VJ Video Internet possibilities (from VJ magazine thread)

[elbows]

I cant really do a brilliant job of moving the posts from the VJ mag thread/poll to this new thread because mostly people talked about both within their posts. So for clarity its probably just as well to leave the original discussion alone and start again here.

Personally I see the following big questions:

Live shows streamed from venue or pre-recorded stuff?

Viewers watch the content via stream, by downloading, or by progressive download?

Video formats/maximum compatibility

Server tech issues & costs

Target audience(s)

Advertising

Copyright/other legal issues

What the content will be ( shows only or reviews, rig setup, behind the scenes etc). Who is up for providing content.

And here are my personal feelings on the above:

Dont understand the obsession with stuff being shown live. Most of the internet video developments today are focussing on the freedom internet video can bring to the viewer. People can pick asnd choose what they want to watch, and when they want to watch it. Going down the live streaming route impacts heavily on all of the other questions, makes things a lot lot harder.

Reasons I hate the live streaming idea include:

Higher costs, tech headaches, impracticle to provide stream in very many different formats, much greater chance of falling foul of copyright etc laws, no ability to moderate/edit/control content and thus no ability to protect ourselves legally, much worse quality video, far less appropriate moments to show advertising. Much less chance of people getting their act together and providing live streams for us to use as content. End result = worse for producers, worse for viewers.

Drawbacks to going down the non-live route:

More chance of copyright violations being noticed due to published content being viewable for large periods of time rather than having to be watching to catch the violation live. Something about watching events live does appeal to the human psyche. A live event on television has something about it that pre-recorded does not.

Anyway enough from me for now, I'll waffle about some of the other issues later.

[elbows]

I will now talk a little about the server issues.

Flash Communication Server is interesting. I got overexcited about it earlier in the year, and even spent silly money on some Macromedia developers licence.

By far its best feature is that you can build nice flash sites with elegant interface and know that anybody with flash is going to be able to see the video, and that the controls etc for the video can be designed just the way you want rather than an ugly or style-clashing plugins controls appearing like with quicktime or windows media etc. Codec issues etc not a problem. Good control over stuff that will affect ability to use a subscription or advertising model.

So basically I see it as having the potential to make the viewers experience a lot earler/more pleasurable than some of the alternatives, and it scores highly on the cross-compatibility front.

Drawbacks:

Cost. Dont know where you saw a 10Mbs server for $100 bucks a month Pixylight, seems off the mark to me.

Here is just one example of pricing of a Macromedia Flash Communication server rented from a hosting company in the same way that this normal webserver is rented for vjcentral/forums etc:

Plans/Pricing:

Setup fee : $0
Monthly : $15
Connections : 10
Bandwdith size : 64 Kbs


Setup fee : $0
Monthly : $75
Connections : 50
Bandwdith size : 256 Kbs


Setup fee : $0
Monthly : $125
Connections : 100
Bandwdith size : 512 Kbs


Setup fee : $0
Monthly : $300
Connections : 250
Bandwdith size : 1 Mbs


Setup fee : $0
Monthly : $600
Connections : 500
Bandwdith size : 5 Mbs


Can probably find cheaper, but it gives an idea. Getting a normal dedicated server and putting Flash Communication Server on it may not be that simple. Unless the hosting company allows such things, it might try to use more sustained bandwidth of their network than they have built into their service/price structure and so they will say "oy - no!". Also the licence cost for a copy of Comms Server is far far from cheap.

Also requires someone with much better knowledge of all sorts of different Macromedia technologies to actually put the site together and make it work. I have managed to get the examples working and set up a developer limited flash comms server on my PC, and it all worked quite nicely. But to add additional functionality is not easy for me, I havent learnt actionscript.

Havent looked at it recently but some people ont he macromedia developers forums were not happy with the way things have gone in general with their products over recent years, and it loosk like they might have spread themselves a little too thin in places. Things like comms server have a habit of being released ina fanfare and then not getting nasty bugs fixed too quick. But Ive seen it used on several sucessful commercial sites with big revenue streams so its basically sound enough to work.

[elbows]

So what are the possible alternatives to flash comms server?

Its been a few years since I looked at other stuff like real, windows media, quicktime streaming. At the end of the day each have different strengths, and common weaknesses when it comes to being proprietry formats (compatibility etc issues). But casting all those fators to one side, it is still the bandwidth costs and implications which turned me away from streaming in general.

I have seen big corporations make a mess of live streaming to large numbers of viewers, for example by offering their pay-per-view tv programs on the internet as well via a one off payment model. The idea was sound but the technology couldnt scale properly so people payed good dollar for bad result. The internet is poor at emulating television, it has much stronger potential by being used in ways tv cannot.

