A Video Interview Using Free Tools

Man oh man have I had an experience. It stems largely from living in the Windows world when it was king (and therefore the only standard) and then moving to larger world of free software and real standards.  Like many in this down economy I am looking for work and in an effort to make myself stand out and thought that a video resume might be a good way to do it.

This story is about how easy it is to do all of this using free tools and then to make it work under both Linux and Windows….only this is not about Linux vs Windows. It is more of a case of Microsoft Internet Explorer vs the rest of the world….

At first the general project sounded simple; dress in a suit, iterate the highlights of my resume on video, edit it to fit into a nice bite-sized format, convert it flash to save on my bandwidth and host it on my web site. Doing it all with free tools made things even nicer.

The Video:

In anticipation of needing to do some editing I broke the general ’script’ apart into four or five sections: An introduction, skills summary, early background, later background, current projects and closing. Then I went into my office with a shovel and cleaned out an area to film in. I used the so-handy RCA Small Wonder video camera to film with. These things are great; even without additional RAM, it can record up to 30 minutes of high-quality video or an hour at low-quality. When you get done filming you press a button on the side of the device and a USB port pops out; plug it into your Linux laptop and it appears as a camera or external drive and the files are already in .AVI containers. I went through all of the section four times so that I could cherry-pick the best ones. As you will see, I may be an excellent coder but I am nobodies movie star.

Processing:

The next step was to break apart the various video files and assemble the best parts into one continuous film. That task was relegated to my favourite video editor for idiots (me being an idiot at such things), AVIDemux (apt-get install avidemux). With this tool it was childs play to break them apart, preview the various elements and then “stack” them together into one video:

Once I chose the parts I wanted it was a simple matter of stacking them with successive calls to Append File (File -> Append). When done, I simply saved the result to a file called interview1.avi. This was fine except for two things that should be apparent: 1. I am unemployed so funds are limited and 2. This file was 89 megs in length! I could see my bandwidth bills going through the roof, defeating the purpose of the exercise. That answer? The oft-despised but comparatively anorexic Flash medium but I had no experience at creating Flash videos! Oh what is an OSS dude to do? FFMpeg to the rescue but I was on the clock, having put it off all weekend and needed it for the following morning. A nice front-end for FFMpeg (and my new best friend) is WinFF (apt-get install winff):

WinFF is great; you point at the file you are starting with, choose from dozens of types of outputs and press Convert. It’s just that simple. I love it. Out pops interview2.flv at a slender 15 megs.

The Fun: Flash

At this point I somewhat stupidly assumed I was in the home stretch; the only thing that was to stretch was my ability to curse at inanimate objects and insanely rich billionaires. All I had to do was to embed the Flash video into my website which contained a page with my experience on it anyways and just sticking the file out there with an HREF anchor did the trick but it just started up and played with no way to stop or to pause the video…and made it look even more lame than it was. A little research revealed that you had to embed a Flash player on your website (or somewhere) to provide the VCR-like controls we are all accustomed to…and most were for “non-commercial” use only. Well job-hunting left me in a strange spot in that it would be non-commercial … until and unless it worked. Consquently I went out in a search for an open source Flash player and sure enough, the OSS world provides OSFLV.

Creating the page:

First to set up the web page; I run WordPress on a spare box for my main site. Great product, BTW. In any event, OS FLV needed me to muck with elements of the HTML normally out of the reach of the common user so I just created a subdirectory under the main site called ‘interview’ and from the OS FLV tarball I extracted the flash folder along with AC_RunActiveContent.js along with player.swf and put them all in the interview folder. To that I added the interview2.flv file, a snapshot from it called sample.png (AVIDemux provided this) which gives the Flash player an image to display when the video is not running. All that was left was the HTML to play it. Since I had it in a directory of it’s own, I fired up Bluefish HTML editor and created a default index.html file using the Quick Start wizard (I was definitely into the “why work when you don’t have to” mode at this point) and this is where the fun began. To get Flash to embed nicely on everything (regardless of platform) except Microsoft Internet Explorer, you need the embed tag:

<EMBED href="http://www/jbcobb.net/interview/interview2.flv"
quality=high bgcolor=#FFFFFF WIDTH="550" HEIGHT="400"  NAME="interview2" ALIGN=""
TYPE="application/x-shockwave-flash" PLUGINSPAGE="http://www.macromedia.com/gogetflashplayer">
</EMBED>

And to get it to work in IE you have to wrap all of *that* in an object tag from hell:

<object> classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=9,0,16,0"
width='480' height='360' id='flvPlayer'>
  <param name='allowFullScreen' value='true'>
  <param name='movie' value="player.swf?movie=interview2.flv&bgcolor=0x051615&fgcolor=0x13ABEC&
volume=90&autoload=on&autorewind=on&clickurl=interview2.flv&clicktarget=_self&
postimage=sample.png">
 </object>

You can view the semi-finished product here:

http://www/jbcobb.net/interview

At the end of the day this was pretty simple to do once you deal with the browser insanity. I did a lot of browser work years ago; I would have thought that Microsoft would have learned by now….the thing is about any form of HTML/javascript/etc worked in Linux and only one in IE….there was a time when it was the other way around…

Update 11 November 2009:

I added another similar section here: jbcobb.net/14_things/. Basically I thought the interview itself was pretty dry and I wanted an easy way to quickly outline some of the more interesting projects I have worked on or invented. Again using free tools I used Open Office.org Presentation tool to create a slideshow of the material, ran the slideshow under recordmydesktop (apt-get install grecordmydesktop), converted the file to .AVI with WinFF (see above), edited the cruft out of it, overlaid some background unobtrusive background music and saved. Then I used WinFF again to convert the video to Flash, I cloned the ‘interview’ directory on my webserver, replaced the video payload with the new ‘14_things.flv’ and updated the index.html file there to reflect that. Badda-bing we have a new video…

Me to you

JeffC