However, if you hook up your Apple TV to a TV or other device that expects to receive uncompressed PCM audio, the Apple TV's unwillingness to decode AC3 can be a problem. In this case, if you attempt to play a video with just an AC3 audio track, the Apple TV will display an error message and refuse to play the video file. Apple itself shrewdly avoids this problem by always having a stereo AAC audio track in all the videos that it sells, so the Apple TV can simply fall back to the stereo track if the display device it's hooked up to can't handle AC3 audio. And the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad can't decode AC3 audio either, so they depend on the stereo track as well.

Creating your own

So what does this mean when creating your own videos?

Most of the time, it shouldn't matter, as most audio sources are stereo or even mono, so a stereo AAC track is all that's needed. But when ripping DVDs to an Apple TV friendly format, you may want to preserve the original 5.1 audio track as well as create a stereo AAC track, just like Apple does. Handbrake, the powerful video conversion tool, will do this without much trouble.

Things get harder when you find yourself in possession of videos that only have an AC3 audio track. For instance, I downloaded a video from the Roskilde music festival from ClearBits, a place where freely distributable content can be found. This video was encoded in H.264 with AC3 sound in an MKV file. The good news is that iTunes, the Apple TV, and iOS devices can handle the H.264 video, but the bad news is that they don't handle MKV files or AC3 video. (Although the right plugins hide many sins when using iTunes in 32-bit mode, in 64-bit mode, these plugins are no longer supported.)

It is possible to convert the file without re-encoding the video with QuickTime Pro, but this is neither particularly easy nor especially fast. It is then possible to paste back the original AC3 track in the new video if you really know what you're doing. However, a better solution for this is Subler. 

Subler was originally a tool to add subtitle tracks to MP4 videos, but it is also very good at "muxing" audio and video tracks. What this means is that Subler lets you open a file and specify whether to convert the audio to AAC or keep it as AC3. Then, simply choose to add more tracks, select the original file again, deselect the video track, let the program do its thing, and Bob's your uncle. Bonus tip: make Subler write to the "Automatically Add to iTunes" folder inside the "iTunes Music" folder and (guess what!) the new MP4 file is automatically added to iTunes. I also experienced fewer glitches by checking the 64-bit mode checkbox in the save dialog.

This article shows examples of how to embed video and other iframes in a responsive web design and has examples with YouTube, Vimeo and Slideshare.
I found a neat little CSS trick on the A List Apart article “Creating Intrinsic Ratios for Video” and I did some experimenting with it. (Yes, I had to look up the word Intrinsic…)
The problem with embed code that you copy from websites like YouTube is that they often contain a fixed width and height in pixels. And that does not work too well in responsive designs. In a responsive design we have a container with a relative width and we want the embedded object to be relative to our container. This is not possible with all embeds as some of them insist on having a fixed width. If you encounter such embeds, the workaround is probably to move some of the code to the server side or javascript and set the width to the pixel value that you think is most appropriate. It will work, but it will not be flexible like the method shown here.
This technique is fully flexible and I have tests below with Vimeo, SlideShare and YouTube (sorry if this post took long to load…). Here are the steps to make it work.

I've heard a few people say "the human eye can't tell the difference between 30 and 60 frames per second." I disagree.

Here's my attempt to prove that the human eye can tell the difference between 30 FPS and 60 FPS. Pay close attention to the detail of the animation.

The Junkyard Jumbotron lets you take a bunch of random displays and instantly stitch them together into a large, virtual display, simply by taking a photograph of them. It works with laptops, smartphones, tablets --- anything that runs a web browser. It also highlights a new way of connecting a large number of heterogenous devices to each other in the field, on an ad-hoc basis.

Two sheets of fabric continuously fly in and out of a vortex of air.

Interaktiv lista på de bästa TED talks baserat på olika faktorer.

En tråd med massor av guldkorn när det gäller TED.

TED talks, ranked by PostRank engagement data

Apple big event, crammed into 90 seconds.

A lightweight, easy-to-use jQuery plugin for fluid width video embeds.