Theres generally a bit of a vicious circle as far as Im concerned. On the one hand a large number of viewers are desired to make advertising or subscription model work, but unless you have plenty of cash to spend getting scalable streaming service provided by someone, even a modest number of viewers is going to cause woes. Either you limit number of viewers, really skimp on the stream quality, or spend lots of money.

Clearly I am overly negative about this stuff, because there are a few sites already doing vj-related streaming. I really like the content of much of these shows that Ive seen, but I really hate the stream quality. Its improved over the years for sure, but its still enough to seriously impare my viewing pleasure and its even worse with vj stuff when there is lots of detail/fast moving images.

So anyways personally Ive yet to be convinced that live streaming is at a stage right now that is mature enough to sink my time into, bearing in mind at all times the viewers experience is paramount, and nobody round here has lots of cash to spend. I therefore favour downloadable video or progressive-downloading video, which offers a reasonable compromise, and is probably far more economically sustainable.

[holly]

Progressive download is the way to go. Thanks for the detailed breakdown. Live streaming (as you say in your first thread) is only appealing to people in your timezone. We are an international community, and have (through visual media) what could be the only universal method of communicating in the 21st. I wanna see asia, amsterdam, uk, la, et al.

Quicktime, AVI with divx (or variant), and mpeg1. These are what my usage and research say.

[elbows]

Now the area where I really agree with pixylight is when he posted this link:

http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2004/12/01/glaser_co.html

That article touches on many of the areas Ive been looking at for the last few days ith much interest. Namely:

RSS Feeds - very interesting stuff and I do like the idea of syndicating content, and of people being able to subscribe to different feeds that interest them.

Following on from that comes something Im very very excited about, in terms of its potential:

Torrentocracy!

http://www.torrentocracy.com/

Very interesting indeedy :) Although I sometimes think ideas that are too reliant on p2p technology are missing a big part of the way things work in the actual economy, namely that there is no such thing as free bandwidth and that ISPs business model does not allow for univeral use of bandwidth, especially upload bandwidth. torrent stuff in particular does have a nice design that makes logical sense in terms of how the technology scales well, ie if a file is a popular download there will also automatically be plenty of people serving the file. But even so, its still eating various network resources, just because no central server is eating dollars using this method doesnt make it sustainable. If everyone was doing it then ISPs would either restrict it or move back to a non-flat-rate charging structure for peoples own internet connections (ie x$ per gb, or x$ per GB once you go over a monthly Gb limit). This already seems to be happening a bit, and is not really much different to the pricing model for dedicated servers taht we are trying to avoid!

Also some bloggers are starting to get into video blogging, though there isnt much agreement on the label yet. vlogging, videologging, vblogging, video blogging, its all the same thing, and is based on downloading video (either from traditional webserver or torrent) rather than streaming for the most part.

As far as advertising goes, oops another big difference of opinion. Apart from the fact that video adverts are more intrusive than print ads (cos they are harder to avoid) I think it makes copyright & content issues more complex in a few ways. I also think that the huge numbers of dollars spent each year on internet advertising is misleading because I expect the vasy bulk of these dollars are spent by large corporations serving content to a massive potential audience (eg sporting events, big stars in concert).

I favour a model which is initially smale-scale and free, relying on just a few donations to get things started. Then see how it goes, if it scales up then look at subscription model and/or advertising model.

[elbows]

Originally posted by holly
Quicktime, AVI with divx (or variant), and mpeg1. These are what my usage and research say.

Cheers for the feedback :)

As far as formats go, those sound pretty good and Id probably be prepared to go mad and add a few more types, depends how the target audience, quantity/length of content and server space issues develop.

By the way this isnt just a discussion as far as Im concerned, it came along at just the time Im getting ready to get into more debt by getting a server. Ive decided that I am captain internet nerd and theres no point me agonising myself into trying (or even really wanting) to change and become Mr clubber, Mr Travel. I am Mr Bedroom, and thanks to the net this no longer condemns me to living in a very small world. So a progressive download thing is going to happen regardless of what other things get done or decided by others. I was going to just get on and do it with my own crappy self-made content, but the timing of the VJ magazie thread and its thoughts means Im looking to see if there is any crossover between my thoughts and the community.

To be honest I think Im getting desperate, the text-based nature of internet communities is not providing an emotional balance, so the internets potential still hugely outweights its current reality. So Im strongly verging on throwing all my energies into internet video/video blogging/communtiy video whatever. Ive wanted to do it for eyars, I spent too long waiting for streaming to mature so balls to streaming, I aint gonna live forever after all.

[sleepytom]

i think we have failed to ask the big question yet...

HOW OFTEN DO YOU WATCH LIVE STREAMED CONTENT??

as far as i know nobody ever watches live streamed content and i don't see this changing in the future

even a 100k stream is looking bad with VJ content - it simple changes too much to work at streaming bitrates. so its not worth watching.

