And He Blogs

Mark Cuban has lots of ideas. His best one was back in the late ’90s when he decided to create a webcasting business that was ultimately sold for millions of dollars to Yahoo! Cuban may well have another great idea to save Internet video, but I’ll leave commenting on his ideas to a possible future post. Mark should know something about HD video. He is the Chairman of HDNet, a cable television network that broadcasts exclusively in high definition (HD).

HDNet is one of the few networks that has original HD programming, and by that I mean an independent network broadcasting exclusively in HD. HDNet’s Dan Rather Reports is an example of original HD programming. Depending on who your cable provider is, you may or may not have HDNet available to you. Without getting into the sordid details about why, you likely will have either HDNet or a network known as Mojo available with your cable or satellite provider, or with fiber-optic systems such as Verizon’s FiOS, or AT&T’s U-verse.

So Mark Cuban started a business and is one of the leaders of a company that produces HD video. It is with that knowledge that makes this statement so confusing:

100pct (sic) of the internet video that you see offered on the net as HD, is not HD. Plain and simple.

He then offers the following definition (of sorts):

What is HD video ? HD Vidoe (sic) is video you can watch on a screen of ANY size and say…”that looks good, almost as good as it can get “.

My purpose here is not to picks nits, but if that is his definition of HD video, then by who’s standard do we define “looks good” and “as good as it can get”? Look, there are lots of sites, services, and networks trying to distribute HD video on the Internet, or at least what they self-define as HD video. I should also point out that high definition video on the web is mostly a buzzword, and Cuban’s definition doesn’t help.

Here, let me define HD video. It is digital video that is represented by the minimum dimensions of 1280×720 pixels (720p). Now was that so hard? You can also take a look at the Wikipedia entry for high definition video for many more details. Having tendered those definitions, it should also be said that like all things digital, there is a quality factor that can affect how good HD video looks.  It is generally represented by what is known as bit rate. It is also something that most directly relates to the fudge factor that gets used on some supposed HD video sites. Again, the details start to get way too complicated in terms of what makes good (and bad) HD video, so let’s just stop before we hurt ourselves.

What makes Cuban so wrong is that there are good, and successful, attempts at providing HD video through the web. The screen grab at the top of this post is from one of these Internet TV networks called Revision3. The show is called Tekzilla, and by every measurement that I know of it is high definition. The basic specs of the video are, 1280×720 pixels (again 720p), h.264 video codec, AAC audio. It’s video quality that I’ve raved about before.

There’s a great way to check out more HD content by using software called Miro. It is similar to iTunes, but geared toward online video, and it provides good quality HD programming. If you check out their Miro Guide, you can check out some of the HD choices. I use it on my home theater PC which is connected to my Pioneer Plasma and it looks good, almost as good as it can get. Oh, sorry. That definition is taken. So what’s with Cuban’s 100% not HD statement? Is it because it’s not Blu-ray quality? Well, it will be a while before we are downloading 20GB files to watch on our HDTVs. Is it because it isn’t the same quality as HDNet? Well, no, Tekzilla probably doesn’t use XDCAM HD (cameras that still sell for over $20,000). However, it looks as good as a lot of the broadcast HD content out there, because it not further compressed by the cable or satellite company. All of this technology (do I have to say it?) is constantly improving. Codecs are being developed that will surpass what we have today that will deliver higher quality at equivalent bit rates. Cuban’s standard sounds like something that we may never achieve, and when it comes down to the basic definition of HD video, he’s wrong.

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I thought about several ways to begin this post, and I was hoping the title wouldn’t scare people off thinking that I was going to vent. No, it’s not that kind of air. It’s actually Adobe’s AIR, or Adobe Integrated Runtime (yes, I’ll just use AIR from now on). AIR has actually been around for well over a year now. I first used it at the 2007 Faculty Academy here at UMW for a program called Twittercamp, which is a program that would aggregate “tweets” from Twitter and display them on a screen (preferably a large flat panel screen). Alan Levine and I have been using it for the conferences we’ve been involved in the past two years, including this year’s Faculty Academy and the NMC event in Princeton. AIR programs function like Flash programs do on the web, only you download them to your computer. You first need the Adobe AIR “runtime” program, then you can install and use all of the AIR apps you want, even use them simultaneously. There’s no need to open a web browser to use these programs.

The question for a while now has been is it worth downloading the AIR “player” and then installing the individual programs? Is there anything compelling out there to use? I can now say that it’s a definitive YES! The point of these programs is that they are small, and quickly installed. To use the programs, they require that you have a live connection to the Internet, but they function on the idea of working “in the cloud“. So after you get Adobe AIR installed on your computer, go install the following programs:

TweetDeck - I’m getting the feeling that this is going to be the next “must have” program, next to using Twitter of course. TweetDeck is one of the many (thousands?) Twitter intermediaries that pull in Twitter posts (tweets) and display them in a unique way. It’s still in early beta (0.151b as of this writing), but it already has some uniquely great features. It allows you to get a handle on how tweets get viewed. TweetDeck sets up as many columns as you need to view your tweets how you want to. The first column is usually the “all tweets” column, but you can move the columns around. You can set up groups by picking individuals that you follow and giving that group a name. Then you see their tweets in another column. You can create another column that is a search term. I used the term “edupunk” and now I get a column that updates automatically with tweets that have the word edupunk in them. You can have still more columns with replies to you, or direct messages. A recent new feature is the ability to collapse the view to a single column. I expect great things from this program.

