The reason I went with this little gem was that it was simple and straightforward to use, had no restrictions vis-a-vis what your site may or may not be about ( private or commercial ), was very flexible and very configurable AND most importantly – FREE!

What I was also impressed with was that it was already configured to work with my blog without having to adjust any of it’s settings, and it has lots of settings! Pretty well everything is configurable. It has become so popular now that they even have their own support forum now -> wpmarketing.org/forum/forum/wp-plugin-hana-flv-player

Here is how you would implement it and adjust quite a few settings ( which again were not necessary on my blog .) You would just add the following code (using the appropriate address of the real video you want to show ) in the text of your posting:

[hana-flv-player
   video="http://yourwebsite.com/wp-content/plugins/hana-flv-player/babyhana.flv"
   width="400"
   height="320"
   description="Sarah is having fun in a merry-go-round"
   clickurl="http://yourwebsite.com/"
   clicktarget="_blank"
   player="4"
   autoplay="false"
   loop="false"
   autorewind="true"
   splashimage="http://yourwebsite.com/wp-content/plugins/hana-flv-player/splash.jpg"
/]

As you can see it’s quite simple to use and can be easily adjusted to suit your needs!

I would recommend this package/plugin to anyone, who has a WordPress blog, who is wanting to embed ANY internet video ( that’s right you don’t have to host it on your own site – all you need is the URL or address ). I’m thinking that in future I’ll use this engine to play any and all future videos that I might want to post. It’s a great tool to have in your blogging quiver!

Till next time!

I’ve seen this slowly in development/testing for a while, I just didn’t know it was out already…  The problem seems to be that the gang at thebeamz.com put it into their new product listing but forgot to put it into their store listing! Hopefully they will correct that shortly. Until then you can always go here -> thebeamz.com/shop/category/new/.

I’m still not sure what the difference is between the 4 and 6 laser beam models, but once I find out I’ll let you know here!

Suffice to say I’m still enjoying my Beamz and having lots of fun playing with it ( possibly to the detriment of my writing “other” articles – )

As there seems to be a lot of interest, and I’m getting a lot of hits, because of the Beamz, I’ve now made a category called My Beamz. Where you can find any and all articles that I’ve written about this great little device.

Don’t forget, if you are planning to purchase a Beamz, use the code I managed to get for it. It will give you free shipping AND another 10 free songs when you register your Beamz and include that code!

Till Next Time!

Not that I’m complaining, I love my Beamz and would have a hard time parting with it! The really neat thing is that the Beamz is starting to catch on, and as a result more effort is going into supporting it and expanding it’s capabilities. Which of course has lead me to other people who are heavily involved in it’s growth. They are an amazing group and extremely dedicated! If you are looking for any of these people, as well as community support for the Beamz then I recommend that you check out The Beamz Community – www.beamzcommunity.com. Here, after you join, you can post questions, and interact with what I think are some of the most amazing people supporting the Beamz!

But I digress….

My wife is a member of our local Kiwanis Group, whose main goal is helping and supporting kids in our community. Last night she arranged for me to demo the Beamz to the group ( which of course I did. ) They are a pretty creative bunch, and the demo went over like gang-busters! With more ideas flying around than I have space to type – seriously!

What was really neat, was that one couple at the meeting had brought their children along, and they ( the kids ) also got really, really excited with the Beamz. I just stood back and let them have fun. It was really neat to see them experiment and try different things with it. Learning how to operate it as they went, one little girl ( the youngest ) would have taken it home with her if she could.

What a neat experience!

Here’s some more videos that I’ve recently come across that talk about the Beamz n Kids. Wow….

www.viddler.com/explore/beamz/videos/14/

These last two videos are professionals in their field, talking about how the Beamz is used and helping them with their kids.
www.viddler.com/explore/beamz/videos/15/

www.viddler.com/explore/beamz/videos/16/

As there seems to be a lot of interest, and I’m getting a lot of hits, because of the Beamz, I’ve now made a category called My Beamz. Where you can find any and all articles that I’ve written about this great little device.

Even my 5 & 7 year old grandsons enjoy playing it. They really like to use it as an air guitar – one hand playing the Beamz ( picture their hand where the neck of the guitar should be, only playing with the lasers in the Beamz ), the other strumming the air guitar. I gotta tell you it’s great fun to watch them having fun with it!

