I made a huge upgrade on the way the gallery is working. Specifically I just installed gallery which is a much better piece of software than a simple plugin can be (although I must say that the plugin served me quite faithfully until now). The best part is that it supports videos as well while the organization (using keywords and albums) is vastly superior.
So I’ve spent the last two days configuring and uploading stuff on the gallery but I still have a long way to go to finish with it. I also installed the WPG2 wordpress plugin to allow me to integrate the gallery to my site but unfortunately it may be a bit more challenging than I expected, seeing as the theme I’m using is quite heavily modified compared to the basic one.
Nevertheless, progress is being made, and you can find the initial gallery here
Right now I’m still trying to find out why Firefox refuses to play mp4 and avi files. On the mp4 files it just asks for the quicktime plugin and on the avi file it gives out a no video error (even though Konqueror does not seem to have any problem playing it). It can play flv files quite easily but my problem is converting those mp4 files to flvs in the first place. mencoder seems to eat out the sound and I have no idea how to use ffmpeg (nor the time to learn).
I would however appreciate anyone who can try to see the videos on the gallery and tell me what works for him and what doesn’t.
In my humble opinion, the flash ones are the best since they have the best interface and play everywhere. However the conversion tools of Dreamhost and YouTube seems to drop the quality quite a lot compared to the original version.
Now that I mentioned Dreamhost. I just cannot be happy enough that I made this choice of provider. The automated tools have made my life SO much easier and the Bandwidth and Storage limits provided are just amazing. I literally installed Gallery2 within 20 minutes, fully configured.
Anyway, enough talk for now. Time to get back to configuring.