Knowledge Base

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This walkthrough will help you create a cross-platform newscast that you can put on your school website. The tutorial assumes the following:

• You have a local folder on your computer that has all of your web pages in it that mirrors the structure of your website as it exists on the Washington County Webserver that hosts your site.
• You have a graphics manipulation program such as Adobe Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, Paintshop Pro, or something else that you are familiar with that will let you scale images and crop.
• You can enter text into a file with Notepad.

Now, on to the meat of the project:

1. Save the file mediaplayer-3-16.zip to your desktop or someother place that you can find it.
2. Create a folder in your web site folder called newscast.
3. In this folder, create another folder called media. In this folder you will put the videos and some small screenshots of the start of the video.
4. Open the mediaplayer-3-16.zip file and navigate into the mediaplayer-3-16 folder.
5. Drag the mediaplayer.swf and swfobject.js file into the newscast folder.

1. Save the file avanti-0.2.4.zip
2. Open this file and drag the folder to the desktop or another location that you know where to find it.
3. Open the folder avanti-0.2.4
4. Double-click the file Avanti-GUI.exe
5. Click the Folder Icon beside Source 1 and locate the file you want to convert.
6. Click the Folder Icon beside Destination and locate the file you want to convert. This will name the new file with the proper extension (.flv) for you. I recommend a date based name such as 20080204 for February 04, 2008. The year is first because a alphabetic ordering will put the most recent at the end of the list. It also identifies the file clearly. Do spaces in filenames. It will cause you no end of grief.
7. Under Destination Audio settings change Bitrate (kbit/s) to 32
8. Under Destination Audio settings change Sample Frequency to 22050
9. Under Destination Video settings click the Codec drop down and type in Flash Video and in the drop down box to the right of this, select Default
10. Under Destination Video settings change Frame size to 320x240
11. Under Destination Video settings change Bitrate (kbit/s) to 200
12. Click Start Process

When the progress bar is done, you will see the file in the place you set for the destination. Move this file to the media folder in the newscast folder.

More to come