From Love Comes Paine

Posted on May 03.08

The second site we produced for Paines Park Project, From Love Comes Paine is the consumer spin on the movement. Our aim was to generate buzz about the project from an experience that shows the importance of Philadelphia’s mark on skateboarding and explains the importance of reviving that tradition.

From a technology standpoint, the site was originally slated as a full-screen video feed pulling user submissions from YouTube. This was before YouTube released a player API. We used PHP and CURL to hack YouTube into feeding us the .flv files instead of returning their video player. Thematically we saw this much like a skater sliding a park bench or grinding a curb. Eventually we concluded that user submissions would cost too much to monitor and took too much control of the experience out of our hands. While the current experience will change with each exposure due to the randomization of the video stream, it does require sign up or contribution for our visitors to get the point across.

I’m asked most about how we scale the videos on the site. They’re 320 x 240 FLV progressive downloads and we used Sorenson Squeeze’s On2 VP6 codec to crunch em pretty small. They’re each short in length, only 10 – 20 seconds each, so the file sizes are only 100k or so each. The scaling is the same bit of math we use on redtettemer.com. Trick is to use a pattern overlay that hides the hard lines of pixelation that you normally see in scaled video. Scale the video, expand the pattern.

For future thought, we stumbled on a really cheap way to stream live video content at a pretty high quality. I won’t reveal all the details, but on other projects we’ve used Flash Media Server to create 20 second flv clips from live recording. If you accessed these clips with this video player in order, you’d have live streaming without the cost of concurent user connections with only a 20 second delay.

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