I’ve also upgraded my system now so that it includes the Beamz Studio and making your own unique music ( that can then be played in 100’s of different ways ) is pretty easy and amazing! I hope to have a separate article about that some time later.

What I’m excited about right now is that  I’ve been talking with the company, and they have arranged for me to have a coupon that can save you shipping costs ( if you are shipping outside the US you will probably still have duty and taxes to pay depending upon where you live ) AND also give you 10 free extra songs when you register your Beamz with them!Just go to their website www.thebeamz.com, click on shop ( at the very top ), add the system that you want and then go to the checkout where you will see the spot where you can enter the coupon/promotion code. It’s really that simple.

The Coupon code is BEETH and I’ve included below an image of the coupon if you wish to print it off.  If you are considering getting the Beamz why not save a few dollars when you do – I wish I had had this opportunity but I’ve made sure that others will.

Enjoy!

As there seems to be a lot of interest, and I’m getting a lot of hits, because of the Beamz, I’ve now made a category called My Beamz. Where you can find any and all articles that I’ve written about this great little device.

Essentially you load your program, then load up the video you want to edit. You can quickly move through or play the video until you get to your first cut point ( where you make your beginning mark). You then quickly move to the end point ( the end of your selected cut ) and mark your end cut. Note you can also move almost frame by frame if you need to.

After you have selected the piece that you want to keep, you then click on the transfer button to put the file into your buffer. The amazing part here is that the process is almost instantaneous! I’ve used other “professional” editors to do this and it takes forever to transfer the selected video from one point to another.

At this point you can save the clip from the buffer ( again extremely fast ) or mark and cut another section from the same original video ( using the same process above ) and instantly  paste it at the end of the video in the buffer, or even load up a different video that you would like to cut a section out of and paste it onto your copy in the buffer.

Digital View, the company who sells this software, makes a lite version available for you to try for free, but the small cost of this software is worth every penny to get the extras available with the full package. It is an amazing piece of software that I cannot live without. It cuts my work down by more than 90%! Anyone who wants to clean up their home video, or post videos on you tube NEEDS THIS SOFTWARE - Trust me on this one!

Linux/Ubuntu has all sorts of amazing free Audio and Video tools available in it’s library. The problem that I have found with most of them is that they are trying to compete with the professional packages. This means that they usually have way too much “stuff” to do in order to do a simple task like cutting out a small section from a larger video for posting to You-Tube.

I’ve downloaded and tried pretty well everything out there, and nothing…. let me repeat that NOTHING came close to doing the job as quickly, easily and smoothly as  EasyMPEG did and it frustrated the heck out of me!

It took a lot of research to find a tool that comes close ( it’s not perfect but it’s pretty close ) to what my favorite software could do. It is called DVBCut ( an odd name I know ) and while it seemed to exist “out there” in the Linux environment, it did not officially exist for Ubuntu.

I originally downloaded the source code ( the pieces that usually let one “make” a program with ) from Sourceforge ( dvbcut.sourceforge.net ) but it compiled ( tried to create the program ) with way too many errors. No matter what I tried I could not get the program to compile let alone run properly.

That is, until a week later I found a German site ( that’s right German…. and no I don’t speak German ) that seemed to detail the similar sorts of problems I was having with it.

Within their pages ( wiki.ubuntuusers.de/dvbcut ) were listed a bunch of programs and libraries ( special extra pieces found in the operating system ) that  were needed, which I added:

• scons
• libqt3-mt-dev
• qt3-dev-tools
• libao-dev
• libmad0-dev
• liba52-0.7.4-dev
• libboost-dev

But before I  tried to recompile the program, a little further down on their page, I found an entry that they recommended for your sources.list ( the list of places/repositories that you authorize your computer to download software from. )

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/fabricesp/ppa/ubuntu lucid main

After adding this line to my sources.list ( you can see how to do all that here ) I was able to install and run DVBCut by just issuing the command

sudo apt-get install dvbcut

And voila I now have a quick little editor that works quite well within my Ubuntu environment. Unfortunately, it still isn’t as easy or as good as my original Windows EasyMPEG utility, but it’s still faster than any of the other tools that I found.  I have hopes that it will get even better and until then, if I need to, I can always reboot back into Windows to use my “old faithful”.

For those who are only running Linux and especially Ubuntu, I hope dvbcut will help in cutting down the amount of time it used to take you to put together your video. If my EasyMPEG experience is any measure to go by, you should be immensely pleased with the results!