Category: Streaming and Multi-Media

audioblog.com releases a videoblogging tool

Audioblog.com – News
From the site:

November 14, 2004

Introducing our Videoblog tool

Audioblog.com subscribers now have access to the beta version of our streaming videoblog recording/publishing tool, which works with the same ease-of-use as our Flash-based BlogRecorder. Record. Save. Publish. It’s that easy.

Initially, it will be available to all of our customers during our beta period (approximately a month). After that time, it will be available as a feature upgrade for all new subscribers.

What a deal! By acting now, you can have audioblogging and videoblogging for just $4.95 per month (includes 1GB of bandwidth, and each additional GB billed at $1.95 each).

Audioblog.com works with most major blogging software and hosting providers such as Blogware, TypePad, Blogger, Movable Type, WordPress and more. Broadband connections strongly recommended to record video.

Internet Archive Hosting Creative Commons licensed audio and video

Killer CC App: The Publisher, beta version
Bye bye bandwidth bills for *free* media (maybe because I don’t think bandwidth and disk space is really that cheap that it can just be given away in large quantities, yet).

Oh yeah, the link above is for their nice tool in support of this.

Here we go again…

Wi-Fi Acacia’s next patent target | CNET News.com
Acacia, a representation of all that is wrong with our patent system, having successfully extorted companies using streaming technologies has turned to companies using WiFi, attempting to enforce another patent that they apparently have purchased.
I heard a while ago that they Acacia was short on money. Hopefully a couple of high-profile legal battles will drain them and we can sing good night Acacia, good night (until they sell their patent portfolio to another company willing to sue sue sue).

Just what I have been looking for…

MCE QuickStream DV – Portable, FireWire DV Capture Drive

This is a portable hard drive recorder that you plug directly into your camcorder and capture video to. AWESOME.
Over at unmediated.org, kenyatta says that he heard a collective shrug over the first version. I think the collective must be CRAZY. This would cut down on the “time to web” by 10 fold (at least for me). Too bad it is soo expensive. Perhaps I will make some real money again and be able to buy one :-)
From the site:
The revolutionary MCE QuickStream DV, now in its second generation, has re-engineered the entire Digital Video (DV) workflow by completely eliminating the inefficient, time consuming step of transferring (or capturing) DV footage from your DV camcorder tapes into your Mac or PC non-linear editing (NLE) system… The lightweight, portable, self-powered QuickStream DV connects directly to your DV camcorder and captures your DV footage to its miniature high performance hard drive on-the-fly, straight from your camcorder’s FireWire port, in your choice of ready-to-edit file formats (.mov, .avi, .dv, and others) while you are shooting! When done shooting, simply unplug the QuickStream DV from your camcorder’s FireWire (IEEE 1394, i.LINK, etc.) port and plug it into your computer system’s FireWire port and your DV footage is ready for editing and/or viewing… IMMEDIATELY!

PHP Library for QuickTime embedding

PEAR::QuickTime
From the site:
Apple’s QuickTime multimedia architecture has some fantastic features that can be exploited through server-side scripting and HTML embedding, but it’s something of a black art. There is confusion and inconsistency in how best to embed QuickTime in web pages, deal with QTVR, let movies talk to each other, pass XML QTLists back and forth between movies and servers, and much more (did you even know that QuickTime could do all this??!). We hope to expose this in a clean and elegant way so that QuickTime can reach the audience it deserves.

This project aims to provide a simple and consistent interface to these features through a set of PEAR-compatible PHP classes and functions. We’d also like to get this project into a state where it can become part of the PEAR respository, to ease installation for everyone, and open up the hidden world of QuickTime to more developers.

Hacks for the Linksys WRT54G wireless router

Portless Networks
The other day I put this hacked firmware on a spare router. It was fun to look at the additional capabilities that are offered (such as SSH) but what I would really like to do is be able to modify one of these and put a very light weight streaming server on it. Unfortunately, you need a solid Linux box setup (I have to get to work on that one) to build a new firmware image.

Oh yeah, what is MORE interesting (to me at least) is that Linksys has made available the firmware for their wireless cameras as well (also Linux based). Looking through the firmware image for the WVC11B I was able to confirm my suspicion that in fact they do not offer a true MPEG-4 solution, rather it appears as though they *may* be using an MPEG-4 codec but wrapping it in an ASF file (hence the reason you need the stoooopid active x control to view the stream).

In any case, it is one of my missions to hack a true MPEG-4 solution onto one of these. How cool would that be!