USB stick distro

[notoriousruz]

Hiya, I'm working on a project for a band at the moment and they want to distribute the finished product via usb drives. I'm a little iffy on how this might work so I thought I might ask for comments on how to make this workflow work.....

FCP export as mpeg (the one DVDs like, whichever that is)--->

DVD Studio Pro (its my first time venturing into this program, what does it spit out?) ---->

USB, the USB stick should just be a replacement for the physical DVD, so the program would be launchable/playable direct fromt he stick


Any thoughts on this process muchly appreciated.:bath:

 

[JeganRX]

I'm not sure how you'd go about this, as it requires a bit more coding thought than I'm really aware of. You want some kind of autorun-style application to launch your clip, but I don't think many systems perform that on flash drives.

You also must consider compatibility. These days, H264 is pretty widely used, though only in Quicktime or Flash... or pirated movies. Windows 7 has native MP4 container (and thus H264 and AAC) support, but the world isn't on that as much as XP still, so it's a hard guarantee. MPEG2 - which is what you seem to describe since you listed DVD - is widely supported but typically only through DVD player applications. MPEG2 files outside of DVD structures are still, for whatever reason, annoying to playback on their own (and for Apple, the MPEG2 QT decoder costs money).

Old MPEG1 is highly compatible, but I can't possibly suggest this option as it looks god awful. My only absolute recommendation (mainly due to compatibility) would be a flash based program that could play flash video (which could and should be encoded in H264). You've got me on how to implement it, but that sounds like a possible option to me.

 

[notoriousruz]

Hi mate and thanks for the reply.

When I said yes to this project I thought alright, an .ico or sumink like that on the flash drive would just get the computer to think it was a DVD, which would launch the DVD player and that it would simply be a matter of authoring a DVD.

Seems that's not the case huh?

The autorun idea was one I was considering but it seems to have been disabled in Windows 7. At least thats what this page says, i think....

http://www.samlogic.net/articles/autorun-usb-flash-drive.htm

So the user would have to click on an icon to get it started, a bummer, but no deal breaker.

My only absolute recommendation (mainly due to compatibility) would be a flash based program that could play flash video (which could and should be encoded in H264).

So would the USB stick come with some player installed, that the user would then launch?

Thanks again for the reply, looks like this thing could quickly turn into a real migrane. It should be a least theoretically possible though.........

 

[JeganRX]

So would the USB stick come with some player installed, that the user would then launch?

Thanks again for the reply, looks like this thing could quickly turn into a real migrane. It should be a least theoretically possible though.........

Presumably some flash player (Does Adobe provide a standalone decoder? These are things I can't help with unfortunately), but more than likely you'd provide the flash installation so they can at least install it on their computer.

This would require a decent bit of scripting to pull off well.

 

[Demistate]

Hiya, I'm working on a project for a band at the moment and they want to distribute the finished product via usb drives. I'm a little iffy on how this might work so I thought I might ask for comments on how to make this workflow work.....

FCP export as mpeg (the one DVDs like, whichever that is)--->

DVD Studio Pro (its my first time venturing into this program, what does it spit out?) ---->

USB, the USB stick should just be a replacement for the physical DVD, so the program would be launchable/playable direct fromt he stick


Any thoughts on this process muchly appreciated.:bath:

You could create an Auto run for PC and MAC on the same stick. PC version routes to a WMV, and the Mac Version routes to a .mp4

Unfortunately you're going to run into issues. Windows Vista doesn't auto-run software anymore, and prompts the user to do several things. On the MAC, the user still has to open up the stick, and then click something inside the window, but you could have pretty art.

I would investigate having a choose your own adventure like content on Youtube linked through a myspace or Facebook page. You'll probablly get more people actually viewing the content vs your audience formatting the drives and turning them around for cash. Not to mention you can save yourself the technical headaches of creating custom code for auto-runs only to have half of your users actually click on the right part correctly.