Lets face it, video on the web is here to stay. Video makes our user experience better and more entertaining. Flash video is the best choice to deliver all around video to our end users. I have been on a quest to produce the best flash video that is avalible using open source tools. I can easily purchase licensing for some commercially available products but the main reason that I do not is the speed of the encoding process. FFmpeg and mencoder are blazing fast and test encode are some times 3 to 4 times fast than the best commercially available solutions. There is one major problem here with these two products. There is not one command line that will encode any video to flash video perfectly. Each codec and file extension needs its own set of procedures to get the perfect flash video. I am referring to something like Qdesign audio codec in an “mov” container, this file needs to be first converted and audio track ripped before you can add that audio track to the flash encoded video. If you do not follow that procedure you are likely to get horrible audio sync issues.

What I am going to do is develop an encode class in php that will handle any file type with out the need for the developer to know the inter workings of codec and video encoding. I will release this on my blog so that I can get the appropriate feed back that is necessary.

In any programming language there are some pieces of code and functions you want to make once and reuse many times. When I first started programming I was creating every project from the beginning. I was writing the same functions over and over. I realized that I could reuse the same base just change the areas that needed to be different. The base is something that handles user management, access control, database communication, session management. Since I starting using this base, the projects have become much easier to maintain.

Recently I have been interviewing new developers for employment at our company. One developer asked me why we use our own framework and not just make plug ins for other more mature frameworks. My answer to this person was, we need a base that is as lightweight as possible, there are many frameworks that are great in handling many things but we like to keep things as small as possible and as low overhead as possible. He agreed that most frameworks are bloated and would need to be chopped up to get to what I wanted.

I am saying all this because maybe I am second guessing myself right now. I have not been on the look out for a framework in many months (1 year). Is there a new framework that is actively developed that may suit our needs? Is there finally a framework that is easy to learn, simple to use, intuitive to work with, easy to extend, quick to build and maintain applications?

Some frameworks I have been told to look at are :

• Ambivalence: A Java-Maverick Port
• WACT: Web Application Component Toolkit
• Achievo: A good RAD framework
• Phrame: A Java-Struts port
• Studs: A Java-Struts port to PHP
• Prado: The winner of Zend coding contest
• PHPOnTrax: a Rails port - PHP5 Only
• CakePHP: Inspired by Rails PHP4/5
• Mojavi
• Symfony: Based on Mojavi and inspired by Rails