Helpless Helper Monkeys

I suppose a few of my colleagues might not be familiar with The Simpsons tv show and the character Mojo the Helper Monkey.  I had hoped to embed a clip from the web, but it seems that either the Fox people are doing a decent job keeping their copyrighted content off the free web video sites or perhaps Mojo’s episode isn’t as funny as I thought it was…Maybe a little of both.  But I suppose I should explain how Mojo came to mind in the first place.

I’m hanging out at the parent’s place this evening and after scouring the web for quite some time I’ve yet to actually find an embedded Quicktime video outside of an Apple or affiliated site.  I even enlisted the help of my 3 adopted siblings, ages 10, 11, and 15 to act as Helper Monkeys, Oompa Loompas, Robins to my Batmans, Shortrounds to my Indiana Jones (that’s all the sidekick characters I can think of right now).  Yet despite their familiarity and skill surfing the web, they could only find Flash videos…”Everything’s an Adobe video!” they repeatedly complained.  I suppose there is some educational value in such whining.  I am sure there must be some embedded QT videos out there, but this exercise clearly shows the prevalence of Flash. 

Before I sent my sidekicks on their fruitless quest they suggested I simply visit Apple or Itunes to which I replied that while not technically cheating, doing so wouldn’t allow me to add much to a future class discussion.  Well perhaps I should have listened to them.  While I certainly don’t march in lockstep behind Bill Gates, I’ve especially tried to avoid being sucked into the I-everything Mac world.  Maybe I’ve seen the Matrix, the Terminator, and 2001 A Space Odyssey too many times.  But I trudge onto apple.com/quicktime but I didn’t readily see any embedded QT files.  I did check out their HD gallery and was impressed by the quality of the videos at various relatively small file sizes, though they were pop-ups instead of embedded.  However I did find an amusing, but really quite annoying glitch…I selected a video file of about 500 megs and it opened and started to stream, but rather slowly, though I expected that.  So I paused it to prevent it from catching up to the stream too quickly.  But in what seemed a very arrogant manner, when the video decided it had streamed enough to play fully it overrode my “pause” and began to play again, only to catch up the uncompleted stream and stall out again. I tried this several times and every time I hit the pause button, the video would start playing again only a few seconds later.  I’m pretty sure I could hear HAL 9000 whispering in my ear  ”I’ve sorry Aaron, I’m afraid I can’t do that”  

 For the record, I actually found on interscope.com, the record company, embedded videos that let you choose Flash, Windows, or Quicktime.  The site makes you watch an ad before each video, but the site was well layed out and had a very nice selection of content.

Is the Mariners website as bad as the team?

Well I feel like I’m about to beat a dead horse here, but being a Mariner fan I thought I’d check out the official team web page and see how it compared to the highlight videos on ESPN.com.  For starters, the ESPN homepage on arrival starts playing a preselected highlight clip of whatever they figure the top story/game is.  I assume they’ve data mined me in the past to figure out what clip to show me.  The Flash video looks clear, the movement is smooth and sounds pretty decent though the video window I’m guessing is only 160 x 120 or so.  Also, I’m mildly annoyed that the video starts automatically, as I’ve often got music playing already and it has a very jarring effect.  I’d prefer to select from my own clip from a list.  They have such a list on a panel on the right side of the screen with some worthwhile clips but it seems more than half the time a 10-20 second commercial plays before getting to each new video.  I think the commercial time vs. content time is weighted too heavily towards the ads, especially considering the banner ads all over the screen.  Also, when in the middle of an ad if you try to switch to another video it won’t let you until the ad finishes playing.  It makes me feel like the machines from The Terminator/The Matrix/HAL etc…are taking over already.

What I did like was that you can click on the score for tonight’s Mariner game and when arriving at the page with the recap/box score a larger video, maybe 320×240, streams effectively a 30 second highlight (or lack thereof in the Mariner’s case) without any ad’s.  The clip is a bit blocky but it’s fairly easy to follow the action. 

 

Now on the Mariners team site, I was expecting to see clips from tonight’s game on the homepage…Instead, in the “video corner” I was forced to watch a 20 second ad and then the highlight clip was actually from 3 days ago. Now I thought this might be due to the fact that the woeful Mariners have been short on highlight reel worthy efforts the last few days, but it turns out other MLB team webpages all have basically the same format.  Also not impressing me: the video size is even smaller than espn’s, I’m guessing maybe only 120 x 80.  When I clicked on the “audio & video” tab to see what else was offered I was blasted with a huge image adverstising their mlb.tv package for only $49.99 and the rest of the screen was several paragraphs of fine print.  After some scrounging (don’t they know I have a short attention spam?!?) I found the video for tonight’s game.  The video was the same size as ESPN’s, but everything on the team page took much longer to load and responded very slowly to new commands, although there was no ad video or banners before the highlight clip.  I was also a bit disappointed that I couldn’t find (I gave up after about 5 minutes) highlight clips of years gone by when the Mariners were actually good.  I was pleasantly amused by the section of wacky team promo commericals though.  The site also offered a several highlights for each player’s personal page, but I would have like to have seen some more personal “snacksized” videos of the players telling a funny story or something cheesy like that.  This might take a lot more work and could involve some video footage rights conflicts, but I think the multimedia aspect of the Mariners homepage needs a lot of work…Maybe if the tech people were as ‘roided up as the players they could make some progress.

