Lets party, come on everybody….

To celebrate the joy of hitting a 100% target for the month of July 2009, RA organized a dance party for its whole staff. It was organized at the company’s official party center - EC, that is Entertainment Center on 8 August 2009. The party started at around 7pm and came to full swing at around 8pm with the gorgeous gals and handsome hunk hitting the dance floor with full energy! DJ rocked the event with some latest bollywood and Punjabi numbers. Each and every person was enjoying the party to the core. There were drinks and Chinese snacks organized on the house. Neither the humid weather nor the hunger or thirst could stop the party animals to keep dancing till they drop. We, the RedAlkemists surely know how to live upto our motto, “Work Hard and Party Harder”

Posted in Inside RedAlkemi | 2 Comments »

Social Media Marketing: - Remember the basics

If you are a Social Media Marketer or you want to be the same, so just keep some basic points in your pocket.

1. Targeting the right sites

There may be thousands of social media sites in front of you but choosing the right site is very important. Don’t just waste your time on hitting every site; just be selective in your approach. For example:- For covering US audience MySpace and BEBO is a nice option, for social bookmarking -  Digg and Stumbleupon, for microblogging - Twitter and Friendfeed and so on.

Recently a new concept has arrived in which you can handle various social networking sites from a single dashboard.

2. Maintain your consistency

Always be a consistent user of social media as it will create more transparency in your network. Regular usage of social media will increase your followers list and obviously you will have a huge network. Being consistent you will come to know that what piece of your strategy works out and what doesn’t.

3. Content matters the most

Driving traffic to your website through social media will require content development that meets the expectations of social media users. Creating blog content that targets social media users doesn’t mean that you have to alienate your subscribers, contrary to the opinion of some people. What it does mean is that you will have to dedicate the time and effort to find a topic that is of particular interest to your readers and present it in a way that also appeals to social media users. For example, social media users like lists, breaking news, photos, controversy, and informative topics.

Magic Tip: - “Just spread the content what you want to listen”

4. Building network and assisting others

Networking on social media sites involves voting for the submissions of others, leaving comments, adding friends, and generally getting to know other users. With a strong network your submissions and votes will get more attention and you’ll have some friends to call on when you need help getting.

5. Conversion and Leads

In most cases just getting traffic to a website will not be your ultimate goal. Social media traffic is pretty much useless if you are not able to convert some of it into what you want. Maybe you want to convert the traffic into links, or maybe subscribers. The conversion rate of social media  traffic will usually be lower than the rates of other types of traffic, but the huge volumes sent by social media can offset a lower conversion rate and make it very targeted traffic.

So these steps can assist in social media marketing but the three things that really required are :- experimenting, strategy and action.

Posted in SMM | 1 Comment »

Social Media Marketing

It’s quite an interesting scenario. Given a choice between social media activity and something else -what do you think you would give up before you left your favorite social network?

According to a survey: More than one-third (36%, to be exact) would sooner give up chocolate, their Pradas, or their mothers-in-law before they gave up social networking. But only half would be willing to pay a subscription fee for those site.

It’s amazing to think the limits we’ll go to for social networking. Pradas are expensive, I

get that. Mothers-in-law are…well, that’s personal, isn’t it? But giving up chocolate? C’mon, people!

With Social Media Marketing solutions, you can easily embed social media into your existing website, or you can create a separate, on line community. Either way, you can interact with your prospects, customers, and your brand proponents in a familiar format—and then use their participation to extend your reach, increase revenue, and drive innovation.

Reasons For Social Media:

1. It’s free! – Face book, My space, Twitter, Linked In and other social networks require no funds whereas, almost all other forms of advertising and marketing efforts require some kind of fee.

2. Simple & convenient to set-up and maintain – Regardless of how much web savvy you are, social networks make it very quick and simple to set-up, customize, manage & maintain your profile. This profile lists crucial information about your business. Providing you have access to a computer, you can be a part of social media.

