Web & Technology : The Accidental Essayist

Cori’s foal by Heinse 354 is due May 13, one week from today. But that mare is just about ready to foal. Last night I was watching the monitor and ran down to the barn at 2am, sure the baby was on its way. But, false alarm. Cori is staring to shuffle her back feet and move around as the baby positions itself. Must feel really awkward. So when will it happen? Not sure, but I have to believe the next night or so.

Meanwhile, setting up a camera in the new barn has been an adventure. My neighbor and ISP provider Edwin kindly came down and set up a radio that wirelessly gets a radio signal from the house.

This brings the internet to the barn. He also set up an internet network camera for the foaling stall. One little problem though – the camera does not work in low light conditions and since the foal will be most likely born at night, this has been problematic.

Last night I tried something a bit different. I bought a little laptop webcam, but a really good one in low light – the Logitech Quickcam Pro 9000. Hooked that up to a teeny netbook computer and put it all up in the barn, taking my new internet connection and plugging it into the netbook. The netbook is perched on a shelf above the wash stall and the webcam is leaning over the top of the wash stall, peering down into the foaling stall. Pictures below. Click for a larger image.

The Logitech webcam is simply incredible. I cannot believe the quality of the image even in the low light. And there are a number of settings to make it even better.

I was able to use ustream.tv to stream the webcam image to the internet so I could watch it from my house last night. And you know, this worked really well! The image is pixelated – a limitation of ustream – but I may even been able to improve on that. The point is, I am not able to see my mare in her stall. And anyone with an internet connection and any web browser would be able to see her too.

Let’s hope she has that baby tonight. I would like to get some decent sleep this week.

Basic Video Processing for the Web

I recently went on a vacation overseas to attend, yes, a horse event. I wanted to be able to take short videos while I was there, use my new netbook (aka “teeny PC”) to process the video, then upload the results to my personal blog. All without much bandwidth. Thus began my journey into video processing for the web. Here are the interesting tidbits I discovered.

1. Camcorder (or camera) video files vary in format

On my trip I took a Canon Vixia HG20 camcorder (which records in HD – High Definition), and a Canon SD 800 powershot pocket camera. The pocket camera can also record short video. Both devices have the ability to record to the high capacity removable cards – SDHC. Since SDHC is small and fast, and since my netbook also has an SDHC slot, this was perfect. In fact, the SDHC worked out so well that I highly recommend that folks looking for a new camcorder make sure their pick has an SDHC slot.

High Definition files for the Canon have an MTS extension (for Sony, the extention is M2TS, but this seems to be the same as MTS). The pocket camera stored the file in AVI format. AVI is actually a “wrapper” and it turned out the Canon version is a bit of an oddball. Not all programs could read/play this file.

2. For the web, you need a web-friendly file format, and a web-friendly file size

In either case – MTS or AVI – the files are quite large. Much too large for the web. For example, a 2 minute video in low quality MTS was nearly 100Mb in size! Also, though some video engines (Youtube, flickr, etc.) can process and play uploaded AVI files, I wanted to place the videos directly on my blog. So I needed small files and the files needed to be in a web-friendly format.

Presently, two of the more popular formats for the web are:

FLV – a flash video file, recognized by flash players. FLV is small in size and decent quality. Also, flash players reside on most browsers. So if my blog shows an FLV file, it is likely the user will be able to see the file.
H.264 or MP4 – H.264 is a format used on many ipods and Apple TV. Like FLV this is small in size and with good quality (arguably better than FLV). MP4 is similar and is sometimes considered interchangeable with H.264. However, they are ot the same format and are not interchangeable. The ubiquitous Flash player can play these file formats, but the user needs to be on one of the newer versions of the Flash player, or the file will not be recognized.

3. To get the file into FLV or MP4 (or H.264), you need to convert the file

There are a number of file converters available. They range in price from free on up. Many are not (yet) well equipped to properly convert the newer high def formats (such as MTS). I also found that many cannot conver the Canon AVI file either. I finally found a relatively inexpensive program that provided the speed and flexibility I needed on my Windows-based netbook. The program is called XiliSoft Video Converter Ultimate (http://www.xilisoft.com/). I was very pleased with how it handled conversion from both the MTS file and from the AVI. It created H.264 and MP4 files very well. I was less pleased with the FLV output; I did not care for the large size created (640×480) nor the quality.

Since I ultimately chose to use FLV files, I decided to use another converter to take the files from H.264 to FLV. I used a free program called WinFF (http://winff.org). Again, I have been quite pleased.

Using these two programs I successfully converted 100Mb MTS files down to 5Mb FLV files. Not bad! I was sure to keep my original files. They play quite well on the big screen TV.

4. If true editing is desired, you need a real editing program. Not just a converter.

For my purposes, I did not need to edit the files. But often it is desired to really direct a piece, adding audio tracks, transitions, slow motion, menus, chapters, etc. This is not possible with a simple converter – a full editing program is required. Personally, I use Adobe Premiere Elements. Final Cut (on the Mac) is also a valid option, as are a variety of other programs. These full featured programs can input your native files, allow you to do all sorts of work on them, and then output/convert the final product to a variety of formats. No other video converter needed. The programs are not necessarily inexpensive, however, and many really do not handle HD files very well. At least not yet.

