FrontPage Feature

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan Complains

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 12:30:00 EST

In September I mentioned that Michael Hickins had reported on phone spoofing with cell phones to avoid sanctions for calling to Iran. Now The Economist reports that Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan complains that “they eavesdropped on me for six years.” "They" may possibly be the Turkish Justice Ministry. Have something sensitive to say? Take the battery out of your mobile phone, as Bruce Schneier has been saying for years. (Check that link in The Economist before 11/19/2010. After a year all Economist content is only available to paid subscribers.)

The Origin of Stupidity

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 09:30:00 EDT

So apparently Kirk Cameron and a buddy of his are continuing their campaign of lies and outright stupidity because things like common sense, science, and cold hard fact threaten their fragile hold on sanity. Ordinarily I might on on a huge rant about this but everything I could say, the woman in this video says much more eloquently than I could. This is a must-watch.

Turn Your Podcast Into an Interactive Live Streaming Experience

Sat, 26 Sep 2009 09:00:00 EDT

The folks here on the DevCentral team have been producing a weekly podcast for a while now. Trying to keep our budget low, we opted to copy what some other podcasters were doing by making use of Skype for our audio communication and found a great little Skype add-on called Pamela which creates high-quality WAV files from Skype conversations.

We created a dedicated Skype account on an old machine here in the office that will auto-record whenever that account is added to a conversation. We would occasionally have differences in audio levels between the callers so we incorporated the awesome The Levelator (from the Conversations Network) into the post production and we were set.

A few weeks ago we broke through our one hundredth podcast and along with that milestone we decided to expand things a bit by making the podcast more interactive. I spent a few weeks investigating how to best accomplish this and I ultimately decided on a setup. I figured that I'd go ahead and share it with you all so you can see how we do it on our end. Here's the high-level diagram:

I experimented with a mixing board but ended up with a software only solution that anyone can implement. Everything besides the top left three items in the image were added to enable us to record our Skype podcast as well as stream it to UStream and allow callers with TalkShoe.

The Components

Here's a list of the following components and how we used them.

Skype - http://www.skype.com - $0

Skype, for those that don't know, is a software program that allows you to make video and voice calls across the internet. Calls are free to other skype users and you can purchase the ability to call out to land line numbers or to get your own number so you can accept phone calls.

We have a dedicated server with Skype and Pamela running to do the recording and each person on the podcast is connected through the main Skype instance on our publishing system.

Pamela Skype Recorder - http://www.pamela.biz/en/ - $24

Pamela is an add-on program for Skype that will allow you to record your Skype conversations. It features Skype call, video, and chat recording, answering machine, video mail, and skype based publishing. We use it primarily for the ability to automatically record skype calls to either our skype account or our Skype dial-in number. .WAV files are created and we are emailed when a recording is completed.

Windows Media Player - $0

Windows Media Player is the default music/video player on the Windows platforms. We use it to play background music into our skype and UStream sessions. You could just as easily use another audio player as long as it supports the ability to customize which output audio device it uses.

Virtual Audio Cable - http://software.muzychenko.net/eng/vac.html - $30

This little gem really saved the day with our setup. There are various Mac programs that allow you to map audio streams from one program to another one but this is the best one I could find for Windows. Virtual Audio Cable allows you to transfer audio (wave) streams between applications and/or devices. In our setup, it allows us to map windows media player back into Skype and our multiple audio streams back into our live video processing through VidBlaster.

VidBlaster - http://vidblaster.com/ - $0

VidBlaster is a powerful, economic way to record, stream, and produce high quality videos. VidBlaster comes in three versions: Home, Pro, and Studio with the only difference being the number of "modules" you can use at one time. What's best about this product is that you can use it for free if you can live with a "VidBlaster" add in the top right corner of your video stream. We'll likely put the couple hundred bucks down for the Pro version but as of now it hasn't costed us a cent.

