January 3, 2008
Convicto on Brightcove
Here I am playing with Brightcove's Pay Media feature...it allows content owners to protect WMV files and monetize them as pay downloads or rentals. It is a very easy way to monetize. One can even add banner ads to the player to have additional monetization through traditional banner ads. Payment is handled by Brightcove and disbursed to the content owners via PayPal. Easy ...nifty...I still don't like the asset/title/lineup paradigm in Brightcove but I assume large content owners find it useful.
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January 1, 2008
Convicto
In the early '90s, I tried my hand at making some short films. Amateurish stuff really but a tremendous experience both in the complexity of creating stories as well as producing them. I made many mistake but definitely learned a lot -- from using the Bolex 16mm cameras to editing on flatbed editing stations -- all rendered obsolete by this all digital world.
Presented here for the first time, my first short - Convicto -- inspired by the death penalty sentence given to Robert Alton Harris, the first death penalty in California in about 25 years.
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August 10, 2007
Video "Access"
My kids are installed in this beautiful house in Patzcuaro, Michoacan in Mexico. Patzcuaro is a old colonial town of about 50,000 high up in the hills of Michoacan about 4-5 hours West of Mexico City.
Flicker set of them hanging in Patzcuaro and vicinity
I skyped in to check in on them and they were watching the Simpsons Movie which they had bought for $5 at the mercado. The night before they watched Ratatouille. The quality isn't so good but it is easier to watch the new releases in a small village in Mexico than here in the US.
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December 5, 2006
HD over-the-air
I bought the Pinnacle USB HD tuner stick and played around with it over the weekend. Friends in Europe have been using this type of device for some years now on their laptops since space is limited and stations have been transmitting DVB-T for yonks. However, I never saw much use of one here...
On the positive side, there are way more HD channels broadcasting over the air than I thought these days. It was a welcome surprise to see so many channles (about 30) available over-the-air in digital format. In particular, PBS has multiplexed five channels over their allotted frequency...this is very nice as there is an all-day kids channel and an all-day World news channel (BBC and the like). In addition, Univision which transmits from Vallejo (can barely see anything on analog) comes in nice and clear ...so I can watch Mexican soccer (though Cruz Azul, my favorite team, was eliminated over Thanksgiving weekend)
Otherwise, the product pretty much sucks...The software crashes quite often and takes about 30-45 seconds to initialize (not like a TV). Performance is also an issue. The channels very often drop frames and get all blocky. Strangely, the software default was to NOT use hardware acceleration. I turned it on but I couldn't really see much improvement. The software that interfaces to the device has an incredibly lame UI. Here are some examples:
The list of recordings only shows the first letter of the day of the week so Saturday is indistinguishable from Sunday. The columns for each field can't be changes..It also doesn't grab the important metadata such as Title and add to the list!
another example is the calendar...for some reason, it only shows six days of the week!! Saturday is missing in the UI and I can't make the window bigger
The device crashed after the first scheduled recording (I set it to record 4 football games over the weekend) and I came back to find it couldn't find the hardware after the first recording). The default settings of the software are to have the recordings to be at the highest quality. Although this is seemingly good, a recording of a football game (3 and 1/2 hours) ended up being 25GB!!! So, I ran out of free space on my laptop. I didn't realize this till Sunday. I finally changed the default settings and ended up with a football game in 4GB. I have two other files that are 25GB and 18GB that I need to re-compress to a more manageable format (or buy a blu-ray recorder along with stock in hard drive companies!!)
The EPG doesn't let you sort by genre or search so to set up a recording of an event when you don't know the channel (which was my case with the football) is very painful. You have to check each channel individually.
The good news is that it is supported by Media Center but not out of the box. One has to download a different software from the Pinnacle website for this. I just discovered this so might attach the device to the Media Center and play around. The Media Center UI for EPG and recording is quite nice so it may change my view of the product.
Posted by raza at 7:59 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 16, 2006
Playing with Brightcove
overly complex user interface but I suppose not so much so for professional video web syndication dudes. Some new concepts like Lineups...I got too lazy to act like an affiliate for my own videos so I could play around with the syndication features.
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August 20, 2006
Face Recognition
Face recongition is one of those technologies that has been in research or industrial vertical markets (security, surveillance) for a long time but may look to break into mainstream soon. Google acquired Neven Vision this week. Neven Vision was a B2B company selling SDKs and the like to other companies that would integrate them into final products. Riya is a recent photo-sharing startup that allows user to user their recognition technology to manage their photo collections. It takes a while to train the engine but once that's done it works fairly well. Riya is accumulating an amazing collection of face fingerprints. They are even taking it a step further by applying the technology to objects as well.
Adobe, Microsoft, Kodak, Canon and the rest will be dusting off their R&D efforts in this arena prontolike
Posted by raza at 10:10 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 15, 2006
Online Video downloads
I spent some time playing around with a few online video download/purchase sites. I played with an iPod and two or three devices in the Microsoft PlaysforSure camp.
the iPod/iTunes combo -- the video content is still buried in iTunes -- it is still all music with a little TV show (new!) icon leading you to the video content. The selection is still rather limited in genres like sports and kids . The TV show selections are starting to fill out nicely; too bad I don't watch any TV. I also transfered some 20 to 30 second personal movies I created with my digital still camera. I have a Minolta DimageXi which captures directly to QT. Even then, I had to convert them to playback on the iPod. The metadata for content purchased from iTunes is starting to be richer with TV shows having entries such as Season and Episode filled out (again, too bad I don't care about TV content).