VIDEO ON DEMAND (ie progressive download) is the way forward - i sugest that we don't bother investing huge amouts of money and time into setting up our own server but we simply use archive.org

you what?

yes archive.org will let you host anything you like on their servers gigabit net connection - for this service they charge you nothing which last time i checked was a lot cheaper than any other service.

seriously how many of u have downloaded stuff from archive.org? surly its time to put stuff back into the archive?

[holly]

Originally posted by sleepytom
seriously how many of u have downloaded stuff from archive.org? surly its time to put stuff back into the archive?
:o guilty guilty guilty:scared:

[elbows]

Yeah good point Tom, I guess that brings us to licensing/content issues. What are the rules for content on archive.org? It seems pretty clear when it comes to what rights we want to give others to our work (as archive.org supports the creativecommons system) but what about the content, ie clips used and audio used? So far my thinking leads me to believe that we better be strict about other peoples rights, could it work any other way in practice? ie all original content and/or other work where right to reuse that work has clearly been granted?

If we use archive.org do we need to organise this as a community at all, or is everything already there for us to use as individuals. Is there sense in a middle-way where we publish stuff to archive.org as individuals, but have our own RSS feed that shows all published content from this community?

[elbows]

Here is an example of a vlog which renewed my interest in this stuff again and showed how dooable it is:

http://www.rocketboom.com/vlog/

I like the shortness of it. Im sure I spend way longer than the average sat in fron of the net, but even so I dont usually find time to start watching 3 hour long stuff lol.

Some other sites Ive been reading/watching since becoming interested in the emerging weblogging side of net video earlier this week:

http://www.momentshowing.net/momentshowing/cool_people_/index.html

http://www.blogdigger.com/media/index.jsp

http://x.nnon.tv/

It was a strange path that I took to looking at this stuff. I was randomly watching some TV program that started going on about podcasting, a phenomenon Id totally missed. Naturally I wondered about video-podcasting possibilities, and this lead me to RSS feeds and that Torrentocracy site.

These days Im loving the contents of the internet more than the task of wading through it. I want to increase the surfing:watching content ratio. So I love the idea of subscribing to some choice RSS feeds and having them download automatically to my comuter and then i can click on them specifically or watch them in random order as more of a TV-like experience. And naturally Id love it even more if this community were a part of it.

[WordVirus23]

you could have say a max of 10 viewers on the broadband feed, and say a thumbnail feed with max viewers of 50 er some such...

I like the archive.org idea... now if only broadband worked both ways....

I would say, feeds ala shoutcast would be the best way... that way you could check out the House channel, or the Trance one, or Newest Reels

is there some way we could make a graphical "front" for the archive.org feeds?

..j...

[sleepytom]

you can link / embbed any content on archive.org directly from a website.

re rights and stuff - this is the major stumbling block for any system - we cannot run a server that is streaming illegal content - getting broadcast rights on music even is a nightmare (as it is not covered by the normal prs fee)

there are 2 options for this - 1 ignore it and hope we never get caught (which is wrong)
2 only stream licenced stuff (ie stick to stuff on CC licence) which dramatically reduces the amount of stuff that we would have to stream.

this is about where i lose interest in the whole thing - if it were simple / cheap to sort out these problems then we would be seeing huge amounts of streaming content on the web - as it goes its very very complex to get the legal stuf right and it's impossable without access to the relevent lawers (who charge hundreds of dollars per hour)

i'd really like to see more streaming + downloadable content / shows / av tracks on archive.org - it solves the bandwidth / server issues very nicely and providing we can get people to submit content on the creative commons licence then i see no reason why this can't be a success.

it would be easy to knock up a portel site to provide a centralised access to the streams / downloads as well as RSS feeds of vjcentral and vjforums however once again we are stuck in a position of cart before horse if we build a wonderful load of php without anyone submitting any content.

[sleepytom]

so i guess the next question is who has 5 mins of legal AV content that they would be happy to see streamed on a creative commons licence?

[elbows]

And who would be willing to make short technical videos (eg showing us all round your rigs & setups) for the cause of greater human undersanding than words alone can express?

As for artistic content, my mind right now fully expects to contribute a lot of short works of legal AV content, starting before the end of this year. However my mind often expects me to achieve results and nothing ahppens, so we will have to wait and see if I can turn words and dreams into reality this time.

I feel like I have ideas for remixing a few dozen of the existing archive.org prelinger and av geek archives films into many different AV pieces, given infinite time and the right flashes of inspiration.

However I also desperately need some video of current tv-type news under a creative-commons/public domain or fairly open type licence in order to translate my thoughts into a legally acceptable stream of AV. Any ideas?

