Category: music

A Creative Commons music video made out of other CC videos

Hello! Let’s go straight to the point. Here is the video:

…and here are the videos that were used having the Creative Commons Attribution licence: http://wonkydollandtheecho.com/thanks.html. They are downloadable via Vimeo, of course.

Videos available from NASA and the ALMA observatory were also used.

The video (not audio) is under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA licence, which I think is quite reasonable since every scene used from the source videos (ok, almost every scene) has lyrics/graphics embedded on it.

I hope you like it! I didn’t have a lot of time to make this video but I like the result. The tools I used are not open source unfortunately, because the learning curve for these tools is quite steap. I will definitely try them in the future. Actually, I really haven’t come across any alternative to Adobe After Effects. You might say Blender…but is it really an alternative? Any thoughts?

PS. More news soon for the Sopler project (a web application for making to-do lists) and other things I’ve been working on lately (like MQTT-SN).

YouTube HTML5 Switch v0.1.7 & News

Hello!

Long time no see! I’ve been busy outside the blog-sphere and I’ve got some news to share. First of all, I upgraded my Firefox Add-on to version 0.1.7. So here is the link:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-html5-switch/

All in all, the important addition is that you can now use the hotkey Control+Y instead of pushing the button on the toolbar. Plus, I think it now has no other issues for most new versions of Firefox. I need to point out that I get most of the help from the SDK’s documentation which is great, but, to anyone interested, don’t hesitate to contribute to its content! Restartless add-ons rule!

You may use it and see if it works on YouTube (yeah it works, at least for Firefox 21.0 w/ Fedora Linux) using this video:

Yes! It’s the first video of the band I play with, directed by Kostas Gounaris. Cool huh? 🙂

I hope you’ll like it as we put a lot of effort to complete it and guess what? There’s also going to be a short film based on the song. I’ll let you know!

Happy new year & YouTube HTML5 Switch v0.1.3

Happy new year everybody!!!

Here I am, once more, to announce the new version of my recent small project YouTube HTML5 Switch. I made quite a few additions to the previous version (for which I already made a post) and changes to it and it’s on its way to become a fully reviewed add-on for Firefox 🙂

So what the 0.1.3 version does and has right now is:

  • A navigation bar button using the toolbarbutton-jplib (and its depdencies) by erikvold
  • a new 16×16 icon for better cross-platform compatibility (I know, it used to be prettier but I will make it again soon)
  • It works only when “youtube.com/watch” has been opened
  • It doesn’t work if &html5=1 is already in the URL
  • A clickable widget icon at the add-on bar.

What really changed is that now the navigation bar button is movable and its position is maintained if you open a new window etc. More fixes soon 🙂

Once again, the code is on my github repo. Of course, for any major change I will keep you posted 🙂

For those and only those who already use YouTube HTML5 Switch and will upgrade to v0.1.3: Don’t worry if the old icon remains on the browser window. Just restart Firefox and everything will work fine!

————————- Ahem…ahem… Your attention please 🙂  ————————————–

Update: The campaign ended successfully 🙂

Another project I want to talk about is one that’s on Indiegogo, a crowdfunging website! It’s for my band, Wonky Doll and the Echo. If you dig cinema and like our music please, have a look on our Double project: a music video & a short movie. We will collaborate with a director, Costas Gounaris, for our first music video! Our page is here: http://igg.me/p/297701/ Every cent counts and everyone wins gifts too!

By the way…this is the song of the music video:

YouTube HTML5 Switch (and other news)

Hello! Long time no see!

It’s been a busy period and I have lots of news to share. First of all, I decided to have a look on the Mozilla Add-on SDK . It has a very simple API to create Add-ons for Firefox.

Anyway, I tried to come up with an idea of what would be my first Add-on. Hmmm…An Add-on that can make my web experience less annoying. Considering that I spend half of my time on YouTube to listen to songs (mostly), view videos etc, as a Linux user, I get really annoyed when the Flash plug-in crashes and I have to restart Firefox.  You can always visit youtube.com/html5 to change that but what if you delete your cookies? It’s a boring procedure.

youtube_html5_switch_logo
YouTube HTML5 Switch logo

So, what I thought was to make an Add-on that would simply add the “html5=1” parameter on the URL. And I did it…well, kind of, it’s now an experimental Add-on for Firefox. I need to add some more features for it to be considered as a proper Add-on. It’s called “YouTube HTML5 Switch” and here it is at the Mozilla Add-ons website, and here is the source code on Github.