Adobe Flash Media Encoder - http://www.adobe.com/products/flashmediaserver/flashmediaencoder/ - $0

The Adobe Flash Media Encoder allows you to capture live audio and video while streaming it in real time to a flash media server. While we could stream directly from VidBlaster to UStream, the quality is not as good as moving some of the processing down to the client.

UStream - http://www.ustream.tv - $0

UStream is the live interactive video broadcast platform that enables anyone with a camera (or VidBlaster!) and an internet connection to quickly and easily broadcast to a global audience of unlimited size. Best of all, it's free!

TalkShoe - http://www.talkshoe.com - $0

We struggled for a while trying to figure out the best way to include a "live" audience in our recording. TalkShoe is a service that enables anyone to easily create, join, or listen to live interactive discussions, conversations, podcasts, and audioblogs. It fit the bill of just what we needed and since we already had our Skype conversation going, bolting on TalkShoe was as simple as adding the conference number to our group Skype conversation. TalkShoe also has some pretty nifty user controls allowing the moderator to control muting of each of the participants. Another great free service!

Production Setup Walkthrough

Here's the steps I go through in preparation for our weekly podcast.

Create 3 Virtual Audio Cables with the Virtual Audio Cable Control Panel (VAC #1, VAC #2, VAC #3)
Start up 2 instances of the Virtual Audio Cable Audio Repeater. Set the first one (R1) from VAC #3 to VAC #1 and the second from VAC #3 to VAC #2.
Start and login to Skype. Go into the Audio settings and change the audio input to VAC #1 and the output to VAC #2.
Start Windows Media Player and change the speaker device settings to output to VAC #3.
Start VidBlaster and setup various screen captures, set the video resolution to 640x480 and the frame rate to 15fps (much higher than that drives the CPU way up). Finally click "Start" on the Streamer module.
Start the Adobe Flash Media Encoder. Load the stream configuration that you can download from your UStream show's advanced settings and then Select VidBlaster for the Video Device and "Line 2 (Virtual Audio Cable)" (ie. VAC #2) for the Audio device. Click "Start" to begin streaming.
Login to our UStream.tv account and click "Broadcast Now" for your show. Another browser window will come up detecting the media stream. Click "Start Broadcast" to start the stream and click "Start Record" to being recording your stream on the server.
Bring up the Skype window and create a conference with the podcast members including our account that auto-records the conversations. Then finally, call the TalkShoe conference bridge and initiate the meeting on their side.
Login to the TalkShoe account on their website and click the option to join the meeting. When the admin console is loaded, you can optionally select "Record" from the top left to have TalkShoe make an alternate recording.

At this point we are recording our Skype session in audio, UStream is recording the video stream and TalkShoe is recording a secondary audio recording. At this point, I cue up the intro music in Windows Media Player and start into the podcast.

When we are finished, I reverse the process above by stopping and saving the various recordings. I take our Pamela based recording, run it through The Levelator, convert it to a mp3 with Audacity, edit the ID3 tags, and publish it to our media server. At this point, the blog post is created and we are done for the week.

Reflections

There are a few things that are still causing some issues. The main issue is that of horsepower on my media system. The desktop I'm using for all of this was not meant to run these types of CPU intensive applications. While it works, my dual-core CPU system is hovering at 99-100% CPU usage during the podcast which is a bit worrisome. Depending on the success of the podcast, we may invest in a new desktop to run this on. But, seeing how we've spent well under $100 for the entire software suite, I don't think we'll have much trouble justifying it!

Hopefully this helps some of you out there with some ideas and I'd love to hear feedback on how I could do things better!

-Joe

Technorati Tags: F5,DevCentral,Podcast,UStream,VidBlaster,Adobe,Joe Pruitt

Mobile App or Mobile Web

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 14:15:00 EDT

Since the launch of iPhone the mobile industry has been in a flux. It has witnessed lot of innovations since then. Today, more choices are available to the user than ever before which has resulted in a fragmented market. It has complicated matters for every organization which wants to reach out to their consumers through mobile. There are too many platforms to be supported and there is no standardization. Some industry segments have not made any significant move to reach out to their consumer through mobile platform and are playing a waiting game – waiting for the technology to mature. However, travel industry cannot afford to do that.