Quest for the Free Audiobook Download

With all the commuting I have to do and messieurs Wooten and Rayburn dominating most of my reading time (with the weather being perfect and all) I figured I’d see if the what the audiobook industry has to offer the hordes of portable music player users.  So while Audible.com may have a good selection and a seemingly easy UI, I’d rather have things for, ya know, free.  With that in mind I’ll check out what the King County Library System has to offer…I’m hoping that whatever they have in physical form on the shelves will also be available to download, if not even more selections… I’m cautiously optimistic.  I’m curious about how the licensing arrangements work between the publishers and the libraries compared to audible.com and other pay sites. 

After clicking the Ebooks Audio link, I headed to the “always available audiobooks” page.  There were about 30 or so offerings, a refreshingly nice mix of classics (Ray Bradbury, War and Peace), Winnie the Pooh, Ken Kesey and quite a few books turned movies (Last King of Scotland, Charlie Wilson’s War).  So after downloading and installing the OverDrive media player the ~15 meg WMA files downloaded quickly to my hard drive in separate files for each hour or so of audio.  There were no other options for file type…Is Microsoft sponsoring this entire library endeavor???  Aso, they are affixed with a 21 day “lending period” and the following fine print:

 

Digital Rights Information

OverDrive WMA Audiobook

This title can be played during the lending period

Collaborative play of this title is not allowed

This title can be burned to CD during the lending period (for personal use only; no other duplication/distribution of material is permitted under the terms of the license)

This title can be transferred to a portable device during the lending period

So the files play in Windows Media Player just fine and transfer just fine to my Toshiba mp3 player.   I’m not sure what it would take to get these into the iTunes/IPod universe.  Also, I had trouble burning the tracks onto CD using my normal non-Windows Media Player software, but of course, the WMP burner worked just fine…Again I suspect Microsoft is up to something sneaky…

So back to the library web page for more exploring beyond the 30 “always available audiobooks.”  There are 436 offerings, but not a very good way to search through them.  There are about 100 search categories, but most of them return no or very few matches even in categories like “classics, adult trade, scholarly.”  The obvious categories like “fiction” return so many matches that scrolling through pages of 25 matches one at a time is quite tedious.  You can search by ‘most popular” , but for one thing I never liked the popular kids anyway, and two, its still just 25 books per screen.  A bigger gripe I have though is that each book has a limited number of “quantities” available for download and for about 1/3 or so that number is 0! 

Despite the gripes, I was able to find numerous books I’d like to download and listen to so along with KEXP and Democracynow.org podcasts it seems I may be phasing out the annoying radio commercial…

Self-critique: Alternate Focus Screening Room

So I thought I’d start by examining/rambling about the videos posted by the Alternate Focus, the San Diego-based non-profit organization I’m still loosely affiliated with. 

The first and most recent video in the screening room is titled, “The Rise and Fall of Blackwater in Potrero” and tells the story of the mercenary (btw, they hate that term, they prefer “private security contractor ) company and their efforts to build a “training facility” in a small rural community east of San Diego.  I served as Associate Producer on this show but I didn’t take part in any of the compression/uploading on this one.  These and the other videos in the homepage and its screening room are sourced through blip.tv and already I can easily see the higher quality in these videos than those that we post on youtube.   I think these half hour videos are about 300-600megs.   After watching the first couple minutes, the stream caught up to the buffering so I decided to see how long it would take to buffer the entire 30 minute show:  about 12 minutes on a mediocre comcast wireless set-up.  I guess this is tolerable as I figure anyone who really wanted to watch this show would be patient enough to pause occassionally to let the stream catch up in exchange for a pretty good quality video. 

I recall using Adobe Premiere’s encoder and a program called Super (I imagine there are better programs out there but it seemed to work fine at the time and it was free…is it malicious?) to take our 28:30 programs and stuff them into files less than 100 megs per Youtube’s requirements.  I think I had to cut the frame rate to about 15 or so, shrink the resolution to no more than 320:240 and use pretty much the lowest audio quality settings.  Although I think we get anywhere from 5-50 times more hits on youtube than our other video outlets, with all that trimming, most of the videos looked pretty shoddy, especially the ones with lots of visual effects and more frequent cuts.  I think we could improve our encoding to allow a greater data rate during transitions.  However, some of our shows are heavy on the talking heads for extended periods of time (it’s a weekly show, so sometimes we spit out interview shows and try to jazz them up as much as possible) so we can have a bit more flexibility in lowering video size/quality a bit to ensure that at least the audio is decent.  I’m not sure what the solution is to getting better quality onto youtube…maybe splitting each show into multiple parts?

 We also post our videos on

http://www.archive.org/details/AlternateFocus

in streaming format but also for download in various sizes in formats.  This sounds swell, but again, this site gets only a fraction of the hits youtube gets.  Perhaps people downloading files from here also forward them to others or post repost them somewhere???

Also, I contacted goleft.tv and uploaded a few of our better videos to their site and I think they function and look pretty good.  Each file was about 300 megs and while the video window is a bit small the videos buffered pretty quick and sound adequate enough.  However, despite a couple emails, I haven’t heard back from the goleft.tv folks about how many hits we’re getting so I’m not sure if this endeavor was worth my effort???

Look forward to class tomorrow………

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