3. Buzz! – Unlike outbound marketing efforts such as traditional advertising, social networks not only allow customers to provide feedback to organizations, they actively encourage it. Interaction, engagement and sharing are all parts of social media, which if utilized in the correct way can lead to viral exposure, trust, customer loyalty, free market research and brand growth.

4. Volume – Face book has over 300 million active users globally and still at the growing face. Other Social networks can also boost extreme levels of popularity, with Twitter unique user levels growing by over 700% in 2008. Only My space is showing any signs of a decline in numbers.

Increase your marketing reach and effectiveness

• Generate demand and increase revenue: By building trust and deeper ties with the prospect. Acc. to a survey, Customers engaged in social media spends 50% more than others.
• Establish brand champions: One can communicate their message through social media channels and can use these channels to generate referrals, share products reviews or for innovative ideas. It also helps in increasing the site traffic and advertising revenue.
• Improve customer satisfaction: Through continuous engagement with the customers, one can improve the customer satisfaction tremendously through social media.
• Extend your brand visibility & reach: With continuous interaction with the customers and prospects or by creating a familiarity and making reputation among the customers through social media, one can build the brand buzz.
• Improve retention: By being in continuous touch with the customers and replying to all their queries i.e. building a good response rate will retain our customers for longer durations.
• Advance market research and foster new product innovation: By leveraging the insights from on line discussions, groups, prospects and employees – without having any expenses on costly research and travels.

By keeping focus on your objectives and considering the points laid out in this article, it’s not only possible to survive in social media marketing, it’s likely that you will thrive.To conclude, social media is a great tool for businesses to market themselves, but only if done right. Before you go down the social road, it’s crucial to figure out a strategy and stick to it. It’s important to consider exactly who you’re looking to target, how you’re going to target them, what you’re hoping to achieve and how you will measure success.

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Blog & Big Brands

Most of the companies have their own blog known as a business blog. A business blog works as a communication tool between the company and the outside world. It provide a company with a chance to share their expertise and knowledge with a larger audience.

According to Technorati (the search engine dedicated to blogs), there are some 71 million blogs worldwide and 175,000 new blogs are being launched daily.

Business blogs plays an important role as it helps an organization to build stronger relationships with important target groups like clients, customers etc. It can help you draw more traffic and build trust with your customers as well as interact with them.

Below are the examples of major corporates which are using business blogs -

• Coca Cola - Coca Cola’s blog Coca-cola Conversations provide them opportunity to interact with the masses. They share information on a wide variety of topics right from their role in pop culture to brand history.

• Southwest Airlines - Southwest Airlines use their blog Nuts About Southwest to communicate with their customers. Users are allowed to post their comments, thoughts, suggestions and questions. User doesn’t have to register to read or watch but if user wants to rate post, share photo / video etc. he / she needs to register.
  

• Sun Microsystem and CEO Blog - Sun Microsystem’s CEO Blog – Jonathan Schwartz’s blog received about 4,00,000 hits a month in 2006. Both positive and negative comments are allowed and transparency plays major tole in its success.

• KFC - KFC is also not lacking behind in this social media race. They also have a blog called KFC Nation Citizen Blog.

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Load Balancing

Load balancing is a technique to distribute work between two or more servers, network links, CPUs, hard drives, or other resources  in order to get optimal resource utilization, maximize output, and reduce response time. These days this techniques is being used extensively for web application to  provide better experience to user.

In Web load balancing is the process by which inbound internet protocol (IP) traffic can be distributed across multiple servers to enhance the performance of the servers, leads to their optimal utilization and ensures that no single server is overwhelmed. Load balancing is specifically vital for busy networks (with huge traffic), where it is difficult to approximate the number of requests that will be issued to a server. Two or more web serves are employed in a load balancing scheme. If one of the servers begins to get overloaded, the requests are forwarded to another server. Service time is reduced by using a load balancer to identify which server has the appropriate availability to receive the traffic.

