Andrea Trasatti's tech notes and more » Video

Monitoring Streaming sessions

Andrea — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 17:34:00 +0000

When testing mobile devices and media streams you need to monitor quite a few things to discover if it’s the device, the network, your server, your media file or something else that fails. Here is a screenshot of my desktop at the moment.

Is transcoding a crime?

Andrea — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 09:10:00 +0000

I was reading my RSS feed and of course this news item from TechCrunch caught my eye, Transcoding Is Not A Crime, Says Court In Veoh Porn Case (includes longer excerpt from the ruling and a video).

I was initially surprised that TechCrunch spoke about transcoders for mobile sites (remember Novarra, InfoGin, Openweb, etc?) and in fact they are talking about video and flash. The ruling is interesting and here is how it starts:

Here, Veoh has simply established a system whereby software automatically processes user-submitted content and recasts it in a format that is readily accessible to its users. Veoh preselects the software parameters for the process from a range of default values set by the thirdparty software.

The topic is very different, but if you read this text and applied it word-by-word to what proxy transcoders do, it would still make sense. So I wonder (and I’m not a lawyer by far), will this ruling also apply to mobile proxies?

DISCLAIMER: I agree this is extreme, but not entirely impossible.

Video in Flashlite

Andrea — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 16:14:00 +0000

YouTube was a massive success, I guess it doesn’t take a genius to think that there are many companies trying to get the same success on the mobile and I actually think that on the mobile it would be an even bigger success, especially once every mobile will be able to upload video files.

Well, while we wait for all the mobile browsers to reach that point (and some are already capable of this!), it’s probably good to get started with Flashlite. Here’s a free seminar that will be available online, only on 18 September 2007.

Embedding Video and Sound in Flash Lite

Apple’s iTV

Andrea — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 16:08:00 +0000

Interesting article from Roughly Drafted about Apple’s iTV and specifically about the fact that strangely enough Apple has pre-announced a product that will be available in 4 to 6 months from now.

I agree with the idea that 802.11n is probably needed for the iTV to be successful, but I also think that it’s another way to let the majors know that Apple is serious about video downloads. It’s another way to say “Hey, you should join iTMS, because we’re going to broadcast your movies directly on TV, so call us if you want to be there”.