Several years ago my Dad came to me and asked me how to rotate a video he'd recorded on his camera. He'd turned the camera sideways to record a video of someone standing and talking (in portrait orientation) but when he played the video back on his computer it was rendered in landscape orientation by his media player, i.e. not the same we he'd shot it, so the picture was rendered off by 90 degrees.
My Dad was running Windows XP, and so didn't have a platform video editor, so I set about making one.
I built and released Movie Rotator version 1.0, in March 2008. I learned a lot, and I shipped my own first complete product. By May 2010 I was consistently getting 4,000 downloads per month. Movie Rotator 1 was free and open source, and used the Quicktime runtime to set a rotation matrix in the MP4/MOV container causing the video to be rotated by the media player. It was a simple solution, and didn't require the video the be re-encoded, but some media players didn't honour that matrix stored in the container, so it didn't work for some video players. Most notably YouTube. There were other problems that became apparent later too.
I never wanted to charge for Movie Rotator 1, I was never sure whether it would take off, if there would be enough demand for it.
Fast forward to late 2012, and I learned how to use Windows Media Foundation to playback videos as part of my H.264/AAC/MP4 support work in Firefox on Windows. I had been looking forward to being able to learn this on "company time", as I could then use those skills in making Movie Rotator 2, a newer version that reencoded the videos rotated, to solve all the problems in version 1. Movie Rotator 1 was still getting 4000 downloads per month, and had steady Google Adsense income. Competitors existed. They charged for their software. In January 2013 I started work on Movie Rotator 2. This time I intended to try selling it, to make some money for my family.
I sacrificed to work on Movie Rotator 2. My daughter was only a year old at the time, so others had to fill in for me while I was working nights and weekends on this project. I started to skip the Saturday morning black belt class to work on Movie Rotator
After months of work I had learned a huge amount working on Movie Rotator 2. I learned all about about encoding and playback with WMF. I also had to learn about Direct3D9, Direct2D, and a bunch of other C++11x features. I learned a little about crypto and how software license keys are made and validated. I also learned to ruthlessly prioritize. In the evenings I was exhausted from work and parenting, so I saved the hard problems for Saturdays when I worked on the weekend. Of course that would be greatly inconveniencing my family. So I spent my time carefully.
Then in August 2013 I checked my websever's logs again. They were down, way down. I was down to only 1900 downloads per month. Traffic was dropping steadily. In all likelihood, I extrapolated and Movie Rotator didn't have long left.
I'd always assumed that Movie Rotator was a product only good for a few years, but I'd expected a few more yet.
What to do? Development of the software was almost finished. I'd been on the cusp of engaging an accountant to incorporate and a lawyer to sort out a software license/purchase agreement... But now I wasn't certain I'd recoup the expense. I was gutted. I'd sacrificed so much, and rolled up snake eyes.
So I released a free version of Movie Rotator 2 in September 2012, and today scrubbed the code and committed it to posterity as open source. Movie Rotator 2's code is now available on GitHub.
I benefited greatly building this product. I learned an awful lot, way more than on Movie Rotator 1. I really learned how to focus and prioritize. But it is still a bitter pill; all the sacrifice I made, to not achieve my goal.
I guess the world has changed. My theory is that people are mostly recording and watching their videos on their mobile phones now, and those handle video rotation just fine, they have to. At least now that my code is open sourced, it may still help someone someday, possibly me even. I'd like to take more time to clean it up more, and experiment with the design to see how various patterns work. It's good to have a moderately sized codebase to test such things on. You never know what may happen. My DirectShow Firefox code languished for years before finally being resurrected this year to ship in Firefox, so who knows...
My Dad was running Windows XP, and so didn't have a platform video editor, so I set about making one.
I built and released Movie Rotator version 1.0, in March 2008. I learned a lot, and I shipped my own first complete product. By May 2010 I was consistently getting 4,000 downloads per month. Movie Rotator 1 was free and open source, and used the Quicktime runtime to set a rotation matrix in the MP4/MOV container causing the video to be rotated by the media player. It was a simple solution, and didn't require the video the be re-encoded, but some media players didn't honour that matrix stored in the container, so it didn't work for some video players. Most notably YouTube. There were other problems that became apparent later too.
 |
| Movie Rotator 1 |
I never wanted to charge for Movie Rotator 1, I was never sure whether it would take off, if there would be enough demand for it.
Fast forward to late 2012, and I learned how to use Windows Media Foundation to playback videos as part of my H.264/AAC/MP4 support work in Firefox on Windows. I had been looking forward to being able to learn this on "company time", as I could then use those skills in making Movie Rotator 2, a newer version that reencoded the videos rotated, to solve all the problems in version 1. Movie Rotator 1 was still getting 4000 downloads per month, and had steady Google Adsense income. Competitors existed. They charged for their software. In January 2013 I started work on Movie Rotator 2. This time I intended to try selling it, to make some money for my family.
I sacrificed to work on Movie Rotator 2. My daughter was only a year old at the time, so others had to fill in for me while I was working nights and weekends on this project. I started to skip the Saturday morning black belt class to work on Movie Rotator
After months of work I had learned a huge amount working on Movie Rotator 2. I learned all about about encoding and playback with WMF. I also had to learn about Direct3D9, Direct2D, and a bunch of other C++11x features. I learned a little about crypto and how software license keys are made and validated. I also learned to ruthlessly prioritize. In the evenings I was exhausted from work and parenting, so I saved the hard problems for Saturdays when I worked on the weekend. Of course that would be greatly inconveniencing my family. So I spent my time carefully.
Then in August 2013 I checked my websever's logs again. They were down, way down. I was down to only 1900 downloads per month. Traffic was dropping steadily. In all likelihood, I extrapolated and Movie Rotator didn't have long left.
I'd always assumed that Movie Rotator was a product only good for a few years, but I'd expected a few more yet.
What to do? Development of the software was almost finished. I'd been on the cusp of engaging an accountant to incorporate and a lawyer to sort out a software license/purchase agreement... But now I wasn't certain I'd recoup the expense. I was gutted. I'd sacrificed so much, and rolled up snake eyes.
So I released a free version of Movie Rotator 2 in September 2012, and today scrubbed the code and committed it to posterity as open source. Movie Rotator 2's code is now available on GitHub.
 |
| Movie Rotator 2 |
I guess the world has changed. My theory is that people are mostly recording and watching their videos on their mobile phones now, and those handle video rotation just fine, they have to. At least now that my code is open sourced, it may still help someone someday, possibly me even. I'd like to take more time to clean it up more, and experiment with the design to see how various patterns work. It's good to have a moderately sized codebase to test such things on. You never know what may happen. My DirectShow Firefox code languished for years before finally being resurrected this year to ship in Firefox, so who knows...
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