We don't use BLOX video at all...everything is on Brightcove, but that's because of our parent company's decision. Blox video wasn't good enough when we switched, though I understand it's better now. We do embed Youtube video occasionally -- they usually jujst don't get saved on our video page. In fact, a lot of our stuff isn't getting tagged right to get put into our video page...grrrrr.

WRT the airline passenger I'm not sure how we got it.

IANAL, but I do know that downloading and posting is a legal grey area, but so is frankly embedding video in your site to begin with. If there's a copyright issue with the video, legally the fact that you iframed it won't make much difference.

If it's good video, it'll still be good when you get it. What's the deadline for public records where you're at? If it takes months it'll have to be great tape, but if it's a week or something...

We haven't done much 911 audio...and we should...I used that a lot in TV and it's an awesome element. With audio I've put it in Blox and inline it...though if it's really dramatic you should put a slate over it and push it as video, cuz $.

I don't use youtube at all. Their ads pay peanuts and you're giving them too much control of your stuff, even just the presentation. YMMV

Awesome to hear.

The work around I'm using, which helps in several situations where Flex's templates aren't up to snuff, is to use an HTML asset with some CSS in it.

I've got a handful of them saved, and when needed I duplicate them, attach as child assets, and then drag inline. It's a total hack-y solution, but it's the best choice for when it's not something you want to change all the time.

A couple of thoughts in no particular order regarding how we're doing video, and what we're trying to do...

1) ATM we're getting about 25,000 video views a month. Yes, there's nothing like a good surveillance video to draw a ton of traffic, but that's not all that will draw traffic. We should be at three times that number.

2) Video is not worth the time and effort if you're selling it programatic. Video -- something your local audience actively decided to watch, has to sit through that preroll to do, in a lean forward medium -- should get the sort of CPM you usually see in TV advertising (think $20-$25), not the sort of pennies per view banner ads pay. Some of the cool kids in web video are getting $30+ CPM on video. This is not an editorially problem, this is sales problem. No ad network, not even the good folks at TN, can do this for you, and without addressing it you're wasting your time. Well, you might win an award, which will help you when you look for your next job because your newspaper went broke...

3) What I try and push on our reporters (and photogs) is to think beyond the nicely polished video story -- the kinds we've all seen that involves well edited, well composed shots over a combination of natsound and SOTs, runs 1:15-1:30 and takes a staff member a full day to shoot and cut. I tell (and tell, and tell...) people to think of video as an additive element that helps tell the story. 10 seconds of raw video from the crime scene helps tell the story. A quick pan across the packed city council chamber helps tell the story.

4) Getting surveillance video shouldn't be that rare. Anytime there's a pursuit, a stick up, or whatever, any reporter writing it up should ask the cops if there was a dashcam rolling. In our area, local PD have them, Sheriff and smaller departments don't. If someone has to so much as call or email the cops to write three inches of copy they should ask for video. There should be a public records request letter on your computer that just needs the date and incident description filled in before it's ready to send.

This mindset works really well -- even if you only get tape 10% of the time and only 10% of that is good tape, you're still a winner, and most important it doesn't add more than 10 seconds to the workload of your already over burdened staffers. And once local agencies know they're going to get asked, they tend to start producing without you even having to ask.

5) For our staff produced videos, we use a combination of reporter's phones, our photogs DSLRs, and a couple of Canon prosumer grade camcorders. We've still got one old iMac that runs Final Cut Pro X (which Apple destroyed, BTW. FCP 7 was great. X is crap), and a pair of newer iMacs running Adobe CC.

6) One of the best tips I can pass on is to pay attention to audio. People will cheerfully watch video with technical issues. But they'll turn off in a minute if the audio isn't clear. Spend the money on mics. Dumbest thing I've dumb was buying a $200 wireless mic. It works OK, but I borrow the photog's $500 wireless anytime I can.

As Mark Twain once wrote, I apologize for writing so much, but I didn't have the time to write less.

Worth mentioning: I'm constantly fudging start times, not to fool readers (if only they were that easy...) but to fool our site - making sure our best stuff is in the best spot for the daypart. It's often easiest for me to cheat a start time and boost something back up into our lede elements rather than, say, pin it somewhere.

This would make things so much prettier. I have to hack these things together using HTML all the time. It's a total PITA.

A few of these design improvements could turn BLOX's Flex package from something we use because it's a solid CMS into something we use because we really like it. That's a huge difference.

IIRC, our contract with TN said if we cancel they'll work with us to make sure we've got clean archives in NITF format. Otherwise if you want a copy they can charge u for dev time. I'm sure the actual wording is written in lawyer and takes a full page, but that's the gist.

As for .bmp, here's the response I got a year ago to a similar question about getting assets from BMP. This worked for me, YMMV:

That said, working with the BPM file isn't totally horrible. Aidian, you can simply rename the .bpm file to .zip and extract it like you would any other compressed file. Once inside you'll see the the .json file that contains metadata and other BLOX information, plus a folder that contains the images. "hires" is probably the one you are looking for, so just slap a .jpg extension on it and open as normal.Obviously if you have a ton of photos this could take a while, but for just a single image every once in a while it isn't too bad.

HTH

My (usually limited, occasional just wrong) understanding is that anything flagged 'breaking' isn't cached, but TN put a warning in the docs saying 'don't push it or we'll make all your breaking news cache.

I've also gotten around the cache it via use of an HTML asset with dynamically generated content inside it.

Patrick,

thanks for checking this out....I'm looking at the exact same article pulled in via the syndication tool and I'm not seeing an image at all. Can you help me understand what the problem is? You can reply out of band at aholder@yakimaherald.com so we don't clutter up this board.

Thanks!

We're importing articles from an affiliated newsroom via an RSS feed and the Blox syndication tool. I'm currently scraping the feed and reformatting it to the media:rss spec - which is what I was told to use by TN support. You can see a sample feed at http://yh-r.com/scripts/traffic/daily/testfeed.xml

My problem is that when I import the image alone it works OK - article is imported along with image, but no caption. When I add a <media:description> tag with the caption to the article the import doesn't work at all. If I can't bring in the caption, I can't bring in the image, and if I have to manually upload the image I might as well manually import the article.

My two options at this point seem to be to either 1) download each image, write the caption info in as EXIF info, and then upload it to a new URL and use that URL in the feed or 2) rewrite the entire feed as NITF and import via the Blox 'jobs' control -- assuming I can figure out a way to automate the import.

Both of those options are a total pain and bad practice - involving fragile code that'll break the minute anyone changes anything.

TN support says they've opened a feature request to get the <media:description> tag supported, but I don't know how long that'll take, and I'm guessing this has been a problem for other newsrooms, and wanted to see how they'd resolved it.