CNN has presented a unique
and powerful UI for viewing
and navigating the video of one of the recent Presidential
debates. Aside from having done a great job presenting the
transcript alongside the video (with appropriate
click-to-play-from-here functionality), as well as a table-of-contents
by topic; CNN has created
a unique "map" of the debate, allowing a user to single out a
moment, a particular speaker, or the restuls of a search by spoken word
in a brillaint, graphical display.
It's one of the finest
examples of this kind of thing that I've seen. I'd love to
know if anyone has thoughts about other situations in which this kind
of interface could really add value. The cost would be an
issue - transcripts are expensive, as is massaging a transcript into
the descriptive XML required for this tool. Automation using
tools like the Virage
VideoLogger and Pictron's
Audio Gateway can identify speakers and generate text from
speech - the accuracy would certainly be far less than what CNN has
done here, but for some purposes, would it be "good enough"?
Download: A 13MB
download, but no questions asked and no prompting for personal info
Installation: At
about 80 seconds on my MacBook Pro (WinXP under Parallels), still not
zippy, but it asked just a few simple questions about configuration on a single screen. Much simpler than prior versions.
Loading: Loads up
quickly - much more quickly than older RealPlayers. Feels
fast. The UI still includes tabs for managing your media
library, looking at the RealGuide, etc. But interestingly,
the RealGuide, rather than be full of links to teenybopper pop
stars, is full of links to top content on YouTube, Metacafe, and the
like.
Downloading video from the Web:
Of course, the feature everyone's talking about, RP11 adds a "Download
This" link to videos that appear on any Web site with video.
Shown is a screenshot showing the button added to a
Brightcove page:
Clicking the
download button gets you a
download manager that resembles Firefox's download manager.
Videos
go into your video
library in their native format -- no conversions or
obfuscating file names -- it's just there in plain view in the home
directory (\My Documents\My Videos\RealPlayer Downloads by default)
One
interesting thing about RP11 is what it will not download:
RTMP
Streaming Flash video (from a Flash Media Server or equivalent) will
not download. Only HTTP-delivered FLV will work.
DRM-protected
video will not download.
The built-in "Share This"
button on RealPlayer sends a link to the original video content.
All
in all, I found that RP11 downloads video successfully from a
wide variety of sites, including YouTube, Metacafe,
Brightcove, CNN and others. My first "cannot record this" hit
came from Harvard@Home's Human
Systems Explorer site, which uses true Flash rtmp streaming
from Akamai.
Not a bad first impression.
Some things need further exploration. For example, I
haven't yet found out how to hide, when the player first opens, the
window that shows the RealGuide, the Library, and other stuff that's
not "just the video, please". Maybe this fits with Real's
apparent strategy to make the standalone player into a good media
download/management center and leave the embedded player for "video only" uses. I'll post more info as I learn
more.
Real
Networks' newest RealPlayer player appears to be a huge departure from
their earlier client-side products. While the Helix server
technology and the RealVideo codecs have been ones-to-beat in streaming
media technology, the RealPlayer has been the face of the
company
to the user community - and it hasn't always been a pretty face.
Real's marketing folks, in the heat of their battle for
survival
with Microsoft, saw RealPlayer as a the company's direct pipeline to
users' pocketbooks.
Let's face it - the
RealPlayer,
despite its technological excellence (SMIL 1.0 & 2.0,
universal format support, the
industry's best codecs, and support for
nearly every OS and browser out there) became an abomination - big
heavy download, cumbersome registration required, ads and eye candy all
over the place, "notifications" that pop up and annoy with marketing
messages.
Fast-forward to today -- In the new world
of the Web,
Flash is taking over because its player is everywhere and its user
experience is simple, unmarred by distractions, and an easy download in
the unlikely case you need it. I've even been able to install
the Flash player
using Firefox's
XPI Flash installer - no UI whatsoever, just one click and
it's in.
So
with many of Real's remaining customers (there are many, especially in
the higher-education industry) avidly looking for alternatives
to RealPlayer, and Real rapidly
approaching irrelevance in the video technology space, RealNetworks has
come up with a new approach. Real's new player (RealPlayer 11) boasts
two major innovations:
The player is small
and unobtrusive, with a quick, easy install that asks no
questions, takes over nothing, and generally leaves you alone.
In
what could be a stunning new capability, RP11 will download
non-DRM-protected video from any website, in any format (Flash. Real,
QuickTime, WindowsMedia, etc). While you're watching that
video on YouTube, Google,
Metacafe, Brightcove, or anywhere else, RP11 will add a little "save
this" button to the video itself.
The idea is that RealPlayer becomes the base of your personal video
library. You can share (by sending around links to the original
source), or with a $30 upgrade, burn to DVD disc. Presumably, one of
these options will let you easily flip content to your iPod.
There's a pretty good video
demo given by Real VP Jeff Chasen at Scobleizer.com.
Now aside from the obvious idea
that content owners may revolt at the idea of people being able to save
their content whether they want them to or not, I just don't see the
value to RealNetworks in a new player. Why offer it?
And I think the bigger question is, do we really need more players in
the industry? Isn't it already hard enough for consumers? How many more
players and plugins are we going to try and force viewers to have to
download?
The new RealPlayer gives the
users lots of control over Internet video -- watching it offline,
burning it to CD or DVDs, storing it in a library, etc. Sharing content
links directly from the RealPlayer library can be really useful. A
number of people who’ve tested the pre-beta have told me that they love
watching a few seconds of a video on a web site, then using RealPlayer
to download a copy for later viewing.
My take?