Im actually starting to enjoy the challenge of making stuff only from footage with the appropriate rights, in a strange sort of way, many video blogs are the latest source of this kind of content that Ive discovered. I was also extremely happy to see that several documentaries chose to release source interviews under such progressive licens with fair reuse a reality. ( http://www.archive.org/movies/details-db.php?collection=election_2004&collectionid=uncovered_interviews )

At the very least I sense some momentum in the field of creative commons type licensing/rights sanity. It makes me very happy, it offers hope, and I havent even begun to see what audio/music is available with generous rights of reuse.

[elbows]

Furthermore it makes me so happy that I posta again, to say that I love the creative commons & archive.org approach because it removes all but the purest form of advertising.

When I say purest form of advertising, I mean the work itself. Free publicity, brand awareness, getting the message across, these are sought after things. Whilst Im immune from the economies of art due to a day-job in unartistic field of nerdery, I can appreciate that those who need to live by their creative output might not be dancing round in a world of joy at the thought of doing a load of work then giving it away.

Many of you have some video bits on your websites which give me an idea of your identity as creative beings, yet after all these years I am quite frankly upset at how little I really know any of you as artists. I havent put much physical gig attendance or physical dvd medium purchasing effort into trying to discover more, but then again I am thinking of this from the perspective of todays media madness world.

By this I mean that if I listen to the radio or turn on the tv or go out to some cultural/social/purchasing location, I will be bombarded by mainstream productivated music/film/artists etc. It doesnt do much for me, it feels mostly plastic, I want to be exposed to created things that have been touched by less people. passed through the bowels of less humans acting as cogs, middlemen and constraint-imposers.

So I want to surf in a wave of creative works, I want my senses to be bombarded, but I want it direct, I dont want it wrapped in plastic. I have a problem with content that has to be homogenised in order to be digestable by a large enough audience, which today in the traditional world is often the gospel imposed by the economies of scale.

Summary: I wave my genitals at the system that creates an underclass of creatives who are denied or diluted by impositions related to the cost of hiring the lawyer class or who offend the sponsors by daring to have the wrong opinions. If you cant beat them, bypass them. If the odds are stacked against you and theyve got all bases covered, create a new base, come at the situation from another dimension.

I think the cold war would have gone weird if the internet had existed at the time!

[holly]

:Smoking:

:not worth :not worth :not worth :not worth

[holly]

Originally posted by sleepytom
you can link / embbed any content on archive.org directly from a website.

re rights and stuff - this is the major stumbling block for any system - we cannot run a server that is streaming illegal content - getting broadcast rights on music even is a nightmare (as it is not covered by the normal prs fee)

there are 2 options for this - 1 ignore it and hope we never get caught (which is wrong)
2 only stream licenced stuff (ie stick to stuff on CC licence) which dramatically reduces the amount of stuff that we would have to stream.

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I'm pasting this here so I can read it outside of a tiny little window....

[sleepytom]

tyhere is some more usefull stuff in thire docs somewhere about suggested licence terms and the use of extreanlly linking etc etc - i can't find it now but i'll post it here (or a link to it) if / when i find it again.

[elbows]

Well I spent the entire weekend messing with stuff that combines internet video download with RSS feeds and the right software/media players to provide a "tv-like" experience. Progress was made :)

Basically the RSS feed works like a playlist. It contains the title, description, author etc details for the video, as well as a link to the actual video file itself.

The media player will present you with a list of all the content in a feed, or multiple feeds. You can then select whichever media you want and it plays. Or you could have it set to play back all the content in order or in random order.

So lets say for example there was a RSS feed for vjcentral. Every time someone sticks a video on the net that is of interest to VJs, they can go to a webpage and add details of it to the RSS stream.

Now I get home from work and turn on my magical media box. It downloads the latest RSS from vjcentral automatically, and begins downloading & playing these videos. No surfing required, ahh relax :)

If I also want to get my fix of other video stuff, I can subscribe to other RSS feeds of interest as well. I could watch them seperately, or watch specific video clips by selecting them. Or it could be on mega-random mode and will play back the latest clips randomly from all the RSS feeds Im subscribed to. Bingo, Ive now effectively got a TV channel catered to my interests and with no time lost surfing around different webpages with their own different nagivation system etc.

Now there arent so many RSS feeds at the moment which embed links directly to the media files, which is required for the above to work. archive.org for example has RSS feeds, but they only link you to the main webpage for that video, not directly to the media files. http://feedster.tv is one RSS feed that does enclose the media links, so works with the above idea :)

Anyway my crude initial testing of this tuff was done with XBMC (xbox media center) and it worked really well. There are already RSS news reading scripts for the XBMC, so I just crudely changed the code of one of them so that if the right media enclosures are part of the RSS, it downloads and plays the videos. It worked really very nicely, and seemed to handle progressive downloading really well, no nasty delays.

