[microformats-discuss] Video Pop-up Link Maker

[Joshua Kinberg]

Just wanted to share a small project I launched today... I modified
the javascript hCard Creator to make a wizard to generate pop-up links
for videobloggers. If there was a microformat for describing media I
would be happily to incorporate it into this (rel="enclosure" is in
there).

< http://joshkinberg.com/popupmaker/ >

The code generated will launch a pop-up window with the specified
video properly embedded in HTML. The pop-up window is a PHP file on my
website -- choosing the appropriate embed code for the video is
handled server side (currently accepts most file formats for Quicktime
and Windows Media plugins):

< http://joshkinberg.com/popup.php?url=http://joshkinberg.com/blog/files/tornado.mov
>

Its still a little crude, and there may be a few bugs here and there,
but it basically works....

The reason for this is that many videobloggers use Blogger or another
hosted service.
They also typically use video hosting services such as
OurMedia/Internet Archive to host and serve their video files.

Often they do not know how to write HTML in order to embed the videos
in their blog entries, nor do they have the ability to create pop-up
windows with embedded video for this purpose.

Typically videobloggers just link directly to the video file expecting
it to play nicely in the browser, which is not the case if the viewer
is using Internet Explorer because of the way IE handles video plugins
(it disables Quicktime Fast-Start unless the video is embedded, and
WMV will launch in Windows Media Player if not embedded).

But, services like FeedBurner and others require direct links to the
video file in order to create enclosures in the RSS feed, so simply
embedding the video is not enough. Not to mention that a page full of
embedded videos, even using Quicktime poster images, will load slowly
and cause rendering headaches for your web browser.

So.... this solution combines the best of both worlds.

Please let me know what you think, and also if you see a way to stuff
more Microformat goodness in there.

-josh