I woke up in the middle of the night last week, thinking about something that I’d forgotten. In addition to all the photos I took while I worked at Apple, I remembered that I’d shot video occasionally. It took some serious digging to find it in my massive pile of DV tapes, but today I can present the first tidbit.
In May of 2000 I was learning how to use a Steadicam Jr camera stabilizer that I’d bought on eBay, and was walking around the campus trying to get it to work. This segment is from that ‘practice’ session. It’s a two minute ’stroll’ through the Apple WWDC party, held at Apple in May of 2000. Entertainment provided by the Rippingtons.
The clip is 12MB in QuickTime MPEG-4 format (iPod and iTunes compatible). To spread the load around, I mirrored it on three different servers. Pick one:
They’re coming in as text files for me…
Here’s how people can get around this:
Use the “Download Linked File” command to save it, then delete the .txt extension in the Finder.
I can’t figure out why it’s doing that. Anyone know how I should set up the HTML so it will display a proper link for downloading the file? Mike
It’s because they are *.m4v files which are not natively recognized by Safari. You can open them in Firefox I believe. Otherwise you are right; you will have to download them. In order to get them to work on my website I had to scrounge some source code from my iWeb podcast page, but it was a messy way to “plugin” QuickTime.
You can just alt + click the files to download…
Thanks Mike – It’s really good to get videos. Hopefully you’ll put some more up sometime.
By the way how does that steadycam stabiliser work? The video seemed really smooth and steady.
The issue is that the servers are not supplying the correct MIME type. The stock Apache doesn’t know what .m4v is, but you can educate it by editing the httpd.conf
Pierce – The Steadicam Jr worked great, but just shortly after I bought it I decided to upgrade my camera. The new camera (a Sony PD-150) was too heavy for the ‘Jr’, so I sold it.
Wow, those were the days. There’s nobody there! At WWDC ‘05 I could barely move without getting dizzy or trampled.
Love this blog!
Bringing back a lot of fond memories.
It *seems* to be a mime type issue on the hosting server(s). If you can’t change the config on the servers, you could:
- Save the .m4v’s as QuickTime .movs and link as movies (no need to re–encode). Users without QT Pro could control-click the links and save but wouldn’t directly be able to play on an iPod.
- or -
- Use poster movie to target QuickTime player which does play the files when sent to the URL. Users with Pro could “Save as”.
Sign me up for a pre-order of the book!
- Jon
Thanks for the tip on targeting QuickTime player. I think I’ve got it working now. Mike
Who was invited to that party? Was it just apple employees. How many were there roughly – it looks pretty huge and the atmosphere feels good. Were there many such parties.
Thanks
yikes, cheesy smooth jazz!
Wow! Fame at last – that’s me in the still image (black t-shirt and trousers, immediately to the left of the guy in the blue ‘Think Different’ t-shirt).
WWDC2000 was my first WWDC, and both the conference and campus bash were excellent – thanks for posting this video!
Wow, really awesome. I really want to work there, you have no idea. I’m planning to go out to deanza college and intern with them in hopes of getting my foot in the door for employment. I really want to work with video.
Is that Guy Kawasaki around 0:50 by any chance?