Still the point of all this is really ease of usse/saving time for the end user, and this is probably lost when I try to explain this stuff badly lol.

[holly]

What video/media formats can the xbox media center understand?

[elbows]

Most of the common ones, which is nice. The main problem is that the XBMC is not an official project, the XBox is only meant to run apps that are sanctioned by M$, and XBMC isnt. Therefore you need a modified XBox and the executable version of the program cant be legally downloaded. So its really only good for a limited number of people, I am just using it as a prototype, to get a feel of the future as Im sure there is likely to be an explosion of cheap home media center type devices (that are really cutdown computers) some day. Still it also has the added bonus of not feeling like Im using a computer really, and the fact that the picture quality comes out real nice on the TV. Also I fear the choice of supported formats will be less in any real commercial product, because this thing doesnt have to stick to the rules it supports a lot.

To give a rough guide to what formats it supports, here is the file extension list that XBMC can handle:

<pictureextensions>

png|.jpg|.jpeg|.bmp|.gif|.ico|.tif|.tiff|.tga|.pcx

<musicextensions>

m4a|.flac|.aac|.strm|.pls|.rm|.mpa|.wav|.wma|.ogg| .mp3|.mp2|.m3u|.mod|.amf|
.669|.dmf|.dsm|.far|.gdm|.imf|.it|.m15|.med|.okt|. s3m|.stm|.sfx|.ult|.uni|.xm|.sid

<videoextensions>

ty|.nfo|.strm|.rm|.rmvb|.m3u|.ifo|.mov|.qt|.divx|. xvid|.bivx|.vob|.img|.iso|.pva|.wmv|.asf|.asx|.ogm |
.m2v|.avi|.bin|.dat|.mpg|.mpeg|.mp4|.mkv|.avc|.vp3 |.svq3|.nuv|.viv|.dv|.fli


Anyway given that the vast majority of people will be watching with a computer of some sort, I will now move on to computer systems using RSS to get program feed info, and then playing back the media. Ive thought of about 3 different approaches:

1) A web page-based solution. The webpage is given a link to the RSS feed(s) of choice and then generates a page with the video embedded, in practice this will look/work to the end user exactly the same as if it were a normal webpage with quicktime embedded into it.

2) An existing RSS news aggregator app. These are currently used to look at the many different syndicated news etc text content that is around the web these days. In such software where there is video content enclosures in the RSS feed, if the software supports it then the video will show up as a link just like any web hyperlink, and clicking on it will open up the appropriate media player or download the file.

3) A truly media-enabled RSS news aggregator app. This would do things like automatically download the media from feeds you subscribe to, ready for you to watch later. It would also include a multi-format media player, so everything would happen within the one app and make it a nice easy integrated experience for the users. Features like random playback etc that would make the experience more like TV in a way.

Anyway 2 already exists, but is not great because theres little difference between this experience and just the web browsing we are already used to.

3 is the equivalent of a more developed version of theXBMC thing Ive been playing with. It is what Im after really. But I dont have the ability. Im sure such an app will exist soon, as people are starting to talk about it more, but will it be cursed with adverts and format limitations?

So 1 is what I will be doing next. It will take lots more work to make it multi-format, so I'll probably just concentrate on quicktime/mp4 support for now. Without the auto-download feature and other fancy things, it will not offer all the features that a seperate app could do (3), but at least it will be cross-platform and a good demonstration of WTF Im on about lol.

[holly]

I've limited my webvideo experience to QT. None of the other formats seem as accessable to media "authoring" -- at list not to the extent that I wanted to roll up the sleeves, etc.;)

QT embedded in a webpage is very easy, and you can even write simple html instructions to create an embedded playlist, etc. I realize this is all far beneith you.... HTML links can also be sent directly to the QT player instead of the plugin so it can go fullscreen, etc. I have to admit I abandoned this a long time ago (the "cinerama" experience via web) once I moved on to DVD as the obvious format that already did everything I want.... (except of course being downloadable....)

QT does swf, text, and simple scripting as well. For a while I got all up on it and thought I could rule the world through QT, but then I woke up when I tried -- realized I really just wanted reliable hi-qual video with menu options.... My point is just to try to keep things simple and deliverable in ways more perminent than web (ie: CD-rom maybe), and maybe to keep in mind that there may be an advantage to creating something that is self-contained and viewable later. Since we are all a bit wary of the realities of streaming, and believe progressive download is better, I just wanted to put out the suggestion of downloading self-contained chunks.... Sorta like Prellinger's policy of walkaway downloads that would reasonably fit on a 600MB CDrom.