Looking at the education industry, up to now I see a large
investment in Real's technology that's been feeling more and more like
a liability, strictly because of the horrendous RealPlayers of
the RealONE/RP10 generation. Folks are looking at
costly switches to Flash video infrastructure not because the video or
server technology is so great, but mainly because the player has
mindshare and doesn't do anything to piss-off its users.
So,
if Real's new player is something that a) is a no-brainer to install
and use; and b) provides truly useful functionality on top of
the enormous-and-growing world of online video content, it may just
become relevant again to online users. And that's good for Real's
existing customers, for sure. How that helps Real acquire new
paying customers isn't clear to me, but I'd guess that anything that
makes RealPlayer more relevant in the marketplace has to be a good
first step.
Is Amazon's S3 the cheapest streaming video hosting out there?
While researching CDNs for storage and delivery of digital video, I
found that at least one major user-generated video
website provider is using Amazon's S3 service for delivery of
Flash video over HTTP. For http delivery of lots of clips on-demand, S3
is apparently doing the job. The costs are astonishingly low:
$0.15/GB stored per month
$0.18/GB delivered (or less)
A look at Dan Rayburn's recent blog post listing
streaming CDN
vendors shows some of the streaming heavyweights, with broad
networks
of origin and edge servers optimized for real-time media delivery.
Akamai, for example, pre-caches media content close to the
network's edges, making videos load quicker. For a site that's
advertising-funded, fast loading pages can lead to more page views,
which equals more revenue.
But, S3 is an option I hadn't thought of for online video.
There's no support for the RTMP or RTSP streaming protocols,
but many sites are just fine with HTTP download delivery these days. (Streaming
vs. Downloading - What's the Difference?) While it
may not be optimized around realtime delivery, it certainly
offers unlimited scalability at rock-bottom prices. And
options like its rich developer API and BitTorrent integration
could be an asset to a comprehensive media delivery strategy.
It's certainly an option worth looking at.
Image, Audio & Video Search - Reading Content and Context
In his article, Improving
Image Search, Harvard's Michael Hemment writes about a
research project at UC San Diego that uses
human-generated sample data to train an engine that analyses
images to extract searchable metadata.
Supervised
Multiclass Labeling (SML), automatically analyses the content of
images, compares it to various “learned” objects
and classes, and then assigns searchable labels or keywords to the
images. SML can also be used to identify content and generate keywords
for different parts of the same image.
This is an interesting topic. I'm reminded of several related topics --
all involved in extracting useful metadata from binary media objects :
The Music Genome Project and their Pandora site. Uses
human-generated metadata to describe the music, but using fields very
similar in concept to the data in VIA or the seed data used in
SML.
Using OCR tools to identify and index text that appears in
an image. Google's Orcopus
project is an open-source way to do this, although commercial products
like Pictron
do it for images and video.
Speech-recognition on audio/video content is similarly a
way to try to index the otherwise opaque contents of a binary media
file. What's odd is how little use this has gotten in the real world,
even though the technology has been around for quite some years.
I read somewhere on the web recently, (can't recall the source) the
correct observation that hugely popular video sites like YouTube are built on
making video findable by using very primitive metadata combined with
the all-important context. Who else likes this?
What else has this person created/bookmarked/shared? What comments and
tags have users applied? All have turned out to be far more useful than
a full transcript or speech-recognition search.
One burning question for me is, why is searching inside a PDF massively
useful, but searching inside a video just doesn't quite hit the mark?
What's holding video or image searching back? Is it
the quality of the metadata we extract and index? Does video simply contain
less information density (in its transcript) than a written article (i.e. have you ever read the transcript of a half-hour program, only to realize that you can read/skim it in less than 3 minutes?)? Or do
people simply use these kinds of assets differently than they do
text-based documents, so different rules and benefits apply when
searching?
Dan Rayburn points out in his Business
of Online Video blog that streaming video isn't a Web 2.0
technology. But while Dan's point is that streaming video
has been around way too long to be considered part of the Web
2.0 "fad", I think the relationship between video and Web 2.0 is more
complicated than that.
The key ingredient of "Web 2.0" technologies that makes them worthy of
that label is that they have open APIs and are freeform
platforms that allow user behavior to define and create value.
Harvard
Business School professor Andrew McAfee says it well...
...the use of technology
platforms that are initially freeform (meaning that they don't specify
up front roles, identities, workflows, or interdependencies) and
eventually emergent (meaning that they come over time to contain
patterns and structure that can be exploited by their
members). Email is a channel, not a platform; groupware is
not freeform and typically not emergent; and knowledge management
systems were essentially the opposite of freeform -- they
presupposed the structure of the knowledge they were meant to
capture.
...so, to build a Web 2.0 service, Andy says,
Build platforms, not channels
Make sure they're initially freeform
Build in mechanisms for emergence. These
mechanisms include links, tags, powerful search...
...and, I'd add, simple APIs for combining and syndicating content from
one site to another. Sites like YouTube are on the edge of
Web 2.0 because of the ease with which users can publish their content
not just to YouTube, but to other sites. Web 2.0
facilitates video mashups: videos can be embedded across
sites, search results can be published as RSS, users can "mash-up"
collections of video with photos from Flickr and maps from Google or
Yahoo.
But, Dan's right - video isn't really Web 2.0 enough, yet. As
Microsoft's Jon
Udell points out,
The kinds of standard
affordances that we take for granted on the textual web —
select, copy, reorganize, link, paste — are missing in action
on the audio-visual web. The lack of such affordances in our current
crop of (mostly) proprietary media players suggests that open source
and open standards can help move things along. But nobody in the open
world or in the proprietary world has really figured out what those
affordances need to be in the first place.
