And He Blogs

There is a big event coming soon that has to do with Apple and TV’s, and the unveiling is just hours away now. No, it’s not Apple’s music/media event with an anticipated new iTV device, it is the release at midnight August 31 of the new Plex Media Center. I’m a long way from Media Center 1.0, and have long since given up on Windows based home theater PC’s. I have been using a Mac Mini for over a year now and have used different media center software like Front Row (which comes with Macs, but is limited), and for a while, Boxee. But, I found that Boxee was just too clunky. I discovered Plex and liked it. It was updated a couple times and I liked it even more. It was missing a good media manager feature (which most media center software is missing). Back in May there was a sneak peak at code name Alexandria with…media management. Three and a half months later, it’s ready to go.

Now, they call it Plex/Nine, but it is actually version 0.9, so it’s still beta software. I do use it often and it’s the least frustrating media center software I’ve used. So besides media management, what do you get? First, it will read all of your movie files. That includes all my Handbrake ripped movies as well as the “raw” DVD rips of my video library. It seamlessly merges both types of files from a single directory and gives you a clean, attractive interface to view your collection. You also get the ability to watch your Netflix Instant Watch queue, view your Flickr photos, view YouTube videos, play your iTunes music, videos, and podcasts, along with many more services. It even plays my old catalog of DivX videos.

So the anticipation is killing me. I do have some anticipation for the Apple TV device and will be curious if they deliver a $99 device that has similar capabilities to Plex. I find it interesting where we are in computer history. We still have the HTPC/Media Center PC and then several set-top box media devices such as the Apple TV, Roku, Popbox, the Western Digital TV Media Players, and many more. It is similar to the market for traditional desktop/laptops and tablet(iPad)/netbooks. What’s going to be the best combination of features? The appified box (will Apple TV be iOS 4? Seems almost certain) vs. the full on OS box. To me the iPad et. al., and the iTV et. al. are just new markets in the computer world. How it all shakes out will be interesting. It definitely needs a good shake.

I’ve been reading and hearing a lot lately about new video products now that NAB is going on. NAB is the National Association of Broadcasters show in Las Vegas. I’m always interested in the new camcorders that get introduced. What is gaining in popularity are the h.264/MPEG4 AVC based solid-state memory card cameras. The format that they use is what is known as AVCHD. This relatively new MPEG4 format is being used in a wide variety of ways from DirectTV’s HD compression, to Blu-ray’s new HiDef disc technology, to cell phone video. The advantage of using h.264 (or any of those other names that get used) is that it results in a high quality picture in a smaller file size. For example a video using an MPEG2 format (as in a standard DVD) will require a file that is about twice the size of a file using h.264, at the same quality.

Now you’ve heard me blather on and on about that “other” MPEG4 codec known as DivX. It remains a popular format for online movies (legal, and well, not so legal), and a popular format that is include on many DVD players. Where it hasn’t caught fire is with web video, despite my excitement about it in the past. I had hopes of it being the Yang to Flash (FLV) video’s Yin, but it means a separate plugin to play DivX encoded video. Wouldn’t it be nice if a high quality format could be supported, along with Flash video, in one player/plugin.

Ever since last year, when Adobe announced the beta Flash player that supported not only FLV format, but also h.264, I had this “ideal” situation in the back of my mind. Now, as I’ve been working with video so much in the past few months, I’ve wished for a bit of consolidation. I was almost on to it when I discovered YouTube was encoding a high quality version (h.264) of their standard (FLV) video. I’ve also been wondering what format the “high quality” versions of the Great Lives videos would be, and what format would be used as the “archive” format. Finally, there was the question of how would I implement this on a website? The answer was right there. H.264!