Incidently, I suddenly find myself with a 50 minute train commute several days a week. Overnight downloads would be convenient for those who are bandwidth challenged....

[vjpixylight]

Originally posted by elbows
I will now talk a little about the server issues.


Cost. Dont know where you saw a 10Mbs server for $100 bucks a month Pixylight, seems off the mark to me.


.

Damn I can't seem to find that plan, but after looking around, the 10/mbs unmetered bandwidth is running anywhere from $350-450 a month..
http://www.cpcservers.net/specials.html

I'll keep looking for the site I found the 100/month, 10mbs bandwidth, I know it's out there:)

now that is just a server, and the flassComm software, licencing and all that crap would be extra..

I'll get around to getting more indept about this all , but at the moment i'm tied up with other stuff..

cheer's elbow's for doing this research on the Flash Comm server:):jump2:

[elbows]

No worries vjpixylight, but bear in mind my research is already getting old and rusty, I dont know if anything has changed since I formed my initial thoughts on flash comm server. Certainly I would love it for streaming to become afforable and reliable, so if I sneer at streaming sometimes please forgive me, its only that so far in practice there seem to be too many barriers, financial/bandwidth ones if nothing else.

Holly I agree with ya there, certainly the ability to keep downloads saved offline is something that appeals to me. The ideal system would, I guess, allow you to flag content that you wanted to keep, would store details about all the files got so far in a database for searching, indexing etc.

Anyway I am probably getting a little too sidetracked with the exact mechanisms of delivery/viewing, content is still king at the end of the day and thats what Im most keen on encouraging.

I mean when I talk of RSS, it isnt some magical huge part of the system really. As you mention, quicktime already supports playlists (and lol nothing is beneath me). Having a website or app that builds playlists from a database of available media is nothing new. For example if we added a video function to VJCentral, it would be virtually the same as all the existing text articles. Just need an extra field which is a link to the media file itself, and a webpage that plays back the links stored in the database in an embedded player.

The important thing about RSS is the syndication side of things. Lack of regualr new content/notification of new content is something which causes problems for startups. If I start a site which hosts short VJ-related clips, it will take a long time to build up enough content for it to feel anything like a "tv channel" or a site worthy of claiming to be rich in content. Not enough room for people to get into the habit of going there to see whats new. But if the content is syndicated to other sites, and if people just subscribe to the feed if they like it, these issues are gone.

Another real world example. http://demandmedia.net/ has RSS feeds with videolink enclosures, as well as the usual ability to watch clips normally through their site.

Ahh yes Im a bit out-of-date with the app side of things as well, found a commercial thing:

http://www.newsgator.com/ngs/AD_mediacenter.aspx

Only runs on a few platforms but anyway their explanation of why this stuff is good might be easier to understand than mine, as they are trying to sell the thing after all.

[topherz]

Thanks for posting info, links and ideas elbows. Its a great project. I would certainly enjoy something like that. A tv like program generated from the interesting videos on the web. Anyone can build a station.

I wish i remember the name, there is (was?) something very similar with just audio. But dont remember where. I'll look around for it. This was a site where people would upload playlists, linking to online media. And the site could play the playlists back. Such a simple idea.

-topher

[syzygy]

Originally posted by sleepytom
so i guess the next question is who has 5 mins of legal AV content that they would be happy to see streamed on a creative commons licence?

Our AV stuff is all 100% self created and we're happy to get it out to as wide an auidence as possible.

Dan.

[elbows]

Ok I got the first mega buggy barely-functional version of a webpage that will play movies from an RSS feed. Its not useable enough for me to share the url yet, but hopefully it wont be very long till I can.

The funny thing is that this stuff appears to be hotting up simultaneously in the videoblogging world. Hours after I got my version working, I found a yahoo videoblogging group and someone there had got a more sophisticated version running on Sunday lol!

There appears to currently be 2 main ways that links to video content are getting spread the net in ways that automatically alert people to new content. And there is an argument starting to happen about this stuff.

There are now quite a few services which are grabbing links to videos from as many websites, blogs, RSS feeds etc as possible. They dont ask whether its ok to include the link to that media in the index/search engine/feed. Its a very presumptious system, and it has no mercy for those who may be hard of bandwidth, or those who want visitors to see their website if they want to see their video.

Then there is the right way, which is basically like the proper podcasting RSS systems do it. RSS feeds of a certain type (2.0 I think, cant remember) can have enclosure tags. If you want to spread the link to your mp3 or movie or whatever, you put the full http://whatever.com/wibble.mov address inside enclosure url tag. The proper content aggregator will only give people media that is linked to inside the enclosure, rahter than just every single media link it can find mentioned on peoples blogs/websites/rss feeds.

