about audio and video you want to post to your site. But much of the time you won't have that luxury - you'll receive a variety of formats that won't play nice with your website, or even sometimes your desktop! This time, we'll focus on audio.

"Help!" wrote a friend of mine last week. "I was given these great videos of my clinic from a TV network, and I can't figure out how to get them on my website!" My friend runs a free clinic, and they received a lot of great coverage from the local news but they delivered a strange file that no one knew what to do with.