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February 27, 2005

What are these little video posts all about?

So, you may have noticed that I started posting little videos to this blog. I have always been interested in video blogging but could never find the time to create vlog posts on a regular basis. A couple of nights ago I couldn't sleep so I worked out a process to help me out.

Ingredients:
1 Cell Phone with Camera
1 Dedicated Email Account
1 Weblog
1 Unix Cron Utility
1 Perl Script
1 MT-Enclosures Plugin

Put it together:
So, I admit cell phones don't produce high quality video but what follows does work and can be somewhat decent especially considering how easy it is to post videos to your blog once it is setup.

You need a cell phone with a camera that takes video and can do MMS messaging and furthermore send MMS via email. Most modern cell phones have and can do all of the above. I am using both the Nokia 6820 and the Nokia 6630. Both models shoot video in 3GPP format a standard and therefore pretty via to a wide variety of media players.

On my phones, I simply shoot the video (and sometimes edit it on the 6630) and send it via Multimedia Messaging to a specific email address that I have setup for this purpose. Of course, I haven't yet received a bill for all of this from my phone service provider so I am not sure of the repercussions here but I hope it won't be prohibitively expensive to continue.

On my server, I utilize the above perl script (which I originally wrote for picture messages but have recently modified for video and automatic blog posting) run every minute via a cron job. If you take a look at the script, it utilizes the email subject for the blog post title and any text in the body of the message as the body of the blog post. Furthermore, it utilizes an embedded a QuickTime player set to the source of the video that is parsed from the email/MMS message.

Last, I did a slight modification to the MT-Enclosures plugin script so that it would automatically create RSS 2.0 enclosures with pointers to the 3GPP videos. This way folks who subscribe to my feed with ANT or another video aggregator will get my videos.

Here are the lines I added to the MT-Enclosures Plugin:

        elsif ( $url =~ /^.*\.3gp$/i )
        {
                $mime = 'video/3gpp';
        }

Right after the existing lines:

        elsif ( $url =~ /^.*\.png$/i )
        {
                $mime = 'image/png';
        }

Viola.. Automatic Video Blog Posts from my cell phone...
(These instructions are a bit incomplete, I know, but they should get you started on the right path. Also, if you have any mods or bug fixes for the perl script, please send'em to me).

Posted by vanevery at 04:01 PM

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Listed below are links to weblogs that reference What are these little video posts all about?:

» Video From 6680 and Treo 650 from This is Mobility
Here are two samples of video, one shot with the Nokia 6680 and the other with the Treo 650. Both are just shots of a few seconds of traffic out of the window at the office. The Nokia sample was shot with the back camera (the 1.3 megapixel one) using ... [Read More]

Tracked on June 17, 2005 12:54 PM

Comments

Posted by: Dave at July 21, 2005 11:16 AM

Posted by: shawn at July 21, 2005 11:57 AM