Adobe Media Player - Now you might be saying, “who needs another media player?”, and you’re right. However, this is well done, and if you use Adobe software on a regular basis, there is enough Adobe content to make it worth it. Add to that clips from TV shows and some “HiDef” content, and it makes for a worthwhile download.

Destroy Flickr - OK, I don’t get why there’s the hostile name because DF is all about a pretty interface for viewing Flickr photos. Photos just look better on a dark neutral grey background, as opposed to Flickr’s all too white web page. Again, it’s a quick install of an Adobe AIR program and you have the many viewing options, called canvases. It remembers where you have been and saves those views in a history, called workspaces. You also have control of uploading and downloading photos to and from your Flickr account. UPDATE: Note the comment from the creator of DestroyFlickr, Jonnie Hallman, below. I got the name wrong on the first go-round. Sorry!

If you want to check out other AIR applications go to freshAIRapps and see just what the potential for the AIR platform is. Note: Because of a current negotiation with Adobe of the use of AIR in their website’s domain, another location for the FreshAIRApps may be at Refreshingapps.com.

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I just got done re-watching Sir Ken Robinson’s terrific TED Talk on creativity in education. Here is an update that expands upon creativity by talking about the power of innovation, and how we systematically suppress it in our classrooms. There IS an education revolution taking place and it is what makes my job one that gets me excited to go to work on Monday mornings. I’ll have more on these ideas of creativity and innovation soon (with thoughts of the neonatal EDUPUNK movement), but I wanted this video to make the rounds as soon as possible.

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Just a quick post on a new discovery - Photoshop tutorials from a deeply disturbed individual entitled “You Suck at Photoshop“. Definitely PG-13 and abusive, but very funny - and yet instructional.

UPDATE: YSAP returns for “Season 2″ on June 27!

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I usually consider myself a video guy, as well as an audio and imaging guy too. You know a New Media Specialist. So a new document publishing service shouldn’t deserve much of my attention. Unless, of course, the system enables the use of video in documents. Well, enter Calameo into the conversation and you might see why I’m excited. First, what Calameo does is allow you to share documents online, just like Flickr for photos and YouTube for videos. You can upload Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, or the equivalent in Open Office documents. PDFs and text files are also allowed. You can make your documents public or private. Once you uploaded a few documents, your Calameo home page will have that familiar file sharing look to it (again, think Flickr or YouTube). From here you have lots of possibilities to share you documents. You can embed thumbnail versions in web pages or you can invite friends via email to view your documents. There’s even a direct publishing link to aggregation services like Delicious. An RSS feed of your publications is also available.

But now for the reason, I am excited. You can embed Flash (FLV) video within documents. You can also embed Flash animations or MP3s as well. However, with video you can create a flexible document that offers all of the advantages of an online document with a video component that helps the document come alive. Viewers can then print out the document (minus the video, of course) and have a hard copy of the how-to instructions, report, or term paper (to offer some examples).

The documents use Flash technology and the viewing of an online document gives a much better experience than a PDF in Adobe Acrobat. You can zoom in and get a more detailed view, and then the view follows your mouse around the screen. It’s a much more intuitive way to see a document online and much more of a pleasure. Videos embedded in pages can be played automatically, or started with a click of the play button (which can get somewhat obscured because the controls are a bit faint). The service is in beta, but you can sign up and get an account right away. As usual I blew by the terms of service so you may want to read them before you find out you are giving away the rights to your document. There is, however, a section to add a Creative Commons license to your publications. They seem to have thought of most everything. Much more play by yours truly is in store for this service, but I can see educators who might want to share documents in a more flexible way, taking advantage of this service.

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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.

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If you said blogging, you win a prize. At least in my warped mind. Flickr video only allows 90 seconds worth of whatever you’ve got. Looks like Darcy’s reaction was this:

My reaction is to wait and see. Maybe the 1 minute 30 limit will be like Twitter’s 140 character limit. Concise and yet thought provoking. More than a sound bite, but less than a diatribe. Say it in 90 clicks or don’t say it at all. It’s a new Flickr era!

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I AM a “New Breed”, baby!

Watch Now:

 Rush HD [0:31m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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The world of video sharing websites is changing rapidly. YouTube and its competitors are trying to distinguish themselves by constantly improving their services, so we should see great progress in terms of quality of video and features that these sites offer. My recent quest has been to find the best options for hosted screencasts. The makers of my screencasting tool of choice, Camtasia, offer a (pay) service to host the videos at a site called screencast.com. Here you can host the higher quality, and higher resolution (larger), SWF files that really make screencasts look their best. You also can host those high quality screencasts on your own hosting service, provided you have that little extra know how to get them up and streaming. There is an SWF version of the screencast represented in the above photo available.

