Category Archives: Blogging

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!

Bloggercon

Despite the fact that I’ve been blogging for over two years, I have as yet really developed a sense of the impact of weblogs on society at large or how others view them. To help better educate myself on the nature of the blogging universe, I thought I might attend BloggerCon III, which is coming up in November. I’m not sure what to expect, but if it helps expand my thinking about the role that blogs can play in the future, it will be worth the commute down to Stanford.

Perhaps I will see some of you there.

On Audio Blogging

I’ve begun to become interested in the idea of audio blogging, or more generally, multimedia blogging. Ideally, I want to have a way to compose and post new entries to a weblog from a mobile location which might include sound, pictures, video and just plain old text.

Ideally, this could all be done with a single gadget. I’ve been researching PDAs for the last couple of weeks, and trying to find a reasonably inexpensive but useful gadget which can serve this purpose, and yet not cost as much as a full laptop. Unfortunately, the $300-$400 price limit I’ve placed upon this project yield only devices which are compromises. The two most promising devices appear to be:

The Dell Axim X30
This PDA costs $314 currently, includes a 624Mhz processor and has both 802.11b and Bluetooth wireless. If it had a camera, it would be terrific, as it is, it’s tempting.
Palm Zire 72
This one sells for $260 or so from amazon.com, includes a 1.3 megapixel camera, can shoot both still pictures and video, but sadly includes only Bluetooth. I’d really like to be able to take advantage of open wireless connections to send email and the like. Supposedly a WiFi card is coming, but that will consume the expansion slot, and it’s unclear if the WiFi card will include some extra flash memory.

If I expand the allowable price range to $600 (ouch), then some other possibilities arise, with some other unique capabilities. Most notably, I rather like:

Asus MyPal A730
As yet unreleased, this PDA appears to be nearly ideal. Not only does it include Bluetooth, 802.11b and IR connections, it has a VGA resolution screen, a one megapixel camera and both SD and CompactFlash memory slots. Very nice.

Okay, so let’s imagine I’ve got one of these devices. I can use it to compose audio files, snap pictures, or compose text entries. I can then send these using ordinary email to my server, and they will automatically be converted into weblog postings. That seems pretty cool, as these devices are small and convenient, and will lend themselves well to increased impromptu blogging.

But what else can we do? Adam Curry has made a plea for some software that allows him to act as a DJ: you can talk, insert bumper music and songs, and record the result as a high quality mp3 file for later streaming. This immediately reminded me of a similar program that Tom Duff wrote several years ago. Tom was nominated to be the sound engineer for a theater production, and spent three weeks coding up a nice little application that allowed you to preload a bunch of sound effects and “perform” them by hitting keys on a control console. The application handled all the scheduling and mixing internally. It shouldn’t be too difficult to do that on a modest PDA these days. Curry suggests that the Studio365 interface is nearly ideal, and staring at it, it does seem like a good starting point.

There are lots of remaining questions though. While modern PDAs are capable of decoding mp3 files in real time without great difficulty, it appears that they aren’t really up to encoding in real time (I’d love to be wrong about this, if anyone knows more about this, let me know) which means that we would have to store the resulting sound files and then compress them as a post process. Assuming that we want to keep such posts short (limited to say 15 minutes) and that the highest quality isn’t required (say 22050hz audio, 16 bit, mono) that cranks up to 40Mb, which is doable, but not ideal, particularly if you have to do the final encoding on a desktop, since sending the 40Mb of audio files over wireless or Bluetooth isn’t all that fast. Some more headscratching and research is clearly needed here.

Perhaps the greatest problem of audio blogs is one of indexing: it’s very difficult to provide searchable content when given only an audio stream. Currently my idea is simply tag audio posts with some searchable keywords, and also to limit the total length of posts to modest 5-15 minute lengths. I’ve thought about trying to do automated speech recognition to provide a searchable transcript, but given that I want to post from remote locations with the possibility of considerable ambient noise, I doubt that would be entirely successful. It won’t help to have a huge number of audio blog entries with no ability to find one that you found particularly compelling.

This is as far as my thinking takes me this morning. Feel free to comment below.

Blog Additions – My Books and DVDs

I’m not sure if anyone has noticed, but I added a couple of things on the sidebar to the right. A random selection from my book collection with an associated Amazon.com link will appear on the right, and similarly, another link for one of my DVD’s will appear under DVD. I don’t as yet have an Amazon associate ID, but then again, I probably don’t have very many readers either, so I doubt I will notice much. It’s mostly there just to give you guys an idea of the books that I read. I’ve got about twenty in the list so far, I’ll type in some more ISBN’s later and also do my DVD collection.

Enjoy!