During the first decade of the 21st century, film style changed profoundly. Throughout the initial century of moviemaking, the default style of commercial cinema was classical; it was meticulous and patient. At least in theory, every composition and camera move had a meaning, a purpose. Movies did not cut without good reason, as it was considered sloppy, even amateurish. Mainstream films once prided themselves on keeping you the viewer well-oriented because they wanted to make sure you always knew where you were and what was happening.

Action was always intelligible, no matter how frenetic the scenario. A prime example: John Woo’s classic Hong Kong action film Hard Boiled. Its action is wild and extravagant, but it is nevertheless coherent and comprehensible at all times. Viewers feel and experience the exaggerated shootout fantasy without ever losing their bearings. In terms of camerawork, editing and staging, precision is key. Woo’s film is in fact strongly influenced by the work of American directors such as Sam Peckinpah and Martin Scorsese. A similarly great American action film is John McTiernan’s Die Hard. Notice the economy of cuts and camera moves in the scene where hero John McClane fights the bad guy’s chief henchman, Karl. The fight itself is frantic yet clearly understandable, both riveting and stabilizing—the M.O. of classical cinema.

But in the past decade, that bit of received wisdom went right out the window. Commercial films became faster. Overstuffed. Hyperactive.

Rapid editing, close framings, bipolar lens lengths and promiscuous camera movement now define commercial filmmaking. Film scholar David Bordwell gave this type of filmmaking a name: intensified continuity. But Bordwell’s phrase may not go far enough. In many post-millennial releases, we’re not just seeing an intensification of classical technique, but a perversion. Contemporary blockbusters, particularly action movies, trade visual intelligibility for sensory overload, and the result is a film style marked by excess, exaggeration and overindulgence: chaos cinema.

This was filmed between 4th and 11th April 2011. I had the pleasure of visiting El Teide.
Spain´s highest mountain @(3718m) is one of the best places in the world to photograph the stars and is also the location of Teide Observatories, considered to be one of the world´s best observatories.

The goal was to capture the beautiful Milky Way galaxy along with one of the most amazing mountains I know El Teide. I have to say this was one of the most exhausting trips I have done. There was a lot of hiking at high altitudes and probably less than 10 hours of sleep in total for the whole week. Having been here 10-11 times before I had a long list of must-see locations I wanted to capture for this movie, but I am still not 100% used to carrying around so much gear required for time-lapse movies.

A few months ago we ran a story where I said that there was no reason to spend a lot of money on HDMI cables. I still stand by that. Most cable companies are so incredibly misleading in their marketing/advertising it borders on outright lying.

Others just lie.

So we decided to put a test together to see if there really was any difference in cables. The results were… interesting.

YouTube5 has become far more popular than I ever imagined it would! I’d like to say a general thank you to everyone who has commented to make suggestions or just express appreciation for this extension, its a great encouragement to know it has been useful to so many people.

Several months ago I had hinted that I was in the process of developing a new version of this extension, and I’m excited to announce that it is finally ready! This version is an almost complete rewrite, and includes many improvements over the first, including:

A custom designed HTML5 player to replace the usable, but very limited built-in player.
Support for Vimeo and Facebook video.
The ability to switch video resolutions within the player, without having to access Safari’s preferences.
Support for downloading videos from YouTube and Facebook.
A fully functional volume control, rather than just a mute button.
Support for displaying the video’s title, author, and source, in a video overlay, along with a link back to the video’s page on YouTube, Vimeo, etc.

Mark Pilgrim om hur man konverterar video för att passa för iPod 5G.

Ars Technica visar hur man gör för att få över videofilmer till en iPod video, både från mac och pc.

DAVE700 är en kommande trådlös mediaspelare från Netgear. Jag önskar att Apple kunde göra en sådan här produkt.

Jag testar Google Video Search. Uppenbarligen var Dee Snider med i ett avsnitt av Drew Carey. Måste ha.

Pingvinen Pingu textad på svenska. Sanslöst rolig.

Ett tips på macosxhints om hur man kan spara ner videoströmmar med VLC 0.8