5. If you wish to host your own files, you need a way to serve them to your website

Player: I did not wish to use youtube or some other commercial server for my videos. I wanted more control and the ability to have play lists. So I installed an FLV player from longtail video (http://www.longtailvideo.com) on my webserver. It took a little know how and a bit of reading to get the player configured properly, but I really love the flexibility the player gives me.

6. For your own site, you also need streaming

If you do not have streaming of the video, it is quite likely that the video will stop and start incessantly, which is very irritating to watch. To achieve streaming you need to do the following:

Make sure your video file has the proper meta data so a streaming engine knows what to do with it. The process of putting in this information is called “meta data injection” and fortunately there are free programs that can handle this for you. To meta data inject FLV files you can use FLVMDI (http://www.buraks.com/flvmdi/) if you are looking for a client side solution, YAMDI (http://yamdi.sourceforge.net/) if you prefer a server side solution. To inject MP4 files, you might want to try Metadata Mover from rndware (http://rndware.info/content/MetadataMover). These are products I used and they worked well for me, but others are available as well.
Your website has to stream the files. Well, obviously. This is not quite as simple as it sounds. Most website use non-streaming webservers, such as Apache. There are servers that stream (for example, lighttpd) but many people do not have the expertise, authority nor desire to switch out the webserver. Another option is to use a program which, in essence, serves up the video as if eth video is actually streaming. This is what I chose to do, and installed a program called XMOOV.PHP and configured this to handle the streaming for me. One limitation of XMOOV.PHP is that it does not rpesently work properly for MP4 files. And therefore, I used FLV files on my site. You can learn more about XMOOV.PHP from the LongTail Video forums (http://www.longtailvideo.com/support/forum)

Using all these techniques and tools I was able to fairly easily post regular blog entries with video from my trip. Upon my return I compiled some of the key videos into a playlist and my FLV player handled this quite well. The streaming is not perfect, especially on slow connections, but it is not bad. I have to say, though frustrating at first, this ended up being a lot of fun and I look forward to learning more.

An example of the player and some of the videos can be found on my personal blog here: http://accidentalessayist.net/friesian-stallion-videos/

Playing with computer gadgets

A lot of technical experimentation has been going on in the house lately. We’re learning about the new HD camcorder, hooking up the DVD player to the internet over a wireless bridge, and watching netflix movies instantly over the internet.

Tonight we went one step further and connected the Macbook to the LCD TV and our speaker system. The Macbook is getting its feed over a wireless internet connection (and, in fact, the internet connection into the house is wireless as well). The Macbook thinks the TV is a 2nd monitor and the speaker system is just a set of headphones. We pulled up netflix and started a video stream of a movie. Voila – it is playing on the big screen TV and it sounds darned good too! The picture is slightly pixelated, but just slightly. It is really no worse than a non-HD picture.

So now we can enjoy netflix movies on the big screen TV whenever we feel like it.

I cannot believe how fast technology is changing and progressing. It is like magic.

Oooh new technology!

I just love all the new hardware and software that comes out constantly. Things change so fast you can hardly keep up. I have a lot of new toys I sam going to be playing with soon. I want to change the theme for this blog, for example. Who know what it will look like.

Got a new netbook today and I am using it now. I cannot believe all the power in such a teeny package – just what I have been wanting for travel.

New camcorder coming next week. What will those movies look like? It is a never ending saga. What fun!

Experimenting with WP 2.5. I must say, this is really fun

Well, I had a super busy weekend – everything from training a new customer in how to user her CMS to update her site, to stringing more fencing, to doing my taxes. And a big family event/party occurred in there as well!

Whenever I would get a spare minute I would sneak over to my laptop to work more on playing with WordPress 2.5, the new theme I bought (Revolution Pro Media, which will need a lot of “pretty it up” work, but has wonderful built in functionality), and the Tanbark Acres posts, which I have migrated over to my development platform.

Anyhow, the magic of these easy to use tools struck me as I thought to myself “I wonder how I can have a gallery of the youtube videos I have created?” Did a google search and found a plugin, installed it, created the page in WP and BOOM there was my gallery. It took all of maybe 5 minutes.

This is powerful stuff and revolutionizes not only blogging, but software development in general. We are truly getting to the point where the secret to good applications will be the business analysis (understanding what the customer wants/needs), graphic design, usability and customer support. The programming will involve knowing where to find the right applets and how to integrate them together seamlessly. It is like building a car… the engine comes from one place, the brakes from another, the seats from another. We, as buyers, do not care. We care about the quality of the overall car, the looks, the price, the ease of use. But we do not care whether or not car manufacturer XYZ built all the parts from scratch in the XYZ factory. In fact, we know that if this were the case, the blooming car would be outrageously expensive and probably not as good a quality. We’d rather have a car that may be assembled from different manufacturer’s components. Of course, it would be nice if the components were best of breed, whether the components be brakes, sound system, transmission or whatever. This is the way to build a great and affordable car.

And such an integration strategy is [finally] becoming the way of software (well, at least web) applications as well.