Interactive Tele-Journalism
So.. I have finally released ITJ on SourceForge.net.
With support from Konscious and Manhattan Neighborhood Network we have packaged and uploaded the latest version and it can be downloaded at: http://sourceforge.net/projects/itv-ism/.
Hmmn.. This could be very interesting..!
“YouTube is excited to offer APIs to the developer community. Using our APIs, you can easily integrate online videos from YouTube’s rapidly growing repository of videos into your application. The APIs currently allow read-only access to key parts of the YouTube video respository and user community.”
Thanks Steven.
Go Jenny and Cory, go!
“Have you ever been in a situation where you wished your cell phone would ring? Maybe you wanted to look extra important or popular on that hot date. Or maybe you just needed an excuse to escape from an unpleasant meeting.”
So, I haven’t called support and I know that is the first thing I should do when problems like this arise but it just seems too fishy.
To make a long story short, I recently decided to switch from regular home phone service from Verizon (who also supply my DSL) to VoIP service. I have had VoIP and regular phone service for quite some time and things were well. Recently though, we had a pretty nasty electrical storm and one of the things that got zapped was my Asterisk box which handled the integration between normal phone service and VoIP.
After a bit of research, I found the Verizon does in fact offer naked loop DSL (DSL without a phone number) for existing customers and that I could continue with my DSL and transfer my phone number over to my VoIP provider and basically save myself $50 a month.
Now here is the troubling bit. After filling out the paper work and sending it to my VoIP provider who subsequently contacted Verizon to get the process started my DSL has been tremendously flaky. So flaky that my IP address is repeatedly changing. Not once a day, not 10 times a day, somewhere in the vicinity of 100 times a day! I probably don’t need to mention how bad this is for services like VoIP. Essentially making it useless and unusable.
I could chalk it up to damage from the electrical storm (but I didn’t notice it until after sending in the paperwork) or:
Could this really be a Verizon tactic to prevent people from going with 3rd party VoIP?
Pheeder
“Pheeder is a whole new way of using your cellphone: it lets you communicate with all of your friends simultaneously, with a single phone call. To use it, you just call Pheeder, leave a message and hang up. Seconds later all of your friends, or anyone you want, receives the message at the very same instant. And if they want, they can send a reply to your message.”
A couple of days ago I got FFMPEG working to automatically generate FLV video files for OpenVlog. Today I finally got thumbnails generating correctly. Here are the commands:
This creates a JPEG:
ffmpeg -i inputfile -t 0.001 -ss 1 -vframes 1 -f mjpeg -s 320×240 outputfile.jpg
This creates a QT Movie that I am using as a reference movie (just one frame of video):
ffmpeg -i inputfile -t 0.001 -ss 1 -vframes 1 -vcodec mpeg4 -an outputfile.mov
I got this working with lots of help from the following pages:
Converting Video Formats with FFmpeg
Extracting JPG Frames Using FFmpeg and mjpeg Parameter
“This blog is for an experimental documentary that I am working on this year, where I will be shooting video of my experiences in Iran and creating shorts, interactive installations, and/or videoblogs using the footage from my experiences and the experiences of others”
Paris, a former ITP student has slowly been compiling video snippets from her visits to Iran. She is in a unique position to compare and contrast and more often show the similarities in life between Iranians and the western world.
I hope she continues.. I love watching the videos..
Over at OpenVlog I have just finished implementing an automatic Flash conversion for video that is sent in. It was quite a task from getting FFMPEG running on Dreamhost with LAME and AMR support (you need to change your LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable), understanding Ruby enough to get FLVTool2 installed and working (another environment variable issue) and building a fancy Flash video player..
I think it was worthwhile in the end..
A Sample: I love NY (click on the Flash Version link).
Next will be making thumbnails with FFMPEG so that I don’t use the silly “Click Here” graphic anymore.. I suppose I should still say, “click here” as for some strange reason I can not get the mouse pointer to change over top of the QuickTime plugin. That is a story for another day but the gist is, use JavaScript instead of reference movies. The added benefit is that IE users don’t have the extra alert.
Thanks to Cat and the FreeFormed.org crew for the impetus.
VoIPowering Your Office with Asterisk: Soothing the Savages with Hold Music
Some good little command line snippets for conversion to GSM..
blip.tv (beta)
Check it out!
Here are the 3 books:
Videoblogging by Jay Dedman and Joshua Paul.
Secrets of Videoblogging by Michael Verdi, Ryanne Hodson, Diana Weynand and Shirley Craig
Videoblogging For Dummies by S. C. Bryant
Here is the one that Peter didn’t buy:
Hands-On Guide to Video Blogging and Podcasting : Emerging Media Tools for Business Communication