Technical Details on Video Submission

Computers are stupid: they do not know who you are, if you exist or what you want to do.

You have to explain to them very accurately what you want them to do for you.

So the way everything works is based upon NAMES - the names you give to your files, and, more particularly, the pathnames that you give to them (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathname).

To post your content to almost any website you need to understand what a pathname is : basically it is a Unique Address - just like your home address - that's a unique pathname that points to you in your home.

Think of your home address backwards: country/ state/ postcode(zipcode)/ city/ suburb/ street/ house number/ personal name. That's almost exactly the same as: http:/australia/6000/perth/crawley/arts_building/Ms_X isn't it? Except for the "http" prefix - which means "hypertext transfer protocol" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Http) - which could be CPTP - or carrier pigeon transfer protocol (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier_pigeon). SIMPLE! - it's just the means by which information travels from place to place via addresses!

For your interest read about deixisis/deictic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deixis) and ostensivity (eg. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostension). Read with suitable doubt, but ask yourself the question: why and how does pointing at something indicate it?

The equivalent on the internet is a URL - a Uniform Resource Locator - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL

What this means FOR YOU is that you MUST think about how you will name your files. This is called "file management" - and is basically the same as all the management activities you do everyday in life: you know what things are called and where they are. Think about it. Why do you forget things?

Let's imagine a situation: two people want to post video files to a site - one is Paul and the other is Ming.

It is week 6 in a course they are studying.

Ming posts a file called "week6.mov"

Paul posts a file called "week6.mov"

How will the computer know which is Paul's and which is Ming's?

The answer is that it won't (apart from some magical file-renaming processes that certain websites have), so it is incumbent upon you to make your own Unique Identifier for your post (movie, picture -anything) - but BE ORGANISED. The key identifier to anything is your name - but what if someone has the same name as you? Then you include your middle name - or some other detail. Or something original and unique to your project - a nomenclature:

You should think about how you name your files (this is a personal taxonomy) so that the filename indicates to you something about its nature - for instance, Paul could call his first movie "paul_sem_2_2006_1.mov" - meaning "Paul semester 2, 2006, movie (episode) 1" - and it has the correct filename extension ".mov" (THIS IS MOST IMPORTANT). Paul can add all sorts of other details to his vlog post about the content and title of the episode, but the name of the .mov file is unique - because the website is merely a database and nothing more.

Another MOST IMPORTANT issue for video posts (or any file) is that you do not have "blank" or "whitespace" spaces in your filename. For instance "my movie" won't work, but "my_movie.mov" will - and it MUST be in a QuickTime movie format - no weird Windows .avi/.wmv format will work (for this site anyway.) You should also not have "&" or "%" or "$" or "#" or "@" or any symbols of that nature -guaranteed to stuff things up!

The Golden Rule is KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KISS_principle)

I'll post a video about this in the near future, but in the meantime this should be enough to keep you going: QuickTime, no blank spaces in names, the URL should be automatic in Drupal (refer to your notes) or post in the Video File field "http://cacofonix.arts.uwa.edu.au/files/videos/******.mov" - where "*****.mov" is the name of your movie.

If you follow these basic rules, everything should work for you. If it doesn't then first - double check, then ask a colleague who has successfully posted (you can post comments after all) or post a question in the appropriate forum - it should be pretty obvious.

Good luck!