The process is vary simple and straightforward. A user’s request for a webpage request is sent to the load balancer, which forwards the request to one of the servers. That server responds back to the load balancer, which in turn sends the response on to the end user.

Load balancing keeps the application/service alive even in the face of server down time due to server failure or maintenance. If you are load balancing across several servers and one of the servers fails, your service will still be available to your users, as the traffic will be diverted to the other servers in your server farm.

There are several types of load balancing techniques.

• Round Robin DNS Load Balancing: The in-built round-robin feature of BIND of a DNS server can be used to load balance multiple web servers.
• Hardware Load Balancing: Hardware load balancers can route TCP/IP packets to various servers in a cluster.
• Software Load Balancing: Most commonly used load balancers are software based, and often comes as an integrated component of expensive web server and application server software packages.

Posted in Software Concepts | No Comments »

Getting banned on Facebook

     Many online marketing companies are rendering Facebook to promote their business and generate traffic to their site. But doing excessive activities can result in getting your profiles banned. Let’s know what “not-to-do” when marketing via Facebook

Creating too many profiles: People generally create 4-5 profiles and send huge friend requests to these profiles. This can lead to getting all the profiles banned at a critical stage because the administrator can track the IP address and hence, ban the account on the charge of spam .

Excessive wall postings: Flooding your friend’s wall with your updates or promotions can prove quite unethical on your terms and lead your profile in getting banned.

Promoting link by aggressive community postings and group joining: Don’t just send similar content links in every community posts. Neither join too many groups as it again counts to spamming.

Sending too many friend requests: Facebook may ban your account if you send more friend requests to different profiles in a single day as it would be considered “marketing” act.

Don’t send repetitive messages: Don’t send same message infinite no. of times. Sending similar mails to your friends or group members will cause your profile to get banned.

Don’t poke many: One main problem faced by many users is that Facebook’s latest application “Poke ‘em” pokes on your behalf. Anyone having Facebook account can poke you and astonishingly, there is no way to customize this application. So, its like getting punishment for a mistake that you have not committed.

Highly active: Remember the old saying-”Slow and steady wins the race”. So, start your activity in a proper manner. Being highly active will also make you a prime suspect in Facebook’s eyes. You are not desperate to get the links..Are you????

Lastly you can even get your account disabled for no reason at all.!!

Posted in SMM | 3 Comments »

Safety tips to protect your kids online

Most parents are aware that the internet presents new hazards to kids. Here are few tips for parents to make internet safe place for their kids.

Keep computer out of your child’s bedroom -  Keep the computer in a common room or any other well used area of the house, where you can easily monitor your child’s activity on consistent basis.

Set boundaries - On most of the sites, children under the age of 14 are not allowed to register. Make this the non-negotiable point.
Set limitation - Limit your child’s Internet usage. Tell them when they can go online, for how much time and what they can do online.
Talk to your kids about Internet safety - Talk to your kids about Internet safety and explain them why you are concerned. Make sure they understand that you will be watching their activities and tell them to follow these instructions

• Do not give personal information like last name, phone number, address etc. to strangers   Do not post videos or pictures that could be used to identify you
• Do not meet in person anyone you have met only online
• If anything makes them uncomfortable, they should come and talk to you about it

Create your own profile on same sites as your child’s: Create your own profile on same social networking sites (eg - MySpace, Facebook etc.) as your child’s and add them as friends. On regular basis, check your child’s profile page and see what pictures they have posted and read some of the posts to see what others are saying.
Make sure your child’s profile page is set to private: You can set the profile page either to public or to private. Make sure your child’s profile page is set to private, as private pages can be viewed only by the people the user invites personally whereas public pages can be viewed by anyone.
Ensure that your child keeps all private information off their profile page: Your child’s profile page should not contain information like phone number, home address etc. Also make sure that they do not accept request from strangers.
Know your child’s passwords to all email accounts: Make sure your child keeps a list of password available to you, so that you can monitor & keep track of their online activities.
Monitor child’s search engine activity: Periodically check the history of your computer to view your child’s activities online.

