Some misunderstandings about Codecs.
First off, MPEG-4 isn’t actually a codec, it’s a group of codecs.
Secondly, the file extension ‘.mp4′ or ‘.3gp’ is indicative only of the files ‘container’ that holds the audio & video data and not the codec that was used to encode the file contents (and thus determines the codec needed to decode and play the file!)

Video delivery
HTML5 is only supported by some of the latest phones, (android, Apple).
Flash only works on some handheld devices. Apple is a no. Nokia and BB implement a lite version that doesn’t playback video.
The rest of the handsets will allow a file to be downloaded and played but only if it is of the right format.

The JW Player is a good help as it tries to offer flash video and then falls back to HTML5 if flash is not available in the browser – this works for desktops and iOS/Android devices if the right file formats are offered. You need a 3rd option, to offer a download link and an image placeholder for other devices. To do this you need to identify the ‘user agent’ of the browser that has asked for the web page. If it’s bb, offer a mp4 mpeg-4 part 2 file, if it’s Nokia, then you may have to offer a 3gp file instead (the bb file type might work though). See below for more info on encoding in these formats.

Apple Devices
iOS devices supports MPEG4 part 10, encoded to h.264 video and AAC audio in the mp4 container. Use x264 and CoreAudio codecs respectively in Handbrake (a free program) to achieve this. You can encode at 720p and iOS devices will deal with it.
They support HTML5 streaming – tick the ‘web-optimized’ box to let the file play whilst the file loads (this shifts some critical data needed to play the video to the beginning of the file).

Blackberry
New blackberry devices support MPEG4 Part 2, that is h.263 and AAC Audio in an mp4 container. Use ffmpeg and faac codecs respectively to encode this in handbrake (free program).
I’m not sure about older Blackberry devices. It’s best to resize to a width of 480.
Blackberry does not support html5, you need to offer a download link which the browser will open and play (you don’t need to save and then open the file in the multimedia browser).

Windows
Do I care? Not at the moment.

Nokia (pre-windows)
Newer nokia phones support MPEG4 part-10 (h.264) which is used in most apple kit (see above)
Older Nokia Phones support MPEG-4 part 2, which is h.263 – the ffmpeg codec can be used to encode this in handbrake (free program).
I’m not sure if older phones support the mp4 container it might just be 3gp. Handbrake doesn’t do 3gp, but Quicktime 7 Pro does.

Android
I assume this is HTML5 and will work similarly to Chrome – Google are removing MP4 / h.264 support and switching only to Ogg Theora (Joy!) I don’t know as much about this, but you can get a plugin for Quicktime 7 to export to the OGM format here: Ogg OGM Quicktime Component.

Posted from Lambeth, England, United Kingdom.

If you’re big enough to use clustering, then you will probably have ways to get around this, however if you aren’t, it could get problematic and clustering would take some expertise and know how to set up.

The way we solved this also helped improve the level of security with our web servers – an issue that any security aware organisation uses open source software will be well aware of.

The answer was to employ an internal staging server – we could test all content amendments and updates on this server before rolling them out to the live servers. Previously we would have to take a server out of the load balancing ‘array’, make changes, test and then copy the changes across to the live servers before releasing the server used for testing back into the array. This was a pain and it reduced the level of resilience as the number of servers used for load balancing was reduced.

So how do you copy the changes from a staging server to your live servers? Simply use a script that dumps the database and then copies the database across to the live servers along with any updated files (do this using using rsync over ssh). The script then runs a remote script sitting on each of the live servers that automatically imports the transferred database and bingo – new content is copied across and live on all your load balanced servers.

How does this improve security? Well now you can disable access to to wp-admin, wp-login.php and any other admin area of the site on the live servers by using .htaccess files or custom php rules. Simply omit these files from being included in the rsync process (see ignoring files during rsync) and you can help ensure that your WordPress server stays yours.

Additionally, and I really like this, if WordPress does get hacked (and it may not be immediately obvious that this has happened), then the security & integrity of your database and code is no longer known. All you need do is upload the files and database from the staging server (which isn’t publicly accessible) and you’re back in the game.

One last thing – using the auto update script also makes it really easy to upgrade WordPress. Do it on the staging server – test your content and plugins and then roll out the upgrade to your load balanced servers simultaneously.

Posted from High Wycombe, England, United Kingdom.

add the following lines to the bottom of your host file (/etc/hosts) using your site URL’s:

127.0.0.1 site1.co.uk www.site1.co.uk
127.0.0.1 site2.co.uk www.site2.co.uk

Finally, go in to the MAMP directory > conf > apache and edit httpd.conf, adding the following to the bottom:

NameVirtualHost *:80

<virtualHost *:80>
ServerName www.site2.co.uk
DocumentRoot "/Users/homefolder/Sites/site2/"
<Directory /Users/homefolder/Sites/site2/>
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
allow from all
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Save and close the file, flush your mac’s DNS cache and then restart MAMP to load the new config changes. You should now be able to view your local sites for testing or development without having to copy the files to a testing server first.

Posted from Lambeth, England, United Kingdom.

Office 2011 finally brings a full version of Outlook and I to say it’s great! It’s fast and also has seamless synchronisation with the mac address book which I use to synch with my gmail account (and thus iPhone). iCal integration isn’t ready yet apparently, but will come out later in the year, so for the time being I still have to use iCal, which synch’s with my google calendar (and then, again, with my iPhone).

Word is also better, with a more familiar ribbon interface than the altogether bizarre formatting palettes that came with 2008 – these probably worked well on a large screen desktop, but not on a 13″ MBP. It also seems to be faster than the slow behemoth that was the 2008 version.

It almost hurts to say it, but Microsoft actually pulled it out the bag with this one.

Posted from Lambeth, England, United Kingdom.

Had a crack with this pic of me airborne in Fleine. No, I didn’t land it!

Posted from London, England, United Kingdom.

I bought a Buffalo router (cheap as chips) and as it was N-150, it flew along. For about a week. Again connection issues would crop up almost daily. Toggling wifi on/off on the MBP would occasionally fix the issue for a few minutes. A restart didn’t always fix it. Clearing the NVRAM on boot seemed to do the trick for a week or two. Alas, I still have problems.

Meanwhile the WiFi at my office was upgraded to Cisco routers – these should work right? Nope. Not with the MBP. IPhone – yep. Any other wifi device? Flawless. Great.

After much searching I may now have a fix: Trashing the config files in /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration. Copy these files to somewhere safe and delete one file at a time (make a note of which ones you have tried) and restart the mac each time. So far I have only deleted ‘com.apple.airport.preferences.plist’ and things are working ok again – but only time will tell.

I found this fix on the apple support forums, where the original post includes a breakdown of the above process if you’re not experienced with rooting around your hard drive outside of your user folder. Depressingly, you might also notice that there aren’t a shortage of posts about WiFi issues… so you’re not alone!

Posted from Lambeth, England, United Kingdom.