Month: July 2006

Verizon DSL constantly changing IP address

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?

Dear telephone, meet the internet

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.”

Flash, FFMPEG and now Thumbnails!

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

Iranian Video Blogging

This Iranian American Life

“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..

Flash, FFMPEG and more..

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.