Use parental controls: Parental controls can be set to send all emails going to your child’s account through your account first, enabling you to screen everything your child sees. You can also limit emails according to several criteria, for example, emails with offensive words or which require personal information can  be blocked. You can even set it, to receive emails only from the approved addresses.
Install content filtering software: Content filtering software will not allow your child to access inappropriate sites. Most content filtering software has the ability to filter via keywords, like adult, drugs, weapons etc. It will also send you a report with list of sites which user tried to access and was denied.

Posted in General | No Comments »

Email-Marketing

Email-Marketing, is a form of direct marketing which uses your mail system to send commercial messages to your customers.
Email-Marketing is popularly used by many companies to:

• Distribute information to a wider range of targeted customers at a low cost
• It is inexpensive
• Delivery Time for any email message is short
• Easily trackable via unsubscription requests,read receipts, click-through etc.
• High Reach for the subscribers who wish to receive the content based on their interests
• Allows to build royalty and acquire new customers
• Higher profits

How to increase your sales via Email-Marketing
Build a relevant mailing list: This is necessary because you must know who would be interested in buying your product. Build a list for your targeted audience because they are the ones who can be converted into your customers.
Appropriate subject-line: One of the important rule to follow is to choose a good subject line. The subject will give the first impression related to your product. Do not make the email-reader feel that it is a same “spam” mail.
Email:Less : Send less number of mails to people as they would not be interested to learn about your new product again and again. Lower the mail delivery and increase the content for that particular mail.

Disadvantages of Email-Marketing:

• Companies send bulk of unsolicited messages, also referred to as “spam” (To prevent this from happening, the subject line and content of your emails should not imply that they are spam. Avoid using words like “Free”, “Discounts”, “Coupon”, etc.)
• Difficulty in sending a mail on different ISPs and firewalls
• Strenuous to keep an email-recipients them engaged via emails

Posted in SMM, General | 2 Comments »

Twitter and Big Brands

Twitter is popular with corporations worldwide. Companies are using Twitter to get the word out about their new product(s), blog post etc. Twitter stats says, it gets 60% of web traffic from outside United States.

What is Twitter?
Twitter is micro-blogging platform and social network rolled into one. It allows user to post up to 140 characters long message. In this post, I am going to talk about few brands using Twitter and what they are doing on Twitter.

Dell: Dell has created number of twitter profiles. Dell Outlet (one of Dell profiles) has used Twitter to broadcast sales items and great deals on their products at their online store. One of the Dell tweet stated that they had been able to sell $1 million worth of products using Twitter.

Comcast: Comcast is one of the world’s leading communications company. Comcast uses twitter to provide customer service to their consumers. If you have some complaint,  just drop a line to them and surely you will hear from them.

Zappos: Zappos an online store is very active in Twitter. They use twitter to interact with consumers - tell them about the company, listen to their customers, highlight the interesting facts about company etc. Zappos exceptional customer service make them trustworthy with the consumers.

Starbucks: Starbucks keep updating their twitter profile with new offers. And actively participate in threaded discussion related to their offers.
Twitter for recruiting

Some companies are using twitter for recruiting -

Its clear, Twitter is hot favorite with big brands and marketers. Be part of it and tell the world - What are you doing?

Happy Tweettering!

Posted in SMM | 1 Comment »

User Interface - Basic Guidelines

1. The web site should load quickly and be easy to scan. These are the essential prerequisites of web designing.
   
2. Pay attention to your homepage. That is what the viewers will first see. The home page should be attractive and provide useful information. If it doesn’t satisfy the mentioned criteria then the readers will move on.
   