Anyway this stuff does raise issues. Im interested in these developing technologies precisely because Im interested in as large an audience as possible happening to see the content, despite the obvious implications for bandwidth. Convenience of delivery for the viewer/vastly increased potential audience is why I keep going on about RSS. My next step is to get a RSS feed going with enclosures linking to a handful of .movs on my webserver, put the link to the RSS feed out to a few different communities/sites, and monitor how many people watch. If its an issue then the artchive.org hosting and bittorrent options become relevant to think about.

Once these things have been established and code has been polished, I will be in a position to convert my wafflings into a simple guide for any member of this community who wants their video to be linked to on the vjcentral/whatever we call it feed. And then a viewer page for this feed can be added to vjcentral.

As a community I suppose we need to decide whether our community feed will be open, freely available to be syndicated to any website/software app/media box of the future that wants it, without permission (guaraunteeing largest possible audience but no control over context people might see it in) or whether it should be restricted, by writing server-side technology that will only give the RSS feed to sites we have approved.

I personally favour the open idea. Im not too worried about people misusing the feed. For example Im sure some websites will appear that have adverts and then show content from various different free feeds. The viewer will hopefully be the death of those though, because there will be so many other ways to view the same feeds, but free of whatever horrible commercial/advertising context they are put in by the rogue websites.

[holly]

Wow, you have just described a very infiltratable system. I've been on some file sharing servers where you download a jpg and it is an advertisement! There would be nothing to stop bogus movies containing popular keywords to be more spam and commercials.

[elbows]

Well there are 3 types of openness with this stuff, 3 areas where adverts & spam could infiltrate, but its easy to avoid once the right tools are available/right policies decided.

1) Open website interface for adding your material to our feed. So for example if there was a form on vjcentral where people posted the title, description & link to their video, this could be abused. But this is no different to current risk of spam on text-based messageboard with relaxed posting rules, ie this place. And we dont get too much spam right now.

Solution: Restrict form to at least prevent automated misuse of it, and tighten who is allowed to add links if necessary.

2) Someone taking our feed and automatically adding links to adverts to it. Viewers who watch that modified feed will get adverts as well as our content. Nothing we could do to stop that if our feed is publically available.

Solution: Potential viewers subscribe to our original ad-free feed, advert versions will be unpopular so long as interesting ad-free feeds exist.

3) Adverts added at the viewing tool end of the equation. Eg a subsidised media box that plays feeds on your telly but has ad inserts or banners. Or if the only software viewers cost money or were adware, or all webpage-RSS feed viewers had adverts. Nothing we can do about that, except provide people with viewers that are ad free (eg the page Im working on).

Solution: If add free choices exist for consumers, the advert model is screwed.

Adverts will find their rightful place as part of feeds which are commercial, providing costly commercial content that is supposed to be paid for by the advertising, rather than people just leeching links to content and adding their own adverts. No sane viewer will subscribe to a feed with content & adverts where another feed exists which has the same content but no adverts.

[holly]

So we'd control the content more or less? Like a TV network full of options?

[elbows]

We'd control the content of our feed in whatever way the community decides it wants it done and is practical, and providing it isnt abused I guess.

For every hour I surf I discover more software or sites that already do a lot of what Ive been talking about.

For Mac users, this ipodderx software sounds like it is the rss feed software (3) that I waffled about previously:

http://ipodderx.com/

Im just looking for a pc equivalent now. So anyway that software should download movies from feeds you subscribe to, the main problem is that there are huge number of audio RSS feeds, not many video ones yet. But if you have a chance try out the concept, and imagine what it would be like if we had a video feed, and tell me if it sounds like a good idea. Of course content is king, theres no point me getting overexcited about delivery mechanisms for the sake of it if there arent and interesting feeds (which requires people uploading interesting videos)...

[elbows]

OK http://ipodder.sourceforge.net/index.php is for both Mac and PC and apaprently will download video too.

Here is an example of a video RSS feed, try it with ipodder, Im about to.

http://channel9.msdn.com/rss.aspx?ForumID=14&Mode=0

So anyway there are obviously more tools ready for this than I first thought, back to talking about content soon I guess :)

[elbows]

Wahey it works, can schedule your favorite feeds to download automatically at the time of choosing to watch when you want.

That feed I posted as an example isnt very interesting though, content content content. Ive not been into the whole podcasting audio phenomenon though so have no idea how many of the RSS audio feeds actually contain content I want to hear at the moment. But the technology actually works, hoorah. So the "more time hearing/watching content from the net rather than surfing to all the sites and remembering where to look for stuff I like" mission is accomplished, now is there any content I like? lol.

[vjpixylight]

Elbows-
please keep up the awesome research:D !

One thing as I am reading all this info, is...
how does these playlist's know wether or not the web movie link is going to be progressive DLing or not??