Six Secrets to Making Online Video Work for Small Business

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 07:57:00 EDT

Kathy Saenz of Neighborhood America Shares What It Takes to Make Video an Effective Content Marketing Tool Even a micro business can use video effectively to communicate with its customers online. But, as we amateur carpenters know, you can wind up with a mess instead of a masterpiece unless you understand how to use a [...]

The Role of Landscape in Film

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 12:00:00 EDT

For me, one of the attractions of going to the cinema to see a feature film is to experience visually, on the big screen, new places or worlds that one may never actually experience oneself. In many movies, these “places” are not always physical. They can include emotional or psychological places – say when a story concerns itself with themes such as unrequited love or mental breakdown for example. But here I am interested in the physical spaces that can be defined as the “landscapes” represented by the settings or locations portrayed in a film and how the use of landscape can be leveraged by screenwriters to add additional depth to a story or the situation that characters find themselves in.

It’s Sheer Joy To Watch This Video

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 05:30:00 EDT

Now, there are lots of reasons we could suggest — however, I feel pretty strongly about one: The video is sheer joy. If you can watch this — set to Chris Brown’s song, “Forever” — and not smile profusely...and maybe even get a little tear in your eye from the beauty of this...then we have little in common. I think this is just fabulous! If we could make the people who work with us...and do business with us...feel a fraction of the joy that these young people created for their family and friends...we could be the most successful business leaders ever.

Don’t Keep Your Web Visitors Waiting and Guessing

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 14:15:00 EDT

Our supplier of video services shall remain unnamed. When you arrive at the site you have to wait for flash video to load. Although it loads pretty quickly, the presence of flash is still an unnecessary barrier to getting the information you need to make a buying decision. The home page itself lacks any description of what the company does or how it will help solve my problems. We are presented with bouncing vertical lines at the end of which are vertical navigation links which are placed on their side and thus unnecessarily difficult to read.

Understanding The Lingo of Online Movie Downloads

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 14:45:00 EDT

Understanding The Lingo of Online Movie Downloads

Quite a tough topic to repeat, let alone understand what exactly it is. Online movies simply put are more than they seem. First, just because you've downloaded a movie, doesn't mean you can watch it. Next, so you've downloaded a movie, how about taking it with you, maybe on your ipod? And finally, what about making a copy of it to DVD?

iPhone Developer Summit Day Two: Show Report

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 16:45:00 EDT

Today SYS-CON's iPhone Developer Summit finished, on a high as it started yesterday. it has always been said that good things come in two's!

iPhone and Increasing Mobile Device Functionality

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 13:00:00 EDT

I believe that we really do live in a Mobile World, which is driven by the latest and greatest Smartphone’s around. Lets face it, the majority of us love our gadgets and the more powerful the better! So to investigate my thoughts, against a larger community, I recently used the LinkedIn Poll facility. Here are the results I found, that reinforce what I thought.

Where Web 2.0 Meets Voice 2.0

Fri, 15 May 2009 23:00:00 EDT

In today’s financial environment, the demand to extract more value from IT has never been more important within the enterprise. The pressure to improve productivity and streamline processes has been at the heart of the first wave of Web 2.0 adoption, where teams have used collaborative tools like wikis, forums, and online communities in their quest to streamline work processes.

Engelbart's Usability Dilemma: Efficiency vs Ease-of-Use

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 09:15:00 EDT

The mouse was the original idea of Doug Engelbart who was the head of the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at Stanford Research Institute. Engelbart's philosophy is best embodied, in my opinion, in the design of another device that he invented, the five-finger keyboard - with keys like a piano, used by one hand. The problem was, Engelbart's five-finger keyboard and mouse combination was very difficult to learn.