Month: March 2006

‘The Fourth Screen’ Mobile Media Festival

The4thScreen.com :: global mobile media festival
This festival looks very interesting. They are pushing people to think about the phone in a different way, not just as a television that is carried in your pocket as it seems the providers are pushing for:
‘The Fourth Screen’ Global Mobile Media Festival will focus on the mobile phone as an emerging social, cultural and technological phenomenon.
We invite artists, technologists, and other creative thinkers to submit creations, inventions and concepts in two categories:
1/ moving images: videos made with mobile phone, movies, animation and games intended for mobile delivery
2/ wise technologies: software art, software and hardware that proposes new uses for mobile multimedia communication, applications that have positive cultural, social and economic impact in diverse cultures

My New (old) STB

This is a completion of a post that I started in March of 2006:

Then:
So.. I bought a shiny new Intel Mac Mini solely for use as a set top box. First of all, I love it! Second, a lot of work is needed for this to compete with TiVo, MyTH or even Windows Media Center.

So here is what I have, 1 Dual Core Mac Mini with SuperDrive and a great EyeTV tuner/PVR device…

Now: What makes this truly extraordinary (at least in disruption of the pattern of my life):
At some point last year, the cable was unhooked and never got hooked up again (except for about 15 minutes during the 2008 election). This isn’t to say that I don’t watch TV anymore, I do, I watch Heroes, Lost, ER and a bunch of movies. The difference is that I watch it on my terms, not the terms of the networks. I get none of this TV from regular cable, instead I watch these shows through their respective websites (NBC, ABC) or through Hulu and now NetFlix’s online on-demand service (which is soooooooo much better than DVDs via mail as I don’t know what I want to watch next week today).

No longer do I come home and zone out to reruns. No longer to I switch on the TV just to have something to do..

A couple of additional thoughts:
I am pretty sure that scheduled TV will always have a place and people will always want programming in that form. I don’t think TV will go away (at least any time soon). I do think that (if the cable industry doesn’t buy our government) that it will eventually subsumed into the internet (despite all of the fear mongering about clogging the tubes).

Axis 214 PTZ Camera, a dream come true..

I have been waiting for one of these for years. A network PTZ camera that does true standards based streaming. Most of the others from Linksys, DLink and so on seem like they fit the bill but their flavor of “MPEG-4” is only codec deep (if even that) and requires playback to be handled with their proprietary ActiveX or Java players.

Not so with the Axis 214 which not only serves true MPEG-4 content but it is playable with QuickTime and any other player that can handle a standard RTSP MPEG-4 stream. This also means that the streams can be reflected by QuickTime/Darwin Streaming Server to allow for a much larger audience than the camera itself can handle.

Unfortunately, getting it to work with the QuickTime Streaming Server but in the end it was well worth it.

In the interest of saving the rest of the world some time I am posting an email message from Kyle Robertson from Apple’s Streaming Server User’s Listserv that was immensely helpful.
Continue reading Axis 214 PTZ Camera, a dream come true..

Mobile video: Get started with the QuickTime for Java API

Mobile video: Get started with the QuickTime for Java API
From the article:
In this article, I’ll first suggest some practical (and potentially very popular) uses for mobile video, and then present two programs to get you started using the QuickTime for Java API to create video content for the iPod. These programs let you easily add captions to existing video files and convert legacy video files into an iPod-compatible format. At the end of the article, I’ll leave you with some example code that you can use to learn more about manipulating videos using the QuickTime for Java API.