Category: Hardware

Bringing in a generic H.264 stream to Wirecast (via Wowza and Wirecast’s Generic IP Camera support)

Wirecast is truly a studio in a box. It has a great support for multiple cameras, mixing live and recorded sources, graphic overlays and so on. Recent versions even allow you to bring in live feeds from IP cameras including support for specific Axis cameras.

Since I am a big fan of IP cameras and Axis in particular this is great news. Unfortunately Wirecast doesn’t have direct support for most models and I had to dig quite a bit to get things to work using their “Generic” IP camera support.

First test was to get a straight H.264 encoded into Wowza and then out to Wirecast. To do this, I used the Flash Media Live Encoder and set it publish to “rtmp://localhost:1935/img” (I have Wowza running on my local machine and an application called “img” which is a copy of Wowza’s “live” application). I set the Stream name in FMLE to “media.sav” which is what Wirecast is looking for by default.

In Wirecast’s Source Settings, I added a new IP Camera and set it’s IP address to: “127.0.0.1:1935” and choose “Generic” as the type.

Viola! It works, the video is being captured and encoded by FMLE, sent to Wowza and pulled into Wirecast as a Generic IP camera. In this manner, I can have live cameras via FMLE from anywhere in the world brought live into my final stream.

(Big thanks to Steve McFarlin the developer of the LiveU iPhone broadcasting app for his post on Wirecast’s Forum detailing how he got his software working.)

Mobile, 5 Years in the future

I was just interviewed for an upcoming book and one of the questions was:
Fast forward 5 years into the future, can you paint me picture of the mobile world?

Here is what I said:
I am going to beg out of this one and instead paint a picture of my utopia.

My mobile utopia 5 years from now:

Carriers have accepted the fact that they are too large and slow to beat the current crop of DIY wireless systems that are being built. They have realized that the cost of maintaining service such as the little used voice platform is not worthwhile when all that anyone cares about is the openness and speed of their internet connection. Besides, they are sick of battling the hackers who continually figure out how to bypass their restrictions and really sick of spending their lobbying money to battle Googlezon and the like over whether or not they have to carry 3rd party data without charge.

They have finally realized and accepted their place in the world as “dumb pipes”, wireless ISPs.

They have given up on locking down phones. Nobody will sign a 2 year contract anymore for a free phone that they can’t install any of the open source software on.

On the other side of the coin, Googlezon, DIYers, hackers and hipsters are developing and deploying game changing hardware and applications at a phenomenal pace.

A prolific open source community has introduced a kit based mobile phone with every feature imaginable and battery life that puts devices from 5 years ago to shame. Tourists are carrying around monstrous looking home built teleconferencing systems with them as they gawk at the Naked Cowboy in Time Square and talk with their relatives and friends back home.

Hipsters in Bushwick no longer carry laptops and projectors to their VJ gigs but rather bring their mobile projector enabled high-speed wireless video mixing system and no longer have to be hunched over a keyboard and mouse. They simply mingle with the crowd or dance until they drop with every movement being tracked by sensors programmed to project and mix particular clips or dynamically generated visuals.

I can’t think of anyone who uses a laptop computer anymore. Everyone seems to have adopted the projected keyboard and gesture controlled interfaces that are common on mobile devices now.

Data flows pretty seamlessly and just by pointing to a contact in the sky a voice, data or text channel is opened to that person.

Wow.. Things are different now that the networks have been broken..

(Perhaps we can dream..)

ITP End of Year Events – Thesis Presentations and End of Semester Show

ITP Spring Show 2006
A two day exhibition of interactive sight, sound and physical objects from the student artists of ITP.

This event is free and open to the public. No need to RSVP.

ITP Thesis Presentations 2006
ITP’s graduating students will be presenting a wide variety of highly creative and interactive projects that they have constructed over the course of their final project seminars.

Students have been encouraged to undertake projects that bring together the conceptual and design issues that they have engaged in during their two years of study at ITP.

Projects will include installation based work, digital video and audio pieces, interactive 3D, games and educational applications, to name only a few.

ITP will be providing a live webcast of all the thesis presentations.

iPod video, will it lead to more streaming video consumption?

Streamingmedia.com: Video iPod Sales Growth Portends Big Things for Streaming Media in 2006
From the article:
The biggest unanswered question, of course, is whether the average consumer, who has preferred her iPod audio and video downloaded, not streamed, will warm to the idea of streaming content that could really be accessed from anywhere she has cell or wireless data service.

My Comments:
It was suggested in the article that the answer might come at CES or at MacWorld. While interesting related items were announced at CES (nothing at MacWorld AFAIK) I don’t think this actually has anything to do with what the consumer will actually adopt.

Mobile streaming video.. Hmmn.. Mobile carriers think it is the next big thing. If the iPod video is a success and I think it will be, it will be more about personal control over media and fair pricing than TV anywhere, neither of which the mobile carriers understand. For instance, I can’t stream my home movies through Verizon’s VCast service but I can offer a download of them through iTunes for iPod consumption.

Understand the iPod iTunesDB

ITunesDB – wikiPodLinux
From the site:
This page details the format of the binary files used on the iPod to keep track of the music it contains as well as its play history. Collectively we refer to these files as the iTunesDB however there are in fact a number of files, each with their own format, that make up this database.

Java + USB

Universal Serial Bus – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
On the ITP PComp Listserv there was recently a thread about USB and Java. I have some interest in this so I figured I would do a bit of searching around.

Here is what I found:

jUSB – Java USB API for Windows

jUSB: Java USB (Linux)

The Java Community Process(SM) Program – JSRs: Java Specification Requests – detail JSR (JSR 80: JavaTM USB API)

JSR080 – javax.usb

It seems that the Communication API can work with USB devices that implement the communications device class. USB devices can extend from any of the following device classes that are supposed to be supported by the underlying OS. Thanks to WIkipedia Entry

USB human interface device class
USB mass storage device class
USB communications device class
USB printer device class
USB audio device class
USB video device class