[taxbax]

hello,
i greet you on this day after christmas with an interesting development inspired by the site www.bywifi.com which converts youtube (and metacafe) videos to 3gp on the fly (mostly for non iphone mobile users who can not access youtube mobile site)

i searched for the .flv file in the page source of a surfthechannel.com page of an embeded 30 rock episode. i found the addess to be www.surfthechannel.com/flv/4f3f82a252929b03.flv . i entered this address in the www.media-convert.com url option and selected .mp4 output, tho i asume .3gp would work as well and maybe faster. i also clicked split into 5000byte files so when i went to watch it, the videos would load faster, and on a future version of safari (or a native app , even be able to load in the background.

the url download took about 15 minutes and having auto-lock disabled in smb prefs was very convienient ( i typed this as it uploaded). the file processing took about 2 minutes and i ended up with 11 5mb pieces sadly the browser would not download the .mp4 extension with a .001 through .012 on the end of it. perhaps someone could find out the necessary code addition to the safari download plugin and the original whole file was too large for safari to download. but i imagine a smaller file would work perfectly.

however, ive hear if you embed the too large file in an html page it will play.
(within <>)
embed src="filename.mp4" width="x" height="y"
Where x is the width of the video and y is the height (in pixels).

Interestingly enough, this let's you rotate the screen to view the video in either orientation, which is not allowed in iPod mode.

i don't know if anyone has tried this before but ive never seen anyone post about it. perhaps someone with more html or ajax knowledge then myself maybe able to write a nice web app around this...

or a native app?
godspeed

anyone?

[Sidetalker]

hey man good idea but sadly few people visit the web apps page... and i think theres already plenty of sites that do that...? (break.com, tinytube.net, etc)