I am really liking the first option of distributing video content openly...

:yep:

[elbows]

The playlist doesnt know about that stuff. The RSS feed which is effectively the playlist contains the filename, filesize and mime type, along with description etc.

How the actual files are handled depends what tool you use. If its podcasting software then its mission is to download the files to the harddrive before playback, eg some people schedule it to run at night and then transfer all the mp3 podcasts to their ipods when they get up, and listen to them whilst commuting etc. Obviously the commuting bit isnt really the same for video yet, but the process of downloading to hard drive is identical and works already for video with the existing software, its then up to you how you play the files.

If you are watching via a webpage or RSS feed reader software, then that application needs to know how to play back different filetypes. Whether playback will begin before downloading has finished, ie progressive playback, depends on what encoding settings people use for their video, and on how clever the tools are.

So for my early tests, all I did was create a webpage with a normal quicktime embedded player in it. some php web stuff reads the RSS feed and passes the filenames to the quicktime player to play, one after the other. For this to then function in a "tv-like" way, I just have to make sure the quicktime videos are encoded with the right "fast start" or whatever its called settings, and it works. The RSS feeds themselves arent adding any magic to the actual process of watching the video, theyre just a great way to find out about new video clips.

Anyway I got a cold which slowed me down hence my recent silence, although Ive been spending some time on the videoblogging groups as well because that stuff interests me too.

I also went a bit mad and got a server, so I guess it is all systems go with this stuff if people are still up for it :)

I guess to start off with I need a few short videos to use to get the technology working and demonstrated and make sure this plan is realistic in practise. So if anybody has anything suitable, please get in touch, cheers :) Failing that I will mostly use some bad video that I will make for testing the site.

[elbows]

AS I was just saying in the thread about video of peoples rigs, Ive been sort of unfunctional for months, I had to take timeout to do nothing and start feeling better about the world.

Anyway falk has sucessfully used the blogging & podcasting technologies that I got excited about in this thread, so his vjblogging site that he mentions in this forum is a good working example of this technoogy in use. Mac users can get ant so that they can subscribe to RSS feed and get the latest videos from falks blog automatically. PC version of ant is not ready yet, has a few big bugs that need sorting.

Anyway the details are in falks thread. I shall leave this rather large thread alone now, I'll start a new one when I get my act together, I will probably start by own personal videoblog first and then I suppose it is a question in the future as to whether the vjcentral/forums community will want their own shared videoblog with RSS feed, or whether people will just setup their own personal ones on their own server. In that case all that would be needed would be a small section on vjcentral which lists RSS feeds of VJ-related video internet sites.

In practise this would result in things like:

I download a program like ant that allows me to subscribe to RSS feeds.

I go to vjcentral and I see a list of VJ related feeds

I add the address of some or all of these feeds to ANT

ANT willl automatically tell me when there are new videos available from any of these feeds, and depending on your settings can automatically download them etc.

End result = I can regularily watch all these wonderful VJ video clips without having to remember to keep going to different peoples websites all the time.

[djjef]

Check out this site:

www.popcast.com

I have been using it since it came out and it is pretty interesting stuff. Very similar to some of the ideas I saw earlier in this thread. Popcast uses to Bittorrent technology to make it all work. Best thing is it is all free. No bandwidth pay out issues.

[elbows]

Well all this stuff is experiencing quite a fast increase in mainsteaminess.

The inclusion of podcasting stuff into itunes 4.9 has helped popularise it, as itunes also supports video you can use it for videoblogs (instead of ant or some oth the other tools that have popped up like DTV).

This businessweek story about the popular videoblog Rocketboom shows how this stuff is being taken seriously in the wilder world:

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_36/b3949087_mz063.htm

Anyway all of these develoments makes me more sure that this sort of thing is a good idea, it will just come down to whether enough people have the time to do it.

Within the coming weeks I'll start to get back to thinking about whether & what it might be worth offering through vjcentral to help vj-related web video.

Are there people here still interested in doing this stuff in some collaborative way or at least all available through a vjcentral 'channel' or something? Clearly individual vjs with the specific skills can already do this stuff for themselves, does it make sense to do something under a community umbrella?

[holly]

Well, I've been trying to beef up the info and tips section on my site in a maga-blog type format, but I'd still rather be able to plug into a larger project.

[bertranol]

Hello,

I released erlier this week patchouli, which is a video blog software, more info here

http://www.mixnbrew.com/patchouli

I use it for my own VJ blog : http://mjukma.free.fr

and you can use directly the RSS 2.0 feed in iTunes or FireAnt or DTV (subscribe to podcast in iTunes)

http://mjukma.free.fr/patchouli/rssitunes.php

Cheers,

Bertranol