I hate you Wishingbird - I love you Ant

Welcome to my blog, for those of you who don't know the really super great people over at Antnottv.org just came out with the ultimate video playback unit for video blogs just like mine, full of rich media. Basically it will play back all the videos on my blog (or any video blog you choose) like they were TV! But Ant is not TV, it's better, way better.

All you have to do is download it (sorry mac only at this point) and run it. As my RSS news feed is amongst the default feeds it will automatically download and cache all the videos in my feed so all you have to do is click PLAY. Video on demand with no commercials anyone can create their own video blog or watch a video blog feed. How simple is that!?

Anyway, one of the great new features is it should play back not just video clips but those awesome Macromedia Flash animations. This should allow me to start sharing the very best in Flash animations online. As a test I wanted to share with you this very special Flash animation from a group in London England. It's called "Wishingbird". Well, more precisely it's called "I Hate You Wishingbird", but don't worry, I'm sure you'll like it. It's swell.

Watch it: wishingbird.swf (495kb)

Download Ant!

Update: While flash seems to play well in Ant, something that is amazing by itself and I am very pleased about, unforetuneatly, the Ant stage size is fixed at 320x240 and nearly all flash works are considerably larger, leaving the flash work severly masked by the frame. I suppose I could embed the flash inside another flash file specifying a new smaller size, but that might entail copying the orginal work which is a real no-no from the copyright and legal perspective. I suppose I may give it a play, but transparency is a key issue for me.

Hopefully in the future items playing in and will scale proportionaly to the Ant window size, and that window size will be adjustable. For now I may have to swear of flash for a while, which is to bad because there's some REALLY good flash work being done out there. Cheers.