Audio and Video Blogging

Growl.

I’m irritated today because I realize that there are magic djin inside my computer, and I don’t know how to harness them to do my evil bidding. Well, or at least my bidding. Or maybe I just haven’t had enough caffeine yet.

I’m trying to figure out how I can use video and audio to enhance blogging. Toward that end I’ve been reading a bit, experimenting with open source tools I have like mpeg4ip and ffmpeg, and pondering using devices like PDAs and Bluetooth to slog media files from their origin to the destination on the web.

Today’s experiment concerns using Darwin Streaming Server to stream MPEG4 video files. I thought that if I created some very low bandwidth media files, I’d be able to stream them adequately even in the anemic bandwidth provided by my cable modem connection. But so far, even 28kbps video isn’t streaming off my server with any adequate speed. More investigation is clearly needed.

So, I’ve been looking at gadgets lately. Adam Curry’s wrote a little chunk of applescript which reads RSS feeds and scans them for mp3 files, and then will automatically download them to a playlist on your iPod when you dock it next. Others are duplicating the same idea in perl as well, so it seems like a nice idea, and particularly well suited for distributing audio blog information.

And speaking of the gadget front, Dan Lyke has apparently gotten his hands on a ZVUE: a portable mp3/divx player which costs $150. Neat little gadget. It ships with some software called ZFLICKS which is really just a repackaged version of VirtualDub (nobody should be without this program). ZFlicks is set to compress video to 300kbps, with a resolution of 160×120 and 128kbps audio. Apparently it’s a little linux box underneath, which is very cool. A software updates gives it the ability to play OGG and WAV files. Neat, and cheaper (if not as versatile) as a PDA.

Dan also pointed me to VSPAN, a blogging site that specializes in video blogging. They have some nice attractive playback technology based upon Flash, and appear to have the whole ease-of-use thing down pretty well. I’ll be checking it out more too.

Oh well, off to the baseball game tonight. Oakland vs. Baltimore. I doubt I’ll have an opportunity to post more, but I’ll be thinking as I BART over to the game. Ciao!

One thought on “Audio and Video Blogging”

  1. Dan Lyke

    Alas, I’m in one of those “can neither confirm nor deny” states about certain really interesting aspects of the ZVue, but a few things that you might find fun:

    John Maushammer has torn apart a ZVue to see what’s inside…

    I believe that the $150 price is with an extra codec, you can get it for $100, if, say, you were going to try to hack on it.

    I still need to turn on debugging in my USB stack to figure out why my laptop isn’t mounting the thing as a drive, so that I can copy to it from my preferred development environment. Further updates on that as I get there, although if you can just read and write to an SD card that should be half the battle.

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