North Star Labs

I cooked dinner for myself today and sat down at the table looking forward to streaming The Daily Show or The Colbert Report on Hulu since there’s no way I’m paying $65 a month for cable TV. As it turns out, there haven’t been any new episodes in awhile, and I like my fake news fresh off the wire, so I decided to catch up on my other fake news addiction; aggregated blog rss feeds.

I came across the TED talk for today, which is Michell Obama. Great speech by the way, check it out at: http://www.ted.com/talks/michelle_obama.html. The streaming video quality left something to be desired, so I looked around and found the HD podcast URL at podcasters.tv.

This works well with iTunes, and MediaLink is able to copy the movie file from my MacBook pro, but for some reason streaming the video usually quits part way through playback with an obscure error code.

I have my OpenSolaris, Intel Atom based file server running on a gigabit network connected up to the Playstation 3 and HDTV using MediaLink, so I decided to look for some unix tool to download the podcast which could easily be run from cron.

After some searching and research into different options, I downloaded Peapod, a wonderful python command line application, and gave it a whirl.

To my complete satisfaction, peapod runs from my home directory without requiring any piece of itself being installed into the system. The only missing dependency I ran into was urlgrabber for python 2.4. Luckily, I have easy_install installed so it was a simple matter of:
pfexec /usr/bin/easy_install-2.4 urlgrabber
Once urlgrabber was installed, setup of the podcast client was a breeze:

jmccune@rain:~$ cd ~/bin
jmccune@rain:~/bin/$ ln -s ../apps/peapod/peapod.py peapod
jmccune@rain:~/bin/$ cd ~
jmccune@rain:~$ peapod
Creating user directory: /home/jmccune/.peapod
Created a default configuration file in :
/home/jmccune/.peapod/peapod.xml
Please edit this file to contain your feeds and options.

I commented out the sample podcast and added TED in HD.
(Note: I found the feed URL by doing a “Get Info”, or clicking on the little i next to the podcast title in the podcast section of iTunes.)

For the title I made it “TED Talks (HD)” and for the URL, I used http://feeds.feedburner.com/TedtalksHD.

Finally, running peapod simply works.

jmccune@rain:~$ peapod
...Spawning thread 0 for feed url http://feeds.feedburner.com/TedtalksHD
Fetching feed for TED Talks (HD)
Downloading TED Talks (HD) -- http://video.ted.com/talks/podcast/MichelleObama_2009P_480.mp4
Trackname MichelleObama_2009P_480.mp4
Savename /export/dozer/podcasts/jmccune/TED Talks (HD)/MichelleObama_2009P_480.mp4
Mime-type video/mp4


This will be added to cron to run every day a few hours before I get home from work, and MediaTomb should pickup the new content.

And now to figure out how to manually kick off a MediaTomb scan of the folder once downloading is complete.

Here are some decent feeds I’ve found so far:

peapod --addnew=http://www.hbo.com/podcasts/billmaher/podcast.xml --title="Bill Maher"


Please post more video feed URL’s, especially 720p and higher, in the comments if you have some good video podcasts worth watching on my TV.

As a system administrator with a very large music collection, I’ve always been mildly irritated at the difficulty accessing my “master” music library while away from home.

Enter Simply Media a free, small application which does just as the name promises.

My iTunes library back home just shows up in my shared iTunes listing, regardless of where I am. No firewall hackery, nothing to configure, it just works, and works well.

The iTunes integration is fantastic.

I noticed in my RSS feeds recently that the new version of the Adobe Flash Player browser plug-in supports H.264/MPEG-4 AVC and AAC audio, but I didn’t think much of it at the time. As it turns out, I’m really happy that Adobe supports standard MP4 files accessible through plain HTTP, as it cuts out the proprietary Flash Video (FLV) format.

Macs are wonderful when creating rich media since they now ship with iMovie, and relatively inexpensive tools such as ProfCast are out there. This rich media derives a lot of value from being represented in standard formats such as MPEG-4 AVC (H.264) video, and AAC audio, all rolled up into the standard MP4 container. However, it turns out to be incredibly difficult to publish this standards-compliant media to a web page player that “just works” like Youtube.com.

Until now, the only viable way to embed this content in a web site was to use the quicktime plug-in, which is a bit heavy for the task. With the most recent versions of Flash Player 9, we now can directly play high quality videos, in a standard format, produced with free tools.

Here’s an example using Jeroen Wijering’s excellent, and free (Creative Common’s Licensed) Flash Video Player. Check out how nice “The Machine is Us/ing Us” looks, compared to the Youtube version at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE

The code for this is relatively simple, though a bit of a pain to get formatted correctly. And by “bit” I mean, it took me hours. If I start to do more video content, I’ll definitely look into a plug-in so the blog handles these details.

<embed src="/blog/flvplayer.swf">
  allowfullscreen="true"
  allowscriptaccess="always"
  flashvars="&displayheight=350&file=/blog/media/WeschWeb2v3.mp4&width=420&height=315"
  align="middle" height="315" width="420" />

The video is a conversion from a high quality Quicktime file to standard H.264/AAC video.

Hopefully we’ll start to see higher quality videos up on Youtube now. In the meantime, you’re able to do it yourself if you need to publish higher quality video in an easily accessible manner.

This is a bit less technical than my usual posts, but I’ve had the opportunity to test drive the closed beta of Grand Central, and I have to say… It’s features are quite incredible. In particular, I’ve lived without a land line phone for quite a few years now, and I have to admit; it’s been a real step backwards in terms of quality of service. The cell network just isn’t nearly as reliable as traditional copper has been.

Now, what I’m about to mention isn’t a huge leap forward in reliability, but it at least dramatically increases the chances of reaching me and holding a clear conversation. Grand Central is basically a phone de-multiplexer, giving you a new phone number and ringing all of your existing phone numbers simultaneously when it’s called. In addition, it works with Gizmo Project, similar to Skype, allowing you to receive incoming telephone calls on your computer. Toss in a cheap pair of ear bud headphones, and you’ve got yourself a decent alternative to a land line telephone and a much nicer sounding replacement to a cell phone.

Grand central has a lot of other features, like warm transferring calls between any of your extensions. I was able to transfer a live conversation from my MacBook over to my cell phone, over to my office line, and back to my MacBook, all without dropping the call. Visual voice mail, call recording, and much more make this a really convenient service.