Vongo -- vongo is the latest online service to hit the market and is created by Starz. Vongo forces you to download a huge application (XP only) which serves as a front-end to their online service hosted by theplatform. Vongo supports PCs and media players that are Microsoft PMCs -- the key thing though is that Vongo requires Windows Media for Portable Media Centers Version 2 but all the PMCs I have access to (four of them) all have Version 1. I went to the websites of all iRiver, Samsung and Creative and there is no new firmware for these devices. Bottom line - couldn't use Vongo. You may want to consider selling your V1 PMCs on eBay.
Zvue.com -- the zvue.com site is still in beta and just uses the default templates given by theplatform.com...so the UI sucks...The selection also sucks. Zvue.com allows you to download two separate files of the same movie you purchase: one is 320 X 240 and the other is 160 X 120. The 320 X 240 files wouldn't transfer to the PMC. Windows Media Player gave a message saying it couldn't reformat the size and bitrate of protected files to make them appropriate for the PMC...which was odd because it didn't have a problem with the CinemaNow file (below) which was also 320 X 240 and had a HIGHER bit rate. The Zvue guys were OK about filling out metadata. Three of the four titles I bought from them had Title and Genre. However, the actor entry listed the studio they licensed the content from instead of listing the lead actor.
CinemaNow - CinemaNow offers videos to buy and rent for PC, Portable Media devices and, more recently, smart phones. They fully support MS DRM. There are 821 videos available for Portable Media centers. Granted -- I am a total high-brow culture snob when it comes to movies (buñuel, antonioni, kurosawa, stuff like that) but finding something worth purchasing (even if for my kids) was a major struggle. I bought Rossellini's Open City but I couldn't bring myself to buy the two other movies I could actually recognize -- Victor Victoria and Short Circuit. I thought of buying some of the music offerings but these were second rate shows from bands that I was into at some point but no longer am -- MC5, The John Entwhistle Group (?), Half Japanese and others of that ilk. One has to select the appropriate file -- for PC or portable media player. The purchase and download were straightforward.Things became complex once the file was on the HDD. I loaded in to Windows Media Player and double-clicked. WMP told me it was acquiring a license and then went into an endless loop trying to acquire the license. The file then wouldn't transfer to the portable media player. I had to contact support, get a voucher to > re-download the file. The trick is that you can't double-click the file in WMP because that tries to play the file ON THE PC -- and I had bought the version for PMC. You have to go straight to Sync and transfer to the PMC WITHOUT trying to play in the PC or else the DRM gets all scoobied. There was no metadata in the CinemaNow title -- even the Title was empty but Windows Media Player defaults to displaying the file name if no Title entry is found
After all that, Open City at 320 X 240 and some two crappy postage stamp-sized kid videos are loaded on my PMC. It is too bad there isn't a leading in-file metadata standard like ID3 tags for video or EXIF for photo. There seem to be a zillion external metadata standards for video metadata -- pmeta, TVAnytime, OpenEPG, OCAP, ASF, MPEG7 but I am not sure if they have a metadata structure that can be freely licensed and put IN the file.
Bottom line -- video on "plays for sure" portable devices still sucks. Back in 1989, Intel acquired the David Sarnoff Research Center from RCA for its Digital Video Interactive (DVI) technology. I became the field technical engineer for that product helping the sales people. I then went on to be marketing manager of Intel's video compression algorithms (Indeo Video) and then become a VP at a video-sharing and infrastructure site. To date, I have been working with digital video for about 17 years and consider myself a bit of an expert. Getting video from online services for my portable players is still hard for me....gotta feel for the wal-mart dude.
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January 15, 2006
Digital Cinema Doldrums
I took the kids to see Chronicles of Narnia which was projected in digital cinema. The experience was appalling. Granted, I have had over 15 years of experience dealing with the nuances of compression algorithms and am therefore very susceptible to artefacts, jitters, jaggies and skipped frames. However, I would have thought that a system that was projecting to the masses would need to be flawless. To start off, the credits were unwatchable. The white letters superimposed on black or filmed images jumped all over the place. When the camera made fast tilts or pans (which happens quite frequently in these action movies), the frames were clearly noticeable like it wasn't projecting at a smooth 30 frames per second. Finally, on certain scenes which characters with a blue sky behind them, I could actually see jaggies along the faces. What surprises me the most is there hasn't been any public outcry. I can understand that people wouldn't notice jaggies -- but the jumping credits were noticed by all (even my eight year old daughter)
Posted by raza at 10:21 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 29, 2005
Video Sharing, Vlogging, etc.
A slew of new video sharing services have hit the net -- YouTube, ClipShack, Vimeo, OurMedia, Vimmer, VideoEgg... This is the second wave of such companies; the first (of which I was a part of) happened in 1999-2000 with companies like Videoshare, Eveo, Earthnoise, Spotlife. Many of these new companies presented at Chris Shipley's prestigious Demo conference in 2005 much like Earthnoise presented in Demo 2000. I wonder if Chris is laughing to herself seeing a repeat of the failures of 2000 in this space. Unlike 2000, the bandwidth is now in tens of millions of homes. Unlike 2000, blogging tools create an easy publishing framework for video to sit upon. Unlike 2000, podcast receivers make it easy to subscribe and receive video enclosures. Despite all this,
there is still no business model to these sites. Consumers still expect to stream video for free. They'll play with these sites and bore after a few weeks. Video is still difficult and too time-consuming for your average joe to create. Perhaps the only one who will make money off this second wave are the bandwidth providers...or infrastructure software providers such as Brightcove and Google that make money whether these sites succeed or fail.
Posted by raza at 4:02 PM | Comments (0)