The latest version of Camtasia also gives the option of outputting a blog-friendly version of the screencast that works well for embedding into a blog post. However, if you want to give your screencasts a wider audience, you may want to consider YouTube or other video sharing services. Here are a few things you should know about sharing your screencasts online.

The Secret High-Quality YouTube Hack

This really isn’t a secret any more, but YouTube is experimenting with higher quality videos. YouTube announced that it would offer higher quality versions of video, one reason being so that they can accommodate the Apple iPhone and Apple TV, which don’t play Flash video. The video format that is used is a variant of MPEG-4 known as h.264. Adobe recently upgraded their Flash player to play h.264 video in addition to Flash video (FLV). The h.264 versions of the video will give the Apple TV users a more TV friendly experience because it is higher resolution.

To see the higher quality version videos on YouTube you need to add an extra little bit of text to the URL of a YouTube video. Whatever the URL is, add &fmt=18 to the end of the URL. If that doesn’t work, you can try &fmt=6. To see the screencast represented by the photo above at high quality resolution, go to:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=O-W-3OIrJKg&fmt=18

Compare that with the low quality version that is located by using the traditional URL (without the &fmt=18):

http://youtube.com/watch?v=O-W-3OIrJKg

The obvious benefit to the high quality version is that the text is much sharper. The downside is that it will take longer to download to a user’s machine (it’s roughly twice the size). You also lose a bit of the “instant seeking” ability. With a standard YouTube video (the Flash version) you can start watching at any point by moving the play head to the position that you wish. You won’t be able to do that with the h.264 version until it downloads entirely to your computer.

You can click on the images below to compare side-by-side screenshots.

Other Video Sharing Sites

I experimented superficially with some other video sharing sites, and I can recommend two that give good quality encoding of screencasts. One is Blip.tv, which is my personal favorite video sharing/TV channel service. Blip.tv’s selling point, besides the myriad of options to publish, cross-post, distribute, advertise, etc., is that they use the higher quality On2 codec for Flash video. I can also customize a player to match a given blog, and maximize the window to fit in the space that a given WordPress theme provides.

The other site that impressed me was Vimeo. This is one of the first sites to offer HD Flash video, and while I didn’t try to upload the video at HD resolutions, the video quality is quite good at the standard setting. You also can view the video full screen and while the artifacts of compression are more noticeable, you get an acceptable quality video to watch. Blip.tv has the full screen capability as well, but I couldn’t get it to work when I embedded the video in a blog post. Lots more testing yet to do, but so far some cool things out there to report. More to come.

Here is the Blip.tv version:

Here is the Vimeo version:

Install Flickr Photo Gallery Plugin in UMWBlogs from Andy Rush on Vimeo.

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It’s a deal I can’t pass up. $30 plus tax for the complete set of Planet Earth in hi-def! “But Andy”, you are saying, “Isn’t HD-DVD that dead format?” Yes, it’s dead. Gone the way of the dodo. Gone the way of Betamax, but wait. It’s not betamax. It’s a digital format. I’m stating the obvious, or maybe I’m not, but it’s an important point to be made now that HD-DVD is dead, dead, dead. I recently picked up something that can help. It’s an LG GGW-H20L Blu-ray burner. It also reads Blu-ray and HD-DVD discs. OK, so no, I will not be transferring my HD-DVD discs to Blu-ray discs. It’s possible, but my time is much more valuable than that. I can, however, place the movies on my hard drive. Just like there are programs that can get the video files off of standard DVDs, they also exist for HD-DVD (and Blu-ray). Now, legally, you can only extract (rip) the video files from un-encrypted discs (copyright is a separate issue). That would eliminate all of the commercially produced DVD, HD-DVD, and Blu-ray discs. Exceptions have been made, but the fact remains that just breaking the encryption of these discs is illegal.

Now that HD-DVD is dead, the DMCA/encryption issue is less of a worry to me. Nuff said. My plan is to play the discs from the existing player that I have, a Toshiba HD-A1. However, I also have the LG drive in a computer that is hooked into my home theater system, so I essentially have a combo Blu-ray/HD-DVD player. In a previous post, I predicted that once the war was over (it is), combo players might be the way to go. It’s looking more like HD-DVD will just vaporize. So back to the digital nature of the HD-DVD format, these movies can be played from your hard drive using the combination of decryption software and player software such as Nero Showtime or Power DVD, and it’s certainly a convenient way to watch movies. So my Planet Earth disc will play, in the near future, on my HD-DVD player(s). In the distant future, the digital file of Planet Earth will play from whatever storage device is current. Terabyte hard drives will be cheap and new storage technology is just around the corner that will be capable of storing hundreds on HD quality movies as digital files. Check out the TeraDisc and the Holographic Versatile Disc for some of the possible successors to DVD and HD-DVD data storage.

Boy, that was a long justification for buying obsolescence.

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