I’ve decided to learn more about html5, since Google and Apple and a lot of these BIG companies say it’s the future.

I went to http://canvasdemos.com and was amazed that all this can be achieved with canvas tag.

I specifically liked the blowing up video into pieces , check it out, it’s AWESOME.

Sean from craftymind.com has done and amazing proof of concept, you should really check it out. I played with it and then realized, that clicking is the only interactivity there is and it seems that there’s more there. much more.

Here’s what I came up with :

Click on Randomize Pieces to explode the video to pieces and Begin assembling.

demo2 has video courtecy of bigcbuckbunny movie and lots more pieces (use chome)

I’ve decided to try and make something using the drawImage() method for the canvas, and inserting the video feed.

Goals :

• Learn a bit more about <canvas> ,html5 ,  video encoding
• Use tools I know to interact with the new stuff (jquery, css)
• Create something awesome!
• Make it fun

The idea:

The idea was simple, take Sean’s example, and add interactivity, first I was leaning towards making a “pyatnashki” ор fifteenpuzzle puzzle game, only using video, but then I decided it’s cool to leave it as a regular puzzle without constraints.

The actual work:

First I had to use some movie, it had to loop good enough, since as it turned out later, video puzzle isn’t really easy. I’ve used video shot by my uncle I offcourse had to format it properly, well it turns out, right now there are weird ways to input <video> in html, since webkit browsers support h.264 and webM and firefox supports theora codec.

I’ve re-encoded the video to 2 files ( .ogv and .mp4) using this tutorial : http://diveintohtml5.org/video.html

I then had to choose what will I do the actual interactivity with, the canvas itself, or DOM elements. I’ve chosen DOM elements, that maybe slower, but it’s a diferent approach then I’ve seen, plus I already know how to manipulate DOM, and can use that to my advantage.

I’ve created a factory function, that picks up on original video width and height, and takes the number of pieces that I want, and creates the necessary amount of canvas elements.

I then use drawImage each frame of the video, and copy pixels to each canvas according to their location on the matrix.