3. Logo should be linked with homepage both in front-end and in admin.
   
4. Alert messages should be in red color.
   
5. Help message should be in black or light gray color.
   
6. Within the site, minimum use of icons and maximum use of textual links.
   
7. Avoid Pop-Up in the coding, always open in new window or in new tab or use Ajax functionality. Most of user blocked Pop-up messages in the browser. like in Firefox, IE7.
   
8. All files naming convention should be relevant and consistent. Like as an eg. about-us.htm, product-details.htm
   
9. Call for action should present on every page. It reduces the frequency of exit from the site.
   
10. The site should be W3C certified (http://validator.w3.org/). Validating web pages is an important step, which helps in improving and ensuring the quality of website. The validated web pages are also load fast and quickly indexed by search engines.
    
11. Breadcrumb should be present in inner pages of both front-end and admin site. It is easy to navigate the inter-related interfaces.
    
12. Date format & phone number format should be according to the country.
    Example:
    Date Format USA: MM/DD/YYYY
    Date Format UK : YYYY/MM/DD
    Phone number USA: 111-111-1111
    
13. Tabs or links should be highlighted on visiting page.
    
14. Mouse over effect should be there on the buttons. It enhances the look of the site from design perspective.
    
15. Place “Top” icons or links in bottom of the long content pages to go on top of the page in one click. It saves time in scrolling the page.
    
16. Effectively use the page real estate.
    
17. Use Ajax for increasing the interactivity on the site.
    
18. Organize and divide the primary and secondary links and place in correct position, so that visitors will follow right and correct path.
    
19. Avoid broken links. Make sure that they do not occur on your website. Concentrate on the link architecture.
20. Don’t repeat your titles and page headings. Page headings are instrumental in focusing viewer’s attention. Using the same headings will make them think that the information being provided is the same. This will decrease viewer retention.
21. You should make sure that the content and the page headings are grammatically correct. Incorrect grammar and syntax will reflect badly on the web site.
22. User Interface works consistently. Put your buttons in consistent places on all your windows, use the same wording in labels and messages, and use a consistent color scheme throughout. Consistency in your user interface enables your users to build an accurate mental model of the way it works, and accurate mental models lead to lower training and support costs.
23. In Admin Area, near the site logo one link should be present i.e. “Preview Site”.
    Admin can check the updations by one click only.
24. For delete option use trash icon.
    To Activate, Deactivate, Delete huge number of items place checkboxes and select all option.
25. All the related interfaces should be inter-linked.

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Posted in Web Usability | No Comments »

Blogs-How to promote it!

As a kid most of us maintained a personal diary which would contain our thoughts,experience,views related to any particular stuff. Similar is the role of a “BLOG”.A blog refers to a website where you can write any stuff of your taste. Blogs can be either personal or general. These days various companies are leveraging blogs to get traffic to their site. So, the main question that arises is: How can a blog be promoted …

The answer is simple if we follow some sincere steps.

Firstly if you wish the online users to spend some time on your blog,then stop compromising with your content. Build a very useful and informative content for your blog so that people wish to learn from your blog post.

Secondly update your content on the blog. The interested users would be coming to your site looking for more information. Unmodified content would make them deviate to different sites. So,always update your content..

Thirdly site examples from your previous experiences in your blog so that it looks genuine to the reader.

Lastly,commenting on different yet related posts also helps boost traffic to your blog. Search out for similar topic discussions and comment on them and post a link back to your website. This will allow blog author of the particular blog to come back to your blog ,in turn heighten,the traffic to your blog.

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Website Accessibility

Posted in Web Usability | 1 Comment »

Indexing General

An index is a database structure designed to facilitate faster data retrieval Indexes provide a way for SQL Server to organize pointers to the data required An index in a database works the same way as an index in a reference book.

