Stilgherrian’s links for 01 May 2009 through 07 May 2009, pubished wl late in the week for your weekend reading pleasure:
- VideoLAN: I was surprised to discover quite a few people who didn’ know about this free open source video player. It’s very good, you know, handling both downloaded files and live streams.
- The Iremonger Award | Allen & Unwin: A $10,000 prize for someone who was an idea for a non-fiction book which will “contribute to public debate on a contemporary Australian political, social or cultural issue”. Entries close 1 September 2009.
- Control freaks don’t get it: the web works best in a free-for-all | The Observer: John Naughton says it all on the 50th anniversary of C P Snow’s famous meme, the mutual incomprehensible “two cultures” of science and the “literary intellectuals”. But now, the two cultures are very different.
- Defence needs a plan for the Internet age | Tom Worthington via Link: Tom says the Australian government’s new defence white paper is deficient in not mentioning “Internet” or “web” at all. The section on cyber warfare envisages military personnel and scientists operating a “Cyber Security Operations Centre”. But without civilian support from organisations such as AusCERTt, the ADF will be vulnerable to cyber attack.
- Mogulus Live Broadcast: I’ve been using Ustream.TV to do Stilgherrian Live. This new (?) service still officially in beta offers the full mix of live video streaming, video on demand of previous programs, and 24/7 streaming of pre-sequenced programs. I will definitely be exploring this properly soon!
Just went poking around Mogulus. Looks pretty cool. With the live co-production features, you could team up with Mr Hodge and do really swish show handovers & share the load of other parts of the production to remote producers.
@deanlk: My thoughts exactly. Mogulus seems perfect for integrating inputs from all over into the one player, including live shows and pre-recorded and pre-programmed sequences. I intend speaking with Nick Hodge this coming week to see how we build upon what we’re already doing.
You might want to check out Tokbox in the near future. They can video conference up to 20 people at a time apparently and they intend to offer the ability to record conferences as well.
I did look at Mogulus before I came across ustream. I had issues originally with watching shows (lag etc) but that might have been a once off. If you are going to use remote producers outside of major metropolitan areas speeds may be a problem?
@Sean the Blogonaut: People do occasionally report problems with Ustream — extreme lag or buffering failures — but I haven’t investigated further because those problems can be caused by a bottleneck anywhere between the user and Ustream’s servers.
In all of this, bandwidth is the key. You must have an ADSL2+ or cable connection, or Telstra’s Next G for a mobile link (and even then, it needs to be tuned for HSUPA rather than HSDPA). Anything else will fail. Ustream’s 320 x 240 pixel default requires a recommended minimum 400kb/s uplink speed.