Garage & Updates

You would have though that after the Valentines Day competition we ran last week I would have been prepared and brought my wife a card and flowers wouldn’t you.

ActiveX Video

I did completed the video on building applications with the new ActiveX Controls yesterday as promised but it’s taken me the best part of 2 days to publish the file.

For some reason the publishing software would crash at 80% complete each time when trying to output as Flash. All other formats worked fine, I event tried going from AVI to Flash, WMV to Flash, MOV to Flash and just about every other format the software supports and back to Flash again but with the same results.

]]>Eventually, at 8pm yesterday I cracked and re-edited the file around the 80% mark and that solved the problem. And then a new problem started.

When it finally completed and produced my Flash file it was a whopping 3.2gb, amazingly large for a minute demo, so I spent the rest of the night trying to get it down to a reasonable size.

After many hours of tedium watching a progress bar slowly paint its way across the screen I broke the 100mb barrier

As I get told off by all you Mac and Linux guys out there every time I produce something in WMV, I though I would publish things in Flash format as well as from now on. (My experiments with QuickTime and MOV were even worse). This is as close to cross platform as I can get.

So Linux and Mac fans you owe me a beer for the effort I put in getting this Flash movie produced, either that or you need to cheer on the Arsenal tonight.

The App

I used C# to build the following application.

The ActiveX controls can be downloaded from here

Click here to watch the demo

I guess now would be a good time to get down to the shops and see what bargains I can find in the flower department.