I currently develop the Add-on at the Add-on Builder (that means online). I will eventually download the SDK and try it on Fedora 🙂 It’s not the smartest Add-on in the world, but I think it’s a good start for a newbie. By the way I need to say that the SDK’s documentation is not very helpful and I needed to google a lot to write down a few lines of code. Anyway, in every “major” release I will be posting here any changes etc. You can also read the README.md on Github.

What’s more? Wonky Doll and the Echo (the band where I play) are supporting I Like Trains here in Athens on December 15, 2012. You can check our Bandcamp page and listen to our songs. Now, if you have installed the Add-on you can test it with these video…if you go on YouTube of course 🙂

Some videos like this for instance don’t have an HTML5 player so the plugin will not be of any use here.

Other videos though, do have have an HTML5 version and the plugin will work!

New Linux OS, New University, New Album!

Hello world 🙂

I am writing this post from my freshly installed Fedora 16 (If you still haven’t downloaded and installed yet I suggest you do it). I am really excited and proud I am using Gnome 3.2. It has achieved a tremendous change on how we must start to perceive our desktop environment. It also does this with style (with minimal touches that I really love). And so far is doing great in terms of stability. No freezes at all. OK, some small details on some drivers is my weak point but I have to blame the manufacturers for that. Well, something I always wanted to yell on the internet: WHY ON EARTH DON’T YOU RELEASE LINUX DRIVERS? …sigh. Anyway everything runs smoothly.

Moving on to our next subject. Well, it’s about my studies. I am doing my master’s degree at the University of Athens. It’s an interdepartmental master of the Physics Department and the IT Department focusing on Electronics Automation…hell yeah. It’s not easy, but I enjoy it so far 🙂

Now, to the last subject. I uploaded my new album on Jamendo!!! It’s called “The pursuit of happiness“.I think it’s my best work so far…I have until now a very productive year. I hope the following years will be the same as this one. I don’t want to say much, it would be better if you just listen 🙂

Ladies and gentlemen, I hope you enjoy it ! 🙂

The pursuit of hapiness cover

New album on Jamendo and it’s an OST

Dear all,

I am glad to announce that I just published my new work. It’s a soundtrack for a theatrical play named “Έξι αρχεία κρυμμένα”  that means “six hidden files”. No it has nothing to do with Linux and you can’t unhide them with control+H.

As I already said, this album contains all the songs and effects used at the theatrical play of Tomas Diafas “six hidden files”. Six roles, six hidden documents. This play is inspired from last year’s incidents at the center of Athens, showing a different chain of events and personal misfortunes created from a protest. A theatrical play for the protests around us that reveal the protests inside us.

Download it in OGG format : http://bit.ly/fpaFbU

click to listen the album on Jamendo

===== Ελληνικά / Greek =====

Τα κομμάτια αυτά γράφτηκαν για τη παράσταση “Έξι αρχεία κρυμμένα” του σκηνοθέτη-συγγραφέα Θωμά Διάφα με πρωταγωνιστές έξι χαρακτήρες, έξι αρχεία κρυμμένα, εμπνευσμένη από τα περσυνά τραγικά επεισόδια στο κέντρο της Αθήνας και για το πως αυτά δημιουργούν μια αλληλουχία άλλου είδους προσωπικών επεισοδίων. Μια παράσταση για τις διαδηλώσεις γύρω μας που μαρτυρούν τις επαναστάσεις μέσα μας.Περισσότερες πληροφορίες:  http://bit.ly/hp1OBC

Ηθοποιοί:
Περικλής Ασημακόπουλος
Έφη Κατσαφάρου
Ελευθερία Κατσούπη
Νάντια Παυλάκη
Βασιλική Σκρέκου
Απόστολος Φράγκος

Σκηνοθεσία- Κείμενο: Θωμάς Διάφας
Σκηνικά – Κοστούμια: Δομνίκη Βασιαγεώργη
Επιμέλεια Κίνησης: Αφροδίτη Βερβενιώτη
Μουσική: Κωνσταντίνος Αντωνάκογλου
Βοηθός σκηνοθέτη: Αθανασία Ανδρώνη
Κομμώσεις- Μακιγιάζ: Καίτη Αραβαντινού

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