Why Index?
Speed
Without index SQL Server must perform a table scan or read every row in a table
Speed up query joins between tables

Indexing Architecture
SQL Server indexes are stored as B-Tree (Balanced Tree) structures
There are three levels of a B-Tree:
Root Level
Leaf Level
Intermediate Level
A B-Tree structure is built for every index defined in SQL Server

Types of Indexing
There are two types of SQL Server indexes
Clustered
Non-Clustered
Both are built upon B-Tree structures

Clustered Index
The data is physically stored in the sorted order
The leaf pages are the actual data
Only one clustered index is allowed per table
Generally offers better performance than non-clustered index

Non-Clustered Index
Non-clustered indexes create a logical order and therefore, the leaf page merely points to the actual data Create up to 249 Non-clustered indexes per table. Non-clustered index are larger than clustered indexes because of the extra level of leaf pages

Index Creation
CREATE [ UNIQUE ] [ CLUSTERED | NONCLUSTERED ] INDEX index_name
ON { table | view } ( column [ ASC | DESC ] [ ,…n ] )
Indexes can be created at the same time table is created or at a later time
Create clustered first before adding non-clustered indexes.

When to use Clustered vs. Non-Clustered index
Clustered
Columns that are used in range queries
Columns used in ORDER BY or GROUP BY queries
Queries returning large result sets
Static look up tables with large data set
Non-Clustered
Columns used in aggregate functions
Foreign Keys
Queries returning small result sets
Primary keys that are sequential ID keys, such as identity columns

What NOT to index
Tables with a small number of rows
Might be more efficient to do table scan
Columns with small range of values
For example: (yes/no, 0/1, 1,2,3)
Tables with heavy transaction (insert,update,delete) activity but very few select queries run against it
Tables with indexes slow down data modifications
Columns not used in queries
If the column(s) are defined as TEXT, NTEXT, or IMAGE data types

Additional Tips
Try to create indexes on columns that have integer values
Integer values have less overhead than character values
When creating indexes, try to make them unique indexes
Columns used in joins should have an appropriate index
Don’t accidentally add the same index twice on a table
Don’t over index your OLTP tables
Remove unused indexes.

Re-indexing
Periodically (weekly or monthly) perform a database reorganization on all the indexes on all the tables in your database
Frequency depends on transaction activity in database
This will rebuild the indexes so that the data is no longer fragmented
Fragmented data can cause SQL Server to perform unnecessary data reads, slowing down SQL Server’s performance
Use DBCC DBREINDEX(@TableName,’ ‘,90) for specific tables
Use Update Statistics Command
after bulk insert/update to table

Index Tuning Wizard
Powerful tool designed to help you identify existing indexes that aren’t being used
Recommends new indexes that can be used to help speed up queries
Excellent starting point for indexing if you aren’t sure what to index

Index Tuning Wizard 
Don’t blindly accept every recommendation made by the wizard
Sometimes the wizard will not recommend an index
Review each recommendation carefully, sometimes rewriting a query will do more good than adding an additional index

Conclusion
Indexing properly can dramatically improve overall query and application performance
There are many factors to consider when deciding to index
Index wisely

Posted in Web Development | No Comments »

Plugoo: A cool way to be in touch with your web site visitors

A cool widget enables your website visitors to get in touch with you in real time, directly on your Instant Messenger (MSN Messenger, GoogleTalk, Yahoo! Messenger, AOL AIM, ICQ, Jabber…). If your messenger status is online, visitors can send you an instant message through the Plugoo Buddy in your messenger buddy list. You can thus chat with them; answer their questions; more over communicate with prospect customer when they need you.

Site visitors need neither to download any software nor create an account before they can contact you. They never have access to your instant messaging information (username). Conversation between a visitor and you is strictly private – other simultaneous visitors on the website don’t see the conversation. You don’t have to change your habits; you keep using your favorite messenger on your desktop or from your mobile phone.

You embed a Plugoo on your web site. Visitors on your website can see the Plugoo and write through it a message for you.