Standard ways to search within video, associate a video timeline with
other media, and deep-link into video content simply don't exist.
RealPlayer and WindowsMedia always did offer a way to deep
link using start parameters in the .ram or .asx file URLs, but the
endless variety of custom Flash video players (since there isn't really
an official, usable "standard" one) means that even that simple method
is no longer available on most sites. And as for search --
while web search engines crawling into a Word document or a PDF file is
routine, video content search hasn't caught on, even though the
technology, from (the defunct) Virage,
Streamsage
(now part of Comcast) , Pictron,
Podzinger,
and others, has been around for years.
So, Online Video 2.0 is yet to be born - while video is a part of the
Web 2.0 ecosystem that generates value from unscripted user behavior on
freeform platforms, it's not yet ready to BE one of those freeform
platforms.
Article
on embedded event triggers in media files - Again, an old
one. Security changes in browsers have made some of these
examples not work right anymore without some tweaking. But
the basic embedding technique is still valid for simple things like
loading a new URL into another frame. .
Free Akamai best practices gujides: (BTW, I wrote
these. Akamai requests your contact info to download. they
only ask once and you get unlimited, perpetual access to all the
whitepapers.)
Flash video is great for users, but the player lacks easy, built-in
features Web developers have come to expect. But now, Jeroen Wijering
has developed the full-featured Flash
Video Player 3.6 which finally makes all the
features of a "real" video player available to Web
developers using Flash video on their sites.
The standard video players - RealPlayer, Quicktime and WindowsMedia -
all have APIs that help make it easy to embed interactive video onto a
Web page. The major video platforms provided simple run-time
customization capabilities that developers have come to expect from
video platforms. By setting values in either the web page or
the metafile (.ram, .asx, .qtl), you could accomplish a lot:
support for metafiles that can be generated on-the-fly
playlists
background colors and logos
captioning
control over the appearance of the player controls
fullscreen mode
autostart and repeat behavior
Naturally, if you are a Flash developer, you can make a player
that handles all of this. Indeed, unless you're simply
hard-coding an .flv URL into the stock Flash video player, you have to do
Flash development to make a more capable player. Jeroen's
Flash Video Player 3.6 solves all that. With an elegant API
that works through metafiles or FlashVars, you can customize the
playback experience without having to do a lick of Flash development.
What's more, a full Javascript
API includes controls (playlist navigation, play/pause, scrub
and seek, volume control, and movie loading), Javascript
callbacks, and metadata extraction.
This player covers all the important bases in terms of the
video player capabilities Web developers need, and makes publishing
Flash video as easy as publishing Real, QT or Windows Media.
It's distributed under a Creative
Commons License, free for non-commercial use, and nearly free
for commercial use.
The folks at Read/WriteWeb have put together a terrific Online
Video Industry Index that provides a snapshot of the current
online video marketplace. It's not about hardware or software
vendors, like Sorenson,
Accordent, or
Adobe, but rather
sums up the online services space very well. This
list breaks the industry down into categories that include Video
Sharing, Video Search, Video Editing & Creation, Video
eCommerce, Video Streaming, and others.
I've been working in this space a lot lately, and have worked with many
of the providers on this list, including some as-yet little-known ones.
While the authors disclaim the index as "not complete", to my
eye it looks pretty comprehensive. One useful addition would be Sorenson Media, which is getting into the space with its Squishnet video management service.
This is a great resource. In particular, many of the vendors in this index, as well as being consumer-oriented destinations for video, offer enterprise services and developer APIs that let companies and educational institutions build custom, branded video services on hosted infrastructure. Because of this, the consumer video Web is relevant far beyond the entertainment focus that's driving its growth.
Flash streaming encoding settings - what are sites like YouTube doing? (and how can you find out?)
I'm trying to do something simple - find out the codec and bitrate
information for Flash FLV videos found on the Web. In
RealPlayer, the "Statistics" menu option reveals everything you need to
know, and shows even more if you launch it in "Debug" mode (holding the
crtl-shift keys as you select 'Statistics" from the menu).
WindowsMedia provides similar info if you select "Properties"
while it's playing. But Flash? You're out of luck
unless you do some extra work.
My solution may not be the slickest one, but it's one I could work out
in a
few minutes of Googling around. You need two things:
First, a tool to download the FLV file to your local system
so you can open it with a program that will expose the technical
details you want.
A program that analyzes the clip and outputs the codec and
bitrate details of the file.
Stumbling around, I found two options for downloading:
The Firefox extension Video
Downloader. This grabs embedded media from a page
and saves it locally. For video, it only works if the video
is delivered via http download (not streaming).
A Windows tool called WM Recorder 11.
This one hooks into your TCP/IP stack to automatically record
any streaming content coming to your computer, including rtsp, mms, and
rtmp streams. As a stream recorder, it's a very cool new option in
addition to the
old standby I wrote about in 2003, Cucusoft's
StreamDown[buy].
For examining the contents of a file,
Moyea
FLV Converter[buy] seems to be the best one of those I
tried for extracting all the information from files encoded with both
the H.263/Spark and On2 VP6 codecs.
Some interesting findings?
YouTube, Metacafe, and Google are all doing Flash 7 -
Sorenson Spark via http download. Spark, based on H.263 isn't
so great by today's standards, which explains why video on these sites
often looks so bad. On the other hand it is compatible with Flash 7,
making the installed base of players close to 100%. It can also be encoded from a command-line (or
from website code) using free or open-source tools like ffmpeg and Riva. Some
video/audio bitrates I sampled are:
YouTube - 240kbps/64kbps
Google - 282kbps/64kbps
Metacafe - 330kbps/48kbps
Brightcove is rtmp streaming using the excellent Flash 8
VP6 codec, bitrates range from 308k/64k to 640k/96k.