The Jeroen Wijering Flash player is everywhere. Actually, it’s a media player, but it’s referred to as the FLV Media Player. Maybe that’s why it took me so long. It isn’t called the FLV/h.264 Media Player. So how easy was it to use? Well, thanks to Jeroen’s Setup Wizard, it was simple to do some testing. What source material to use, was the next question. How about the best looking video on the web, Apple’s Movie Trailers. I saved the trailers on my hard drive and then uploaded them back to my server, then I plugged the URL of the file into the Wizard. Wow! Gorgeous video! Alright, let’s get this into a blog post right away. So which plugin uses JW’s player? There are plenty including the WordTube and Anarchy plugins, but WordTube isn’t quite what I’m looking for because it is geared toward displaying a playlist of videos, and Anarchy uses the FLV Media Player, but not for h.264. It uses QuickTime. Don’t get me started on the crap that is QuickTime for Windows. No, the best choice for ease of use is the Viper’s Video Quicktags (VVQ). I made one modification to the Javascript code to give fullscreen capability and then produced a post using the FLV button. I filled in the URL to the h.264 video, supplied the width and height, and it was up and lookin’ good. Thanks to Jim Groom, VVQ is working in WordPress Multi-User, allowing anyone at umwblogs.org to take advantage of h.264.

The point here is that the h.264 video acts just like FLV. The file extension can end in .MOV or .MP4, as long as it is an h.264 encoded file, it will work in the FLV Media Player. I even did a test using Hi-Def content (another movie trailer). The file is 1280×544 pixels, weighing in at 85MB, but it does prove the concept. The whole scenario does require that you install the latest Flash Player plugins (version 9.0.115.0 or 9.0.124.0) on your system, but it’s available for PC, Mac, and Linux. Conceptually, if you have a beefy enough system, and a display to go along with it, you can watch videos that are 1920×1080 pixels. On other words, true 1080P HiDef. It’s a breakthrough that’s been around for a little while, but it holds great promise for having Home Theater quality video playing from a little old blog.

A project I just finished almost requires me to blog about a few of the workflow issues. Even if no one reads this it will go down in the archives as a “reference post”, so here goes. A faculty member here at UMW wanted to put speeches that his students recorded, on YouTube, and then create posts on a UMW Blogs site. Some of the speeches were recorded in the class, and some of them were recorded in DTLT’s “studio” (in quotes because you wouldn’t call it a studio if you saw it). The faculty member’s camcorder was a digital 8mm camera (with FireWire), so those were easily captured onto “The Beast” (our PC editing station). We used a Sony wireless lavaliere microphone setup to get good audio, as opposed to the standard noisy on-board mic that camcorders have. I set up a similar scene to the classroom in our “studio”.

So my first scare was the horrible crackling sound on the audio track for the videos shot in the classroom. Thankfully it was only on a couple of videos, and only on the right audio track, so it was easily muted in Adobe Audition. I’m using Adobe Premiere CS2 so it easily integrates with Audition, and switching out audio is simple. So a couple of tips to come away with:

• Use an external microphone.
• Use headphones connected to the camcorder to monitor the sound from the external microphone.

The “studio” setup was, as I said, similar to the classroom, though I did use a different camcorder (Canon HV-20) with a less noisy microphone jack and with the ability to manually change the audio levels (couldn’t find that on the faculty’s camcorder). Things were streamlined by recording directly to the hard drive (thereby skipping the video capture step) with a piece of software called DV Rack. Formerly a Serious Magic product, now known as On Location from Adobe, it records as standard DV (.avi) files. It did a basically flawless job, though it did provide another scare as some students talked louder and horrible clipping noises were present, but only when played back within DV Rack. The noises weren’t present when I played back the video in other media players.

I was very conscious of keeping the look of the classroom when I shot the video of the students in the “studio”, so I set the camera to auto white balance. We shot the videos in a very confined space. Despite giving the students directions to look straight into the camera, there were times when a few of them looked off camera at me at the end of their video.

Once I was done editing the videos, each clip was sent through the DivX Converter program to make smaller MPEG-4 versions of the videos to upload to YouTube. With these short videos, it is no longer a requirement to get them to smaller files as YouTube now accepts up to 1GB files. From a practical standpoint, unless you have a blazing fast Internet tube, you’re better off converting to smaller files and uploading those. The CS2 version of Premiere doesn’t allow me to save out as DivX (grrr!). The CS3 version does. Hence the use of DivX Converter, a $20 program that does batch conversion and is (now) quite stable.

