Open and accountable Government.

By offering embedded videos of selectboard meetings, the readers of the Holland Blog does not need to watch the live meetings at the specific time of the broadcast. Whether you need to work during the time of meetings or you spend winters in Florida, you will be able to watch the meetings recorded by the Holland Blog at your convenience wherever you are whenever you want. Starting this year, the Holland Blog will post videos of each broadcasted selectboard meeting. As time permits, I will also make archived videos available to the readers.

Embedding YouTube videos into a dynamic generated webpage is simple; embedding your own videos into your own static or dynamic webpage is complex. Apple and Microsoft still rival and implement different technologies into their browsers to view videos. The two technologies are not compatible.

The question is what to do, and which system to use. I personally have a preference, it is neither Apple’s OSX nor Microsoft’s Windows operating systems, it is the Linux operating system.
However, most web-designers implement solutions that work on the platform used by a majority of end-users; that would be Windows and Windows’s Mediaplayer.
To be exact, I write the HTML code for the version 6.4 of the Mediaplayer and not the latest version in order to accommodate users still operating their computer with the Windows 98 operating system. The code is backwards compatible; if you use the latest OS Windows 7 you can still watch the videos. (I’m using 'CLSID:22d6f312-b0f6-11d0-94ab-0080c74c7e95').

According to Google Analytics, visitors to the Holland Blog use the following operating systems: Windows 84.33%; iPhone 9.77%; Mcintosh 5.80%; Linux 0.08%, others 0.03%.
To satisfy 84.33%, I decided to embed videos that utilize Windows’s Mediaplayer.

If you run an Apple platform you need to download a plugin to watch the embedded videos. Plugin’s for Apple computers can be downloaded from the mactopia website which is a sub-site of the Microsoft webpage. The needed plugin is free of charge. Click here to go to the mactopia webpage.
Another way around this problem for Apple users is to use another browser instead of Safari, such as FireFox web browser or any other web browser.

A video file of a meeting lasting arround 30 minutes is typically around 100mb in size. If you are still on a dial-up connection it is not visible for you to download the files as it would take way to long and your connection would be terminated before the end of the download. Only 1.60% of the Holland Blog’s readers are still connected to the internet with a dial-up connection.

Chad Brigham will be responsible for digitally recording the meetings for the Holland Blog, thank you Chad!

January 14, 2010, Peter Frei