Feedroom (responsible for video news sites like New York Times
and USAToday
is using rtmp streaming, but it's using another level of indirection in
its site that makes its streams not capturable by WMRecorder.
Disclosure: Some of the links above are affiliate links. Any of the pennies that trickle in from purchases of these products from these links will help support the ongoing costs of maintaining this site.
Which Web video format is the best? Which encoding tool is the best
one? Which tools handle high-action video best?
If part of your job involves encoding digital video
for Web
delivery, you must read streamingmedia.com's research reports on codecs
and encoders. Some of the key points are summarized
in Jan Ozer's
article, Choosing
a Codec. Some highlights for me:
RealVideo is the best overall codec of all the tested
choices, and became the benchmark against the others were compared.
Differerent codecs were best at handling each combination
of encoding bitrate and content type (e.g. talking head vs. sports
video)
Some tools encode some formats and content types
exceptionally well, while doing a poor job on others.
VBR (variable bitrate) won't always offer an improvement
over CBR (constant bitrate), even for high-motion content.
Although I've been a contributing editor to streamingmedia.com and have
friends there, I have no financial interest in these reports. I just
think there's awfully helpful!
User-Generated Media - Challenges & Solutions for Business and Academia
Social networking and user-generated content (UGC) sites present unique
technical challenges, which lead to unique business challenges.
While unexpected growth is a potential problem for any online
site, it is both the holy
grail and (in the spirit of "be careful what you wish for") a ticking
time bomb for social networking sites.
User-generated content sites are the fastest-growing
category of web site (by unique visitors) on the Net, showing, in some
cases, triple digit year-over-year growth. Of the ten fastest growing
web brands, five are UGC sites (for example, Flickr and
Wikipedia).
Social networking/UGC sites have, by definition,
unpredictable storage and bandwidth needs, making technical
infrastructure (and therefore, budget and capital expense) planning a
crap shoot. Outsourced capacity on-demand is an important
option to consider before you're faced with site-crippling runaway
success.
Success is tied closely to having a fast innovation cycle
-- try stuff out, see how it works for your users.
Continually sense-and-respond to user needs to find that sweet spot of
simplicity, functionality, and sustainability that makes your site
sticky and social. One way to do this is to minimize the time
and effort you put into infrastructure build-out and put it into more
creative endeavors.
If you're an ad-driven site, performance is directly tied
to revenue, as faster loading pages keep eyeballs on the site, lead to
more page views per user, and therefore register more ad impressions.
When Friendster moved to Akamai's delivery network in March
2006, they saw an immediate
33% decrease in page load times, and a threefold
uptick in page views.
Even for an educational institution, outsourcing certain infrastructure
is appealing. With service-oriented Web APIs, it can be
easier now to work with a vendor/partner than it is to build it myself.
If I want to put up a quick video recording/encoding/sharing
service for my users, I can:
Build it myself - not always a bad idea, and definitely a
quick-and-dirty solution for a pilot or proof-of-concept, provided I
have to staff and the time to move it from P-O-C to production-ready if
the need arises.
Acquire and deploy an inexpensive product. I was
surprised to find YouTube clones like Clip'Share
and Altrasoft
VideoShare for a few hundred bucks or less. Again -
good for a proof-of-concept. May or may not offer enough for
coping with real success.
Use a Web Service API like that from Video Egg or JumpCut
to handle all the media operations, while you focus just on your
website. These services handle media input (in the case of
Video Egg, from webcam and cell phone, as well as file upload).
transcoding, online editing and delivery. It can provide a
platform for rapid development of your own custom solutions,
as well as a scalable solution in case your solution takes off.
I'm generally a big fan of institutions building their media solutions
in-house, but the combination of the unpredictable needs of
user-generated media, the ease and excellence of some of the vendor
service-based APIs, and the need to be able to innovate quickly without
up-front investment in big infrastructure creates some interesting
possibilities.
The Akamai white paper, Successful Social Networking and
User-Generated-Content Applications: What You Need to Know, (which, by
the way, I wrote) addresses some other challenges of social and UGC
sites -- how edge-caching works with dynamic content, how to control
costs when growth is unpredictable, options for exercising editorial
control over UGC sites, and some examples of how social networking is
being used by businesses to build revenue and create new opportunities.
The challenge of effective eLearning is finding ways to leverage the
medium that simply can't be equaled in solely traditional teaching environments.
Can students learn better from online-instruction than from
in-person instruction? One example pointed out to me was the
wildly different experience of listening to a string quartet
play live in a real space as compared to listening to the
radio or even a CD on a good audio system. Does the presence,
energy, acoustic power, and ambiance of that live performance extend
through the electronic realm? Sort of, but it's just not the
same. Would you willingly deny anyone the option of the
in-person experience without good reason?
To me, the alternate example is the professional football
game. Sure, sitting at the top section of a stadium with
85,000 of your closest friends is a social experience with an
energy that's hard to beat; but for actually watching a game,
nothing beats a TV (even a small one) with instant replay, close-ups of
the action, and that bright yellow line that marks the yardage for a
first down.
Which led me to this: The challenge for eLearning and
distance education is to identify the "yellow lines" of the medium --
those things that represent something inherently valuable but simply
not possible in the traditional-teaching realm. Maybe
eLearning's real advantage will remain rooted in the fact not that it
competes with in-person teaching, but that it allows learning where
in-person teaching is not possible or practical. But I think
there's also some "yellow-line" capabilities waiting to be explored,
even where educational technology supports (rather than supplants)
in-person learning.
