Why I’m blogging in English
If you know me, read my about me page, followed a link from a German site or noticed my TLD is .de you probably know I’m German. So why am I blogging in English?
Since my early days in web development, which happened to start at HostingPosts, a free hosting provider, I’ve always been using English when talking about web development related topics. I quickly advanced to a moderator and later an administrator at HostingPosts, for I was trying to give something back to the community by helping other members out, when they had web development-related problems. I practically never talked to my German friends about web development, probably since they were just not interested in that kind of stuff anyway.
When I got my two VPSes at HostEurope I first joined a German discussion board about web topics - HostEurope’s customer board is a great place if you need help, if you have access to it (obviously only if you’re a HostEurope customer) make sure you check it out.
The decision whether to blog in English or German was a tough one, though. It took me almost two months to make the final decision, but I went with English for two main reasons:
- I have some English friends, who would probably enjoy reading my blog and they obviously don’t speak German
- A lot of people in Germany speak English anyway
Oh, and there’s another reason, too: I’m blogging in English, because I can 
I know my English is not perfect, so you’re welcome to correct spelling mistakes (shame on me for not paying attention to Firefox’ spell check plug-in!) or weird grammar.
Experiences with ClipShare Pro 2.0
There’s quite a market for YouTube clones, it seems. I’ve been recently working with three of these scripts, namely the commercial ClipShare Pro 2.0, the free PHPmotion and the Real Estate Video Upload Software I wrote a while ago. My experiences with these scripts are quite mixed, though.
Requirements
All of the scripts are based on PHP and MySQL - there might be other solutions out there, but since my clients all had the traditional LAMP setup I didn’t bother searching for alternatives.
For encoding, all of the scripts named use the same combination of MEncoder, ffmpeg to support the Flash video format, the ffmpeg PHP extension and FLVTool2.
Installing these software packages isn’t that hard unless you’re on something different than a .deb-based Linux system: The Debian multimedia repository provided me with the MEncoder and FFmpeg packages, I installed Ruby to run FLVTool2 (which is a Ruby script) and installed ffmpeg-php from Atomo64’s Debian Repository (thanks to Raphaël for this one).
If you’re on another system, you might end up with a lot of compiling, though.
Once you got all these things in place and made sure your php.ini settings allow the exec(), shell_exec() and system() functions you can start doing the real installataion.