One of my baseball clients is looking to post a lot of videos to their official site this season. In the past, we would periodically post WMV or MOV files to the site for fans to download. The new push for video this season requires us to move towards streaming Flash videos instead.

The video production guys on the team’s staff are a Mac crew so I had to come up with a way for them to convert their regular video files into Flash. Luckily, I stumbled upon the freeware program called FFMPEGX that they can use to convert their movies into FLV files. Once the movies are converted, they simply FTP the FLV file up to the webserver.

Now that the conversion details are out of the way I’m looking for a video player to embed on the site. Right now, I’m leaning toward using the Flash Video Player by Jeroen Wijering but I’m still scoping out other ideas too.

There’s going to come a time in your life when you’ll want to check an email account using PHP. Trust me on this. You’ll want to add an unread message counter to an intranet project, write a “Post via Email” module to your custom built CMS or even, God forbid, write your own webmail application.

When this day comes you’re going to want to use the PHP POP3 Class by Manuel Lemos. It’s available on the awful looking and barely functional PHP Classes site at: http://www.phpclasses.org/browse/package/2.html

This baby does it all. The example file is a bit of a mess but you can hack out a lot of the debug code quickly and easily to make it more manageable. You’ll be up and running in minutes.