Finally, it’s time to upload the videos. I had prior to this only uploaded videos one at a time. Was there a multiple video uploader for YouTube like there is for Flickr? Yep! It is PC only at this point, a Mac version is announced as on its way. YouTube is well known for sucking when it comes to video quality, but it adds other flexibilities that still make it a desirable place to serve your videos. Supposedly higher quality is coming in the near future. It’s the only thing left keeping from the title of super-uber-video-sharing site of all time.

All in all, it was a valuable education in using the popular video sharing site. Nothing like shooting 9 videos, adding to that another 6 shot in the classroom, and then 2 more that were self produced, all uploaded to YouTube to give you a real world test of the pros and cons of a service. Valuable lessons were learned, or reinforced.

Next!

Sorry, but I couldn’t just do an update in my original post on Falling Water. I wanted to highlight the fact that a DivX version is available for Fallingwater, The Movie . Which means you can watch this movie full screen, if you so choose. It is featured quite prominently on the video page, and I’ll just add that they said "Best Choice", not me.

This is short, but it’s a stunner. Done entirely with computer graphics, watch Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpiece Falling Water come alive. Thanks Apollo Pony!

UPDATE! The good news is that there is a DivX version. The bad news is that the video has exceeded their bandwidth.

Photo by paperdog2005

Memories from NMC 2007 are somewhat faded, but one of the most interesting sessions for me was the IUPUI presentation on “Searching for an Ideal Live Video Streaming Technology”. A promise was made to publish the detailed results of “the search” by the end of the summer. Well, it’s been delivered, and let’s give a huge round of applause to VLC! What is VLC? Well in a bit of Jim Groom style hyperbolic flare, it’s only the best program ever. I’m only half kidding. VLC stands for VideoLAN Client and it is a multi-purpose media player. The list of its capabilities is truly staggering.

First off it is completely cross platform. Windows (including Vista), Macintosh, AND Linux versions exist. Jim Groom highlighted this program in a post about Mac video tools a while back, so he can vouch for the viability of using this program on OS X. An interesting side note is that this program was actually developed as a student project in a Paris, France school, so it was literally born in the education world.

I promise a full article on all of its talents, but here is a short list. It plays virtually all of the media formats, audio and video, that you could think of. More importantly it plays files very efficiently. I have seen in the case of some high bitrate DivX files, DivX’s own player stutter with the playback, while VLC handled the same file with aplomb. The only major exception to format compatibility is the Real Media format, which is perhaps for licensing issues. That format is pretty dead, though UMW certainly dabbled in it. VLC also can function as a DVD player, playing discs back with full menus. It also has a great playlist feature (we employed at our recent freshman student orientation presentation). Throw it a directory of files, again video or audio, and it will play them back one-by-one. I use it to play DivX and FLV (like YouTube) files, my two favorite formats.

Finally, as the title of this post suggests, you can stream from your computer live video. That’s right it’s both a client and server program for live streaming video. As you can see, IUPUI thought very highly of it. Now how much would you pay for it? Did I mention that it was free? It’s versatility is unmatched and you will hear me speak of it often in my role as New Media Specialist here at the University of Mary Washington. The multi-faceted VLC.

I had seen this information a while back about what is the best video format to upload to get the best quality playback from YouTube videos. Well, obviously there is a (corny) video to go along with the information. Boy, that DivX sure gets around.

