Scrum.org

Filed under: Scrum, Video — Andrew @ 10:53 pm

Yesterday I took the multiple choice test that is available on scrum.org. I signed up as soon as I discovered that Ken Schwaber was developing this site after leaving the Scrum Alliance.

OK, first things first. I scored 70%. Not bad, but I have an excuse ready. I didn’t notice the timer when I started the test so I had to rush the second half and missed the last 4 questions. The test was really useful to me because a number of questions relate to the responsibilities of each Scrum role. It also touched upon the idea that if you are going to modify Scrum or can’t implement it as designed you won’t realise all the benefits.

It will be interesting to see how scrum.org develops in the near future.

Just before learning about Scrum.org I came across Ken’s Google TechTalk from 2006 – Scrum et al.

The talk helped me to gain a better understanding of what a high performing Scrum team should feel like and how each role can contribute to this. If you are thinking of starting Scrum I would recommend that your team watch this together.

After using Scrum for the last year and seeing many benefits I am really keen to bring together other Scrum teams, ScrumMasters and Product Owners in my local area to share our experiences. Living in a rugby city it’s clear that I am not going to find these people by searching for ‘Scrum Bath’. If you’re interested or know someone who might be please get in touch.

Flowplayer splash image with FFmpeg

Filed under: Video, WordPress — Andrew @ 11:16 pm

At work we’ve been using the wordTube and wordTube Flowplayer plugins to add video to our news.  We had some old videos we wanted to include so I used FFmpeg to generate a splash image for each one.  I applied the same command to all the videos which meant the images was taken from the same frame.  This was a bit hit and miss, people with their eyes closed or fading captions isn’t what we wanted.  For those videos we resorted to screen captures and Photoshop.

It’s clear that for the best results someone needs to select the part of the video which will be used for the splash image.  I thought that I would use the Flowplayer javascript api to pass the size and frame information to FFmpeg when the video is paused.  I have put together this proof of concept and it seems to work well, but I do have one small issue that I need to resolve.

It would be nice to integrate this with wordTube so that instead of uploading an image or giving a URL you could generate one directly from the video.  Perhaps I’ll have a go.