Author: vanevery

ZeD – Open Source Television


ZeD – Open Source Television
A very interesting television project being done by the CBC. Damn, I wish television in the US was as risk taking as it is in Canada and the UK.
From the site:
CBC Television’s late-night TV project, ZeD. ZeD is a launch pad for ideas, individuals and creative expression. It’s a blend of short films, micro-cinema, experimental works, performances by bands, poets, comics and choreographers, and – always – contributions from the audience.

an unmediated reconference.

It’s no secret that the unmediated crew is working on a conference on decentralized, “bottom-up” media to be held in NYC, either on it’s own in October or in conjunction with Eric Rice’s Blogcast somehow. The idea is to do a three-day conference with tracks that mimic the five major categories of unmediated posts, with the sessions mostly decided by us.

Now I’m wondering if what it’d be like if we programmed the conference more like a reblog instead. Workshop and panel proposals could be submitted as posts to your own blogs that we’d receive via your RSS feeds. Or better yet, we can pull it from either the Technorati or del.icio.us tag ‘unmediated-conference’ and we’ll post it to unmediated. From there we could start to filter proposals by either allowing other people to comment on it or maybe select the most linked to posts.

Obivously I’m still thinking this one through. I’ll bring it up to the rest of the crew this weekend.

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).

Movies were meant to be watched together.

Tryst: Home
WOW!!!
From the site:
Finally, high-quality streaming for the rest of us. Using Apple’s revolutionary Rendezvous technology, you can make your movies available on the network for everyone to watch together, or even password protect them for private showings. Broadcast family movies, student films, or class lectures without ever having to worry about multicast addresses, SLP announces, or port numbers: Tryst puts all the power of streaming at the touch of a button.