One example of a genuinely new and interesting capability is
the digital
pen note-taking integration done by Tegrity in their
classroom capture system. I've long been a user of Logitech's
digital pen. The pen allows you to write on special
notebook paper, and captures everything you write to your computer as a
perfect digital image of the page you wrote. You can print
pages, share them via email, as well as add text and drawing
to the page in the computer, making pages indexable and searchable.
What Tegrity has done is to tie the
note-taking with the digital pen to the timeline of the video/slides
(marketing demo video) captured during a live
lecture. Students who took notes during the class can, at
their own PCs, bring up their notes on-screen alongside the lecture
video. The lecture video, the instructor's notes, and the student's
notes all become part of a synchronized presentation. Notes
can go from being a one-shot chance to get the main points down
(sometimes at the expense of really listening) to being a guide to
review and further exploration. I don't know if it will
transform teaching and learning, but it struck me as an example of a
stunningly clever and useful application of technology to do something
that was previously quite impossible.
There's a lot of activity in researching the effect of these
technologies. One interesting study is Lonnie Harvel's
dissertation Using
Student-Generated Notes as an Interface to a Digital Repository
(pdf). Harvel explores the surprisingly low use of
digital repositories in education by experimenting with methods to
integrate lectures, student notes, and external resources in
deeply integrated ways.
What's new about this is that it's all done over the Web.
Tools like Apple's
iMovie or Final
Cut Pro, Adobe
Premiere,Avid
Liquid or Pinnacle
Studio and others are more powerful, sure. But
being able to do this on the Web from any computer at any time, with no
software to buy or install, is very cool.
That got me to wondering about the engines behind these sites -- is it
all custom code or are there vendors developing and separately selling
parts of these solutions? My initial digging around didn't answer
that question, but it led me to one rather simple, but very interesting
video manipulation tool called VideoScript.
Available on Windows and MacOS, VideoScript is a free tool that lets
you write simple Basic-like code that manipulates, analyzes, assembles
and edits video. Record time-lapse movies, detect motion in
video frames, subtract backgrounds, extract keyframes, blend and
composite frames...it's all here and it's
suprisingly simple to do. It's not entirely
bug-free - I found that my own first script, which extracts keyframes
from a QuickTime movie (based on diff'ing frames and extracting as a
JPG any frame that differs more than 25% with its predecessor) and
writes an HTML page to look at them, tended to hang the program upon
completion. But it's a neat tool and sheds some light on how
folks who aren't Google or Yahoo can do some Web-based video
manipulation of their own.
set frame_count to (length of m) - 1;
set new_movie to movie;
set keyIndex to 0;
set keyFrame to m[0];
set n to 0;
set i to 1;
set myHTML to "><html><head><title>Video Keyframe Extraction with VideoScript</title></head><body><br><br>";
repeat frame_count times increment i
begin
set currentFrame to m[i];
set diff to Math.Difference(currentFrame, keyFrame);
if (diff > 0.25) then
begin
set n to n+1;
append keyFrame to new_movie;
set file "frame"+n+".jpg" to keyFrame;
set myHTML to myHTML + "<img src='frame"+n+".jpg' style='border: 4px grey outset;width: 90px; height: 70px;'>\n";
set keyIndex to i;
set keyFrame to m[i];
end
end
set file "keyframes.html" to myHTML as text;
set file "keyframes_only.mov" to new_movie;
With Apple's firmware release 1.2 for the video iPod (5G), one
significant video playback bug has been fixed. When
conducting research for the Akamai
whitepaper, Creating & Delivering Podcasts & Other
Downloadable Media, I found a
critical iPod video bug related to playback of lengthy H.264
files on the 60GB iPod (the 30GB model was not affected). The problem was that video files
larger than about 100MB which were not created with QuickTime Pro
(Sorenson, ffmpeg-based encoders, and others all suffered from the
problem) would play fine under iTunes on the desktop, but on the iPod
they'd play for about 30 seconds, stall for a moment, then continue to
play without audio.
With the 1.2 firmware update, files that previously did not play
correctly are now working. Apple's Release Notes for the
update are vague (and, apparently, impossible to find again after
seeing them once) so it's not clear exactly what else was fixed. I've not done exhaustive testing to see if there are circumstances in which videos will not play, but the specific failure conditions I identified previously have been resolved.
Creating & Delivering Podcasts & Other Downloadable Media
A
new white paper from Akamai, Creating
& Delivering Podcasts & Other Downloadable Media,
tells you (nearly) everything you need to know to create, encode, and
publish
podcasts. Not just a basic "how-to" on podcasting, this paper
explains the real details of codecs, formats, and gotcha's for
delivering audio and video podcasts. Akamai
has deep
knowledge of storing and distributing digital media. I was surprised to
see how easy it is to replicate your digital media across Akamai's Edge
distribution network (my own subdomain, media.learningapi.com, lives on
the Akamai network). Akamai knows that it's good for them to
help people do
more with digital media. In turn, white papers like this are good for
everyone who wants to know more, whether they
are Akamai customers or not.
The paper includes details on the differences between the
different (and incompatible) flavors of MPEG4, the best way
to encode podcasts and vodcasts for the Creative
Zen Vision and Sony
PSP as
well as the ubiquitous iPod, some player bugs (even the iPod
has 'em) you need to know about, maintaining RSS feeds, and even
creating downloadable media for "alternative" devices like the TiVo and
XBox. The article also includes quick-start directions for
using Sorenson
Squeeze for all your encoding
needs, and of course, how to leverage
Akamai's distribution network for handling the storage needs and load
that podcasting can generate.
