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I have noticed that there is a lack of GOOD videos out there showing how to convert a car to electric.

Because of that, a friend and I are going to videotape the whole process of him converting his Dodge Neon into a 300+V AC electric car!

We have already started shooting and posting videos to the web. The idea here is to get good information out to people who are interested, and encourage them to do their own conversions.

Here are links to some of the first videos.

http://www.metacafe.com/watch/1972228/electric_car_conversion_101_part_001/

http://www.metacafe.com/watch/1972228/electric_car_conversion_101_part_002/

http://www.metacafe.com/watch/1972512/electric_car_conversion_101_003/

http://www.metacafe.com/watch/1972816/electric_car_conversion_101_part_4/


If you have any (positive) suggestions on improving these videos to help promote EV conversions, please let me know.

I will add links for more of the videos once they are rendered and posted.

Thanks,

-Ben Nelson
EV guy

Looks good, Ben! Is there an easy way to reference the list of videos?

I am doing these videos through Metacafe. I'm new to it, so I am not sure yet how to do something like a "playlist".

This address:
http://www.metacafe.com/f/channels/bennelson

should link you to all my videos on Metacafe.

Check out this guy:
http://www.kiwiev.com/

Please try to post the actual direct paths to the video files
themselves, as metacafe appears to be all inscrutable Flash garbage.
Hopefully they give you way to extract the real pathname URL.
If they don't, complain at them.
.
_H*

Yep, honestly, KiwiEV's videos are the best thing out there right now on electric car conversions.

Plus you gotta love the accent!

Yep, honestly, KiwiEV's videos are the best thing out there right now on electric car conversions.

Plus you gotta love the accent!

Gotta love the funky background music he uses too, lol.

Hey Hobbit,

Here is the snippet of code they provide for embedding:


<embed src="http://www.metacafe.com/fplayer/1972816/electric_car_conversion_101_part_4.swf" width="400" height="345" wmode="transparent" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"> </embed><br><font size = 1><a href="http://www.metacafe.com/watch/1972816/electric_car_conversion_101_part_4/">Electric Car Conversion 101 Part 4</a> - <a href="http://www.metacafe.com/">Click here for more free videos</a></font>


Can you help me figure out how to use some of the information in here to post MetaCafe videos directly?

Thanks,

-Ben

Ben, pick out the part with the swf file extension (the whole url) then wrap it in flash tags to embed here -- use square brackets to replace the curly braces below:

{flash}http://www.metacafe.com/fplayer/1972816/electric_car_conversion_101_part_4.swf{/flash}

I've put the first 4 into a table below:

Neon Conversion Videos:|||
http://www.metacafe.com/fplayer/1972161/electric_car_conversion_101_part_001.swf||http://www.metacafe.com/fplayer/1972228/electric_car_conversion_101_part_002.swf
|||
http://www.metacafe.com/fplayer/1972512/electric_car_conversion_101_part_003.swf||http://www.metacafe.com/fplayer/1972816/electric_car_conversion_101_part_4.swf


Al, those links are as follows:

http://www.metacafe.com/fplayer/1972161/electric_car_conversion_101_part_001.swf
http://www.metacafe.com/fplayer/1972228/electric_car_conversion_101_part_002.swf
http://www.metacafe.com/fplayer/1972512/electric_car_conversion_101_part_003.swf
http://www.metacafe.com/fplayer/1972816/electric_car_conversion_101_part_4.swf

Nice quality by the way, Ben. :thumbs_up:

Thanks for the help embedding!

I did try to go for decent quality on these videos. I used a tripod, lights, and lavalier microphone.

Most web videos out there are so bad technically, that even if they have good information, they are still unwatchable because of shaky camera or bad sound.

I am trying to start a "Video Blog" on electric and other alternative vehicles.

Here's the start of it.
http://www.greencarvideos.blogspot.com/

I still have to figure out how to do some more formatting of photos and have it clean and organized, but it's a start.

I think you're missing the point. The .swf reference is some
sort of wrapper than runs something in Flash that eventually
pulls down the video file itself, hopefully in some standard
format like mpeg. None of the .swf helps someone who doesn't
run flash in the first place. If the *video* itself is some
form of flash, that's a different story, but I think you're
getting fooled by the wrappers and you need to take it one more
level down to find where the real data is.
.
_H*

It's my understanding that YouTube, Metacafe, and similar web video places do use the Flash Video Format.

The true Flash video format (.FLV) is pretty much only playable in the Flash design software. Then other things can be added to it to make a complete .SWF file.

It seems to be squirreled away on another service that requires a key exchange to fetch the actual video. This is the string that is passed:

http://v.mccont.com/ItemFiles/%5BFrom%20www.metacafe.com%5D%201972816.8709274.11.flv

Said key appears to be:

&gdaKey=1226335187_a60001ec50ce20ff93acb6b124f3e6ac

I've no idea how to successfully retrieve this thing separately.

that's a pretty mangled URL; trying the obvious means of sticking
them together as a request didn't work. Well, as long as they
insist on burying this stuff under such layers of useless
obfuscation, screw it, I give up. If another place to host
the files in a more straightforward fashion is found, let us know.
.
_H*