Just to sum up, save your video with the following attributes:

* MPEG4 (Divx, Xvid) format
* 320×240 640×480 resolution (*updated recommendation)
* MP3 audio
* 30 frames per second

I’m looking at a lot of video lately. Being in the vicinity of prolific film blogger Jim Groom isn’t helping in reducing the amount I’m viewing. I’ve got a bunch of projects I’m working on that involve homegrown video, from Chemistry instructional videos, to historic UMW videos, to soon to be webcast projects like the Great Lives series. That latter project is causing me to challenge my way of thinking and re-imagine what video on the web really means. When I first got involved in the Great Lives Webcasts, I thought long and hard about which technology to use. Many of the issues that existed then are still true today. Making the videos work well cross-platform was my overriding mission. Real Video was the most tolerable format to go with. Berkeley was also using this format, which is what UMW Webcasts were modeled on. Windows Media was awful or non-existent on the Mac, and QuickTime was awful on Windows. It’s still the case. What has changed is that Flash video (FLVs) has matured, and frankly revolutionized the online video world. Even Microsoft admitted it not too long ago.

So why am I not running full steam ahead with Flash video for everything? Well, for many things it’s great. YouTube lives by it. My blog is filled with it. Most users have the Flash plugin before they have anything else (98% is the percentage bandied about). Encoders are bordering on ubiquitous. The quality is quite good with comparable file sizes to the other platforms. It was the most pliable to work into an interactive format. Most of the video that is incorporated into the numerous graphical design intensive sites is Flash video.

So why am I hesitating? Well the presentation of Flash video isn’t all there. 320 by 240 pixels videos are fine for shorter projects (less than 20 minutes), but after that you need to start thinking in the home theater/big screen realm of video. That’s why I’m thinking a lot about Divx web delivery. Let me get the disadvantage out of the way straight off. File size. It’s not that Divx files are abnormally large, it’s that Home Theater quality sizes (640×480 and larger) are inescapably big. However, with a speedy broadband connection, the problem isn’t even noticeable. Divx has one of the best buffering schemes available, allowing you to seamlessly start watching a video while the rest of it downloads quietly in the background. The broadband issue WILL become less and less of a factor.

So what of this experience? Well if you clicked through on the picture above, or have seen my post of Dr. Pyckle and Mr. Pride, you can begin to see the possibilities. Not only can it play well in a bigger window, that’s just one of the viewers choices of viewing modes. Clicking on the full screen button or right-clicking the video and choosing fullscreen mode allows you to watch high-quality video on the big screen. At almost DVD quality. The Mac experience is somewhat weaker than the Windows experience in that you need to minimize the browser after going into fullscreen mode. The Divx Stage 6 site can provide you with more videos to sample the quality (UPDATE: Stage6 is, as they say, no longer with us).

One part of the experience that was immediately a hit with me was that using Firefox and viewing a Divx video led to a pleasant, quick, and painless plugin download. And, of course, once it’s done the first time, you’re done. More testing needs to be done (I invite you all to test and leave comments) and while there is no Linux player available yet, there are (less elegant) solutions. Go watch some Divx movies on the web and see what you think. At least one viewer of my blog is beginning to experiment with it, and another is beginning to see the light.

I’ve touted DivX in the past, and you can’t go very long without hearing someone mention YouTube this or that. Well, for a while now, DivX has had a YouTube-like site called Stage 6, where they feature videos that are presented in the DivX format (you’ll need the DivX web player to see them). YouTube has not been short on content worth watching, though original content is not necessarily their forte. The Stage 6 site, while not nearly a YouTube, offers up an original film called In This Corner. It’s a short film set in the year 1988 and while maybe not Oscar-worthy, it does have a good combination of humor, suspense, and triumph, enough to make it well worth your time (did I also mention teenage angst and Nintendo).

Head . . .Full . . . of . . . Stuff. Must . . . jettison . . . information. Head . . . about . . . to . . . explode . . .

People ask me what I’m up to lately. Here are a couple of items from today.

Taking pictures of Jerry leading the THEA435 class on Wikis:

Getting cool MP3 player plugins installed (Click Play button to listen to music):

Music “Cold Cloth and an Ice Pack” by Derek K. Miller. Creative Commons license.

Also, working with DivX, helping build an intranet, thinking about film projects, blogging three times a week, testing out new digital cameras, testing out digital video cameras, welcoming students to online forums for a Biology class, etc.

People ask me if I like my job. You betcha!