I should note that I wrote this paper. I think the value-add
of articles like
this lies in describing the difference between how it's supposed to
work, and how it really does work. As is usually the case,
when researching
this piece I came across numerous technical procedures
and processes that are supposed to be straightforward, but that don't
really work as documented (or that simply aren't documented in one
place where you need it). As such, this paper, while brief,
reflects the way it really works and will hopefully save some people
a bunch of that "figuring it out" time!
While building out the podcasting features of the Videotools
Media
Content Mangement system for Harvard Business School,
we were trying to
figure the simplest way to do a "one-click" RSS subscription for
iTunes users. Before we explored it, we had
some open questions: do you have to register you feed with the
iTunes podcast directory for it to work? Will it work without
complicated client-side Javascript? With all the "iTunes U" university stuff out there
( proprietary as it is), will a
totally standards-based RSS feed work?
Turns out that it's easier than we expected, although surprisingly,
there were few documented examples on the Web showing how
simple it really is.
To make a one-click iTunes subscription link, just link the RSS feed
from your Website using a URL with the protocol prefix itpc://
So, a one-click iTunes subscription link to a
podcast would look like this:
itpc://www.learningapi.com/rss/podcast.xml
That's all there is to it. No registration
required, no Javascript, nothing special. This will not enter your feed into the iTunes Music Store's directory, so you won't get rankings, etc from iTunes. For our purposes, which are really intranet-oriented podcasts, we don't want publicity beyond our own user population, so that's a bonus. When a
user who has iTunes installed clicks this link, it will automatically
subscribe them to the RSS feed as an iTunes podcast. While it
was tempting to explore many of the other RSS one-click options
(noticing the Odeo and PodNova options on my local
NPR station), we determined that
for our users, offering a one-click for iTunes along with a
plain RSS link for manual copy/paste was the sweet spot of user choice
and simplicity.
One other nice touch that's become common for making RSS feeds more
friendly to new users - if you click
on the RSS feed link (for either
podcast or simple RSS news feeds), it's
styled in the browser using XSL,
so that it's human-readable, with some helpful instructions for what to
do next.
My prior post on the
travails of podcasting, MPEG4, and supporting multiple devices
detailed the differences between MPEG4 as it's supported by three of
the most popular portable digital media devices: the iPod, the Creative
Zen Vision, and the Sony PSP. After further exploration, I've
learned a few new things.
MPEG4
Woes
The MPEG4 format supported by the PSP is structurally the same
as the iPod format: MPEG4 H.264 (AVC) w/ AAC audio. For some reason that escapes me, Sony
employs a customized header within the file that makes it look
different -- and incompatible. To get an iPod-format MPEG4 to
play on a PSP, you have to either convert the file using software like
the free PSP
Video 9 or Sony's own PSP Media Manager; or use a utility that is supposed to flip the header bits: AtomChanger.
I didn't have any luck making AtomChanger work, but truthfully, I
didn't spend a lot of time working at it.
Podcasting For podcasts, PSP Media Manager software is excellent and makes it easy for the user. Although Sony sells it separately, it
should be included with the device, in my opinion. It handles
RSS subscriptions, automatically does any file format conversions
necessary for the PSP, also manages photos, music and games on the device, and makes the process seamless for the user.
Alternatively, PSP Video 9 combined with Videora
provides a no-cost, although less seamless, solution for podcasting and
file conversions.
For those of us producing podcast content for these devices,
I think the best answer is still to encode for the iPod.
Audio, of course, should be MP3 - then you support everyone.
For video, software like PSP Video 9 and PSP Media Manager mean that PSP
users can use the same media that iPod users can. But if
you're looking to deliver video content directly online to PSP Web
surfers (see the next paragraph), you'll need to provide MPEG4 files in the PSP
format.
PSP for Browsing the Web
The Sony PSP is a fine wireless Web device in its own
right.
It took me about ten minutes to get it up and running on my
home WiFi network
(802.11g), complete with WEP authentication. The internal Web
browser is
adequate, although the way you "type" text (a URL, for
example) on the
device is clunky. You can surf the Web, and download audio and video files directly to the device.
MPEG4 format madness - iPod and Creative Zen Vision and Sony PSP
In the process of trying to figure out video podcasting
(vodcasting) for the most popular portable devices (ipods,
Creative Zen Vision, and Sony PSP), I've discovered that MPEG4 as it's
supported in the real world is a mess of incompatibilities.
In my streamingmedia.com
article on interactive MPEG4 authoring
a few years ago, I noted that interactivity in the MPEG4 spec was not
really implemented by any major vendor. Now I see
that almosr three years later, even the basic video codec profiles are
not supported in a meaningful way.
I've been trying to find the codec/format combination that will work on
an iPod, a Creative Zen Vision, and a Sony PSP. All
of these purport to support MPEG4.
iPod
handles MPEG4 SP and AVC in an .mp4 container
Creative Zen Vision
handles MPEG4 SP, but only in an AVI container. Leading tools
like Sorenson don't even bother to support this archaic
variant. I might as well use the WM format's better
compression and drop MPEG4 from the process.
Sony PSP
- I've just ordered one for testing, but in advance of its arrival,
I've already noticed that the .mp4 AVC files that Google Video makes
available for the PSP are different than the .mp4 AVC files they make
available for the iPod. And tests reveal that the
PSP-targeted file will not play on an iPod.
