I wanted to add some nice buttons to my web site, but didn’t really know how to draw them very well. After quite a bit of hunting, I found this fantastic tutorial on drawing buttons in GIMP (my favorite photoshop alternative). It’s a small number of easy steps that are excellently documented, so that even I could follow it with no problem at all to produce buttons like this;
Since my TunerFreeMCE code has been out there for almost a year now, I have picked up a fair bit of experience of playing flash on windows media center.
Most of the TV companies who provide flash video do so using the Akamai tech stack to secure and stream their content. They build their own custom flash players on top of that to provide their own flavour to the players, e.g. related videos and so on. The probably intentional side effect of this is that it is really not trivial to get in to their flash streams and do anything with it. It’s not like the have an rtmp url easily accessible for you to get hold of. There are ways of doing it, but not easily. There is for example a project on sourceforge called rtmpdump (http://sourceforge.net/projects/rtmpdump/) which allows you to download flash videos from the BBC and from Hulu. (more…)