Today we are thrilled to announce two important updates to Stupeflix.com!
First, the “Demos” tab at the top of this page.
This page features a demo we are excited to release because it illustrates the scale at which the Stupeflix service can operate.
Shortly put, we scrapped images and legends from the Wikipedia’s famous touristic landmarks. We then described a video template in XML (position of the logo, effects and transitions, text styling and animation). Lastly, we sent that XML file to the Stupeflix API, along with the urls of our pictures, and everything got processed into thousands of videos in an hour.
We’ve put a thousand of those videos on the Demos page for you to watch.
Those are very simple videos meant to demonstrate the speed, automation and scale, as well as fine customization options of the Stupeflix service. There is much more to it in terms of video montage capabilities.
Last but not least, the service processes video inputs as well, so you can mix video clips, add graphic design packaging or text, soundtracks, at an industrial scale.
So please help yourself with an API key and try and build your own mashup !
Watch the Wiki Videos screencast
Try the Wiki Videos demo
Second big update of the day is a totally revamped online editor to create your videos. More details in an upcoming post!
This is amazing and inspiring.
Are there any licensing issues involved for you in using images from all over?
You should involve some copyright free music in some way as an option. You could get some classical performances and it would go great with the historical videos from Wikipedia (e.g. American Civil War).
Thanks !
Images are for the wikipedia, so they should be mostly free of use for non commercial use.
So there should be no licensing issue except if you start selling them.
For the copyright free music issue, that’s true that it would be a nice plus.
We are looking in that direction.
The only thing is that you would have to choose a music style for each video, something that is a bit hard to do automatically (maybe based on dates and geography in the articles ?)
It could be solved collaboratively too: the wikipedia could launch a video project, where the script would be edited collaboratively ?
In that case we would be glad to help !
François
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This is really exciting stuff. congrats.
I believe there is a possibility of live streaming. Would that be possible since I am thinking of a live stream of text from status updates?
We cannot do streaming at the time, and in fact it is a full business on its own.
But of course you can feed our videos in a streaming solution like flumotion, vlc, or the apple one.
I don’t see exactly what you want to do with a “live stream of text” , huh ?
We hope you will enjoy playing with our API !
François
Awesome concept I say. Easy to use and it’s fast. Quick question though… how do I add videos? I don’t see an option on the editor nor a full description of video formats and codes mentioned in the API.
You are right, it is not available right now in the editor.
The solution ? That’s easy : just wait for a few days…
We will add it this week if everything is ok !
François
So many of us teachers want to use this , but we need more explanation. I want to try this wikipedia thing for class, but I only stood a small section of the directions, We are not techies, but we want to use it.
Thanks .
tt
@Toni Theisen
We will improve the user interface and the explanations provided.
The site was intended first for developers, but given the success we have among the general public, we will be bound to do so !
To make sure I understood you comment: do you want to create new wikipedia videos or just use those we created ?
Thanks for your interest in Stupeflix !
François
Francois, thanks for the update. It will help if you quote the name of the person you are responding to so that we know who/which question your reply is directed at. With that said, I will be eagerly waiting for your next build….
Yes, it was quite hard to read…
I just activated the threaded comments on wordpress, it should be way more readable now.
(thanks for the feedback, in the wordpress admin I did not realized it would be in a totally different order …)
Is there a resource for some of us not well vested in XML where we can get code for stuff like different transition effects, changing the size and location of the text container etc.
I am able to figure out where to place it in the code, I just don’t know where to find code that performs these functions
The best is to look at our documentation at http://wiki.stupeflix.com.
Tell us if you do not find what you are looking for !
Is there a way to change the dimensions of the video frame to make it, for example more rectangular. I have tried posting a couple of videos I made here to to youtube but the result is not very good. The video only takes a square in the midle of the youtube container. Instead of the video being a perfect square, is there any way to adjust the dimentions of a video (before it is processed) to tailor it towards a specific contaner e.g. 425 x 344 or multiples of that?
Thanks.
just checking… any progress on being able to upload videos?
The video upload feature is being tested in the Stupeflix Editor. We think it will be in production next week.