I guess I thought there'd be more support for common
standards in 2006 than there was in 2003. When I'm done
testing, I'll post the recommendations on what codecs/formats will work
on most of the popular devices. Seems that no one has really
tried 'em all (and written about it) from the content publisher's
perspective - "what's the simplest process for supporting the most
users?"
If you publish video destined for the iPod, you should know that there's a problem with the iPod 60GB
Firmware Version 1.1 that affects playback of some H.264
videos. I found this myself when I had encoded a
SageTV-recorded episode of Battlestar Galactica. My son
popped it over to his 30GB iPod where it worked fine. I moved
a copy to my 60GB iPod, and found that it would play for about
30seconds, and then begin to skip and drop audio.
Anyway, a little sniffing around reveals that very large H.264 files
(over 100MB) that are encoded with some third-party MPEG encoders (the
problem does not affect encodes using Quicktime Pro). A
discussion on FEWL.net
summarizes the condition:
This problem only seems to
affect the 5G 60Gb iPod
There have been no reports
of this problem occurring on the 5G 30Gb iPod
The problem does not occur
with content purchased from iTunes
The problem does not occur
with content encoded with QuickTime and/or iTunes.
The problem only seems to
occur with large video files (in excess of 100Mb)
The
problem seems to occur most frequently with content encoded with
Videora on PC, although other applications have shown this problem as
well.
There have been few to no
reports of this problem occurring for Mac users encoding with Handbrake.
Turns out that both Videora and the utility I used to convert the
SageTV MPEG2 file to an H.264 are based on the open-source
ffmpeg encoder. Other
encoders may be affected as well, so be sure to test your longer-format
video on the 60GB iPod/Firmware 1.1. Apparently, one
workaround is to open an affected file with Quicktime Pro and re-export
it as H.264.
User-Driven Innovation in Television - the creative ecosystem around SageTV
Want to slip TV programs over to your iPod (or other portable media
viewer) automatically? Read on...
PC Magazine last month published a feature called TV
Transformed -
Watch Anytime, Anywhere, on Any Device.
It's a great piece on the options now available for digital
distribution and consumption of TV and video content. One
solution they didn't
cover in their article is called SageTV.
In the process of getting ready
to buy a new home computer for the family, I'd done some research on
Windows Media Center Edition and found the presence of DRM restrictions
on recorded content to be unnecessary and unacceptable.
I ended up deciding on Sage
TV,
bundled with the Haupaugge PVR350 video tuner
card. SageTV is like
Tivo, but runs on your computer. It's got all the usual
Personal Video Recorder (PVR) features, like interactive program guide,
recording of individual shows or whole seasons, recording things it
think you might like, and pause/instant replay of live TV.
The hardware includes a remote control and audio/video outputs that let
you
use your computer like a TV and your TV like a computer - but that's
just the tip of the iceberg.
The delightful thing about SageTV is that it's architected to be a
platform for user innovation. It comes with a set
of published APIs
for everything from controlling it via command-line
scripts to full Java and native C/C# APIs for customizing the system or
writing your own applications. A wide range of tools and
utilities have sprung up around SageTV as users leverage the power an
open platform gives them. The development community
has a wiki
and busy discussion
forums where users and
developers share ideas, code, and tips.
For example, Geoff Gerhardt at the InveterateDIY
Blog
has created Sage-To-iPod, a
terrific utility that will automatically take your chosen selection of
recorded TV programming, convert it to MPEG4/H.264 and sync it to
your iPod. Now you can go to bed early and still
get The Daily Show
on your iPod in time for the morning commute on the train.
There are other examples: the UI tweaks on the Ruel.net
PC-TV page, or these custom
modules to tie in imdb.com movie
lookup, RSS feeds, or control SageTV via a web interface.
And of course, anything you record can be burned to DVD.
I know there are other options - including the open source MythTV.
On the scale of effort required to get up and
running, MythTV requires more of an investment in time than many people
are willing to make. The sweet spot for me is that SageTV combined the
ease of a commercial product with the open interfaces and invitation to
tinker that makes good software great.
Moving audio around - from CD to PC to MP3 to iPod - is an simple task,
with lots of free tools to make it easy. This week, I needed
something to get one of my DVDs over to my iPod, and found
one useful tool - Cucusoft DVD to iPod Converter [download
link - 5.4MB]. [Drag the slider to enlarge the screenshot] - [details on this]
It's
a super-easy way to rip a DVD into iPod-compatible MP4, H.264 at up to
768 Kbps or MPEG4 at up to 2.5 Mbps. Options for various
input and output formats let you choose details about the audio
downsampling, frame rates, codecs, how aspect ratio is handled, and
more. On my 2.2GHz Pentium 4 laptop, conversion is slightly
slower than real-time, and the output looks great.
Cucusoft's iPod Video Converter [download link - 4.3MB]
does the same to-iPod
video conversions, but from a variety of sources, including AVI, MPEG,
Windows Media, RealVideo, DivX, and others.
Each product retails for $29.95, but the two are available as a "suite"
for $39.95 [download
link - iPod Video Converter Suite 7.1MB].
The downloadable trial versions are fully
functional, but leave a "Trial Version" watermark on the converted
video image.
I haven't done an exhaustive review of products available in this
category, but in a pinch, the Cucusoft toolset was exactly what I
needed to get the job done with little ramp-up time and minimal effort.
I recommend giving it a try.
[Disclosure - the download links on this page are affiliate
links. If you register the software by clicking "Upgrade" from
one of these downloads, a small payment will go to help support this
website.]
Jon's got a workable solution going with shell scripts, mplayer and
lame on his Mac OSX system. His screencast
of making it work is terrific.
