A purple monkey ate my homework? The inter-connectedness of cloud

So YouTube is down tonight. My money is on some nation-state-shenanigans with BGP routing table injection, but that is wild-speculation.

So what does that have to do with my homework?

Well, you see, I use G-Suite. And as part of that, Google Slides. And there’s this one slide I want to have a little audio-opener. You know, something to wake the crowd up.

Google Slides doesn’t support audio, but it does support video. So, let me take my audio clip and make a video out of it. How you ask?

ffmpeg -ss 0 -t 12 -loop 1 -i STILL-IMAGE.png 
  -i audio.mp3 -c:v libx264 -tune stillimage 
  -c:a copy -pix_fmt yuv420p  AUDIO.mp4

OK, what that does is extract the first 12 seconds of my audio file, loop in ‘STILL-IMAGE.png’ as a video, copy the audio, encode the video as x264, and place it in an mp4 file. Easy!

Back to the story. So now I’ve made my video clip (with no video). This is something I did 20 years ago for a customer (Artist Insertion), la plus ca change!. To insert it, I put it in my Google Drive. I then ‘Insert Video’ on the Google Slides. OK, done. It works. Now to make it auto play. I select it, select ‘Format Options’. And this is where it falls apart.

You see, despite it being a private video uploaded to my Drive, its all inter-connected. YouTube infrastructure is used to ‘transcode’ my video to various rates and formats. And, it uses that API here (I can tell because it came back when YouTube came back!)

So… what this means… if Google cancels YouTube (like it goes the way of Wave or Google+ or …. you know the story), my slides will break.

And this is making me go ‘hmmm’.


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