As this Plugoo is directly connected to your Instant Messenger, it forwards you in real time all the messages your website visitors can send to you. You reply to your visitors from your Messenger while they are currently browsing your website.

You can also use myPlugoo, a simple link http://www.myPlugoo.com/… to let your friends IM you from any web site, email or blog. For instance, you can add this link to your email signatures or to your blog/forum comments… This way, your emails recipients or other Net surfer have the opportunity to pop-up your Plugoo Widget with just one click and start a LIVE conversation with you!

For more details, surf http://www.plugoo.com/

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FFmpeg Library - Video and Audio Converter

FFmpeg is a wonderful library for creating video applications or even general purpose utilities. FFmpeg takes care of all the hard work of video processing by doing all the decoding, encoding, muxing and demuxing for you. This can make media applications much simpler to write. It’s simple, written in C, fast, and can decode almost any codec you’ll find in use today, as well as encode several other formats.

FFmpeg is a very fast video and audio converter. It can also grab from a live audio/video source. It can also convert from any sample rate to any other, and resize video on the fly with a high quality polyphase filter. FFmpeg is basically a computer program that can record, convert and stream digital audio and video in numerous formats. It is a command line tool that is composed of a collection of free software / open source libraries. It includes libavcodec, an audio/video codec library used by several other projects, and libavformat, an audio/video container mux and demux library. The name of the project comes from the MPEG video standards group, together with “FF” for “fast forward”.

An Insight

FFmpeg is developed under Linux, but it can be compiled under most operating systems, including Apple Inc. Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows and AmigaOS. The command line interface is designed to be intuitive, in the sense that FFmpeg tries to figure out all parameters that can possibly be derived automatically. You usually only have to specify the target bitrate you want.

The generic syntax is: ffmpeg [[infile options][`-i’ infile]]… {[outfile options] outfile}…

The project is made of several components:

• ffmpeg is a command line tool to convert one video file format to another. It can also grab and encode in real time from a TV card.
• ffserver is an HTTP and RTSP multimedia streaming server for live broadcasts. It can also time shift live broadcast.
• ffplay is a simple media player based on SDL and on the FFmpeg libraries.
• libavcodec is a library containing all the FFmpeg audio/video encoders and decoders. Most codecs were developed from scratch to ensure best performance and high code reusability.
• libavformat is a library containing demuxers and muxers for audio/video container formats.
• libavutil is a helper library containing routines common to different parts of FFmpeg. This library include adler32, crc, md5, sha1, lzo decompressor, Base64 encoder/decoder, des encrypter/decrypter, rc4 encrypter/decrypter and aes encrypter/decrypter.
• libpostproc is a library containing video postprocessing routines.
• libswscale is a library containing video image scaling routines.
• libavfilter is the substitute for vhook which allows the video to be modified or examined between the decoder and the encoder.

Major use over the Internet:

FFmpeg Hosting or ffmpeg webhosting is special hosting for online video sharing web sites. FFmpeg converts video to .flv format or any other video format. With FFmpeg web hosting you can create powerful online video sharing web sites just like YouTube. FFmpeg is used by many open source projects, including VLC, MPlayer, Handbrake, Google Chrome.

Multimedia frameworks using FFmpeg

• DirectShow/VFW: ffdshow (external project)
•   QuickTime: Perian (external project)
•   GStreamer: GStreamer FFmpeg plug-in (external project)

Advantages

• Commandline driven
• Many options
• Multi-platform, free, source available

Disadvantages:

• Does not ensure bitrate consistency accross a set of files. So a set of AVI files produced from a set of VOB files cannot be merged into a single AVI.
• The latest version available at Sourceforge (strangely) predates the version bundled with gui4ffmpeg. Currently the version available on Sourceforge does not support the “-vtag xvid” option. So users are stuck with Windows if they want to run the latest.
• According to rumor, the codec does not accurately compress at the bitrate requested by the user.

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