I've done the same thing - it was my primary use of my iPod
even before podcasting was in broad use. For me, it was trying to
listen to a streaming National Public Radio
program in the bustle of the workplace that caused me to want to
time-shift the interview--record it, slip it over to my iPod, and let
it entertain my evening commute.
My process was just about as clunky, but it worked: my streamingmedia.com
article on Stream Recorders
reviews Streamdown - give it the URL to a SMIL, RAM, or ASX
file and it will promptly retrieve all the media files to your
desktop. Then I'd use RM To MP3
Converter from Boilsoft to
convert to something my iPod can deal with. And finally, as
the third step, use iTunes to sync the file to the iPod. For a while, I used RealPlayer to manage my files
and synchronization with the iPod. It saved steps, since the RM to MP3 conversion would be handled
automatically by RealPlayer. But it seems that iTunes and RealPlayer would end up fighting over
control of my iPod and I tired of dealing with it. I returned to using iTunes alone, for its predictability (and despite its dreadful performance).
But Jon's real question in all this was, "am I doing anything wrong" by
downloading and recording this audio. To me, the answer is
clear. Jon's not redistributing the program, he's timeshifting
it. Fair use. Settled law. Closed issue.
Managing Video Content - "Like Netflix, Only Better?"
The Videotools Video Content Management System, which my team
developed at Harvard Business School, is a first-place winner of the 9th
Annual Process
Innovation Award by Kinetic
Information.
Videotools was one of six winners in the
Innovative Solutions Category (Recognizing
Superior Solutions for
their Creativity and Effectiveness ).
Specifically, they look for
process improvement -- those applications that best exemplify
how technology can be used for business benefit.
A recent Campus
Technology article on Digital Libraries by Matt Villano
profiled Videotools, introducing it as "Like Netflix, Only Better."
It's flattering, even if that's a bit of a stretch!
But, Videotools does make an impact on the institution, by
providing three services:
Managing and automating the
encoding, metadata extraction and collection, and publishing of digital
video in various (and multiple) formats and bitrates.
Managing permissions, roles
and collections, and providing users with a video and media portal
where they can search, organize, and share video content.
Providing delivery
management that allows a unique URL for each video clip which applies
rulesets to seamlessly determine a user's permission to view a
video, detect their network location and preferred format/bitrate/size,
and generates a metafile (.ram, .asx, etc) that gets the right video to
the user quickly. (i.e. The same URL that opens a 1.5Mbps
RealVideo at full-screen when accessed from a classroom may provide
300kbps Real SureStream or 250kbps Flash video via http when accessed
from home.)
More information about how we designed and built Videotools, along with
our philosophy of how to think about these kinds of projects,
can be found in:
In preparation for my conference session today at the DAM (Digital
Asset Management) Symposium, I was asked to summarize my thoughts on
what's most important for people who are implementing a content
management system to know.
My personal experience in DAM is mostly centered around building
systems for managing streaming media content (search, delivery
management, metadata extraction, etc) and other kinds of multimedia
materials. Having done several generations of a
video content management system, as well as several multimedia
authoring and asset management systems, here are a few
points I think are important:
Buy
vs. Build --
Realistically, it's not
build vs. buy, it's "build" vs. "buy
& build". These implementations take a great deal of
analysis of
your business problem, copious customization, and require a strong
internal team. You cannot outsource success.
Integration of a vendor
solution can take as long as a custom
build. Be sure your vendor's direction and your
implementation will
let you take advantage of the vendor's upgrade path, otherwise you may
have been better off building.
Plan
for change - Don't expect to get
everything right in
the specification stage. When you define your business
problem and its
solution, find the right balance between up-front
analysis/specification and leaving room for the system to evolve as its
users begin using it. Follow a path-based development model
in which
you break the big problem into a bunch of small ones and tackle each
incrementally; because;
"If
a project team can eat more than two pizzas, it's too
large."
This week's Baseline
Magazine profiles Amazon.com CTO Verner Vogels
and his approach to running Amazon's software development
operation.
Small problems are easier to
grasp, examine, and solve than big ones. Small solutions are
easier to explain, understand, test, and implement. Small
teams need
less
process, have few communications challenges, and lower overhead than
larger ones. Small teams can get real work done while large
ones are still trying to find common understanding about the
problem.
Retain
internal development capacity --
in order to have
the system evolve, you need to have internal expertise in modifying
it.
Be
ruthless about insisting on the use of open, flexible
standards and APIs - Using a
system based on open interfaces and
standards gives you flexibility to create new things you didn't even
dream of when you began. Information "stovepipes" can be
OK...as long
as there are simple hooks between them.
Apparently, a little basic mathematics is all it takes to create real 3D
wireframe rendering in
Macromedia Flash. Oliver
Knill of the Harvard University
Department of Mathematics has developed a set
of animated 3D models for
teaching about vectorfields.
What's really cool is the use of Flash. The .FLA
file contains only the blank stage and a reference to the ActionScript.
A
single ActionScript file contains
the entire rendering and interactive behavior (the ability to rotate
the model around all three axes using the keyboard) for the model.
What's more, source code for all examples is GPL'd and is
freely available on the Flash/Actionscript
project for Multivariable calculus
site.
Gilbane 2005 Content Management Conference Presentation: Media Content and Delivery Management at HBS: Videotools
On April 12, I gave
the keynote address at the Gilbnane Conference on Content
Management in San Francisco. The session description included "We'll examine actual
business and IT planning scenarios and identify
the characteristics associated with successful content technology
deployment."
; or use a utility that is supposed to flip the header bits: 
