B. Mann Consulting

The best open source media player for OS X. Should play most anything you come across, and in full-screen without the Quicktime Pro tax.

So, after completing the previous post about storing video and other large files, I did go off and buy my AudioBlog.com membership for a year (you can try a 7 day free trial as well).

Over on my personal site, I posted my first moblog: I called into the AudioBlog phone number with my cell phone, recorded, and hit publish. I had previously set AudioBlog up with all my blog details (I have 4 set up so far -- this site, my personal site, Bryght, and Urban Vancouver), and you punch a code into your phone identifying the blog to which you want to publish. You can also just record and handle the publishing details later on through the website.

Everything went pretty easy, minus a few things I had to fiddle with in Drupal to get things working seamlessly. The two things you need to know here are 1) choose MovableType as your blog type...the Drupal one falls back to using the Blogger API, which doesn't even support titles, never mind categories; and 2) AudioBlog uses an iframe to display the Flash audio player, which won't display unless you have Full HTML and/or iframes not filtered by default.

It seems that since the launch of Ourmedia, there are now dozens of places wanting to keep your videos online. You know, trying to be the "Flickr of Video" (aside: could Flickr itself start storing video? I think there are a lot of differences between static photos and video, but I'd love for that team to take a run at it...). Actually, the issue is bigger than just video -- in general, there is a lack of easy ways of both storing and downloading large user created files online. BitTorrent (plug: go get BitTorrent for Dummies, written by my friends Kris Krug and Susie Gardner) helps with download and bandwidth savings, but uploading and storage haven't really been solved. 10MB seems to be the magic number -- anything larger than that is difficult to deal with using a regular web upload, meaning you need to use an uploader application of some kind.

In any case, this is was just meant to be a test post pointing to some personal videos. I completed my test of Revver, which uses a special uploader. I was wondering why my videos weren't showing up, and it turns out there is an extra step of actually bringing them public. This should probably be worked into the uploader at some point, but for now it makes the uploading process very simple.

My public video page for Revver has all the clips I've uploaded (only two so far), both taken on my Canon S1 IS. Here's the thumbnail and click-through link for the heron video:

Ever since the Airport Express came out, I've been speculating about what else could be done with it. Surely that USB port wasn't just for something as mundance as printer sharing.

Well, there's another Apple Special Event coming up. They might be announcing the bundling of the Google Toolbar with Safari....or it might be a video version of the Airport Express to coincide with the opening of the iTunes Movie Store.

Yep, put me down for not believing in the fabled video iPod. Well, actually, I do believe in it, but Travis figures the Airport Express Video edition is a safer bet. Travis said I *had* to blog about this, so I am.

So, the special event will announce the opening of for-pay video downloads via the iTunes store, at the same time as they announce how to connect it to your TV via Airport. Apparently, there has been no new music video content in iTunes for the past couple of weeks, perhaps indicating a build up of new content. With Google announcing streaming of UPN shows, Apple's timing is probably about right.

Actually, Cringely also thinks that Apple is going to come out with a portable retinal display:

What about a higher resolution display, possibly a retinal scan display, for the Video iPod? It's the only way to extend Apple's "Year of HD" to its tiniest platform.

Nearly all of the retinal scan patents are held by Bothell, Washington-based MicroVision, a company I have written about in the past. And from the look of the SEC filings, a lot is happening up there in Bothell. As always I have no insider information at all, but it wouldn't surprise me if Apple introduced a super-high-capacity iPod and a separate retinal-scan display. It will be aimed at the very high end of the price scale, just like the Apple Cinema Display originally cost $4,000 for what now costs less than $1,000. The retinal scan display won't be cheap, but it will be cool, and it will be some permutation of HD, too.

I, Cringely: There's More to the Apple/Intel Deal Than Even Bob Thought At First

My previous writings on the iTunes Movies rumours and associated devices.

Video support in iTunes: check. Now off to find some video to buy.

Well, not really -- it happened by accident. I was browsing around and noticed that the Canadian iTMS had something new from Gorillaz featured.

Turns out that Feel Good Inc (Single Edit) is an album...because it comes bundled with the music videos for four other songs: Game of Death, Hey Our Toys, Jump Gut, and Tibet. In the interests of research (well, and it's a pretty good song), I paid my 99 cents to buy the "album".

You can check it out yourself using the iTunes link below (Canadian storefront) or read on for my description.

Update: AppleInsider talks about premium video content that you pay for directly, as opposed to the bundled freebies that I bought.

AppleInsider broke the news that iTunes 4.8 (not yet in Software Update, you can get it from Apple directly) supports Quicktime content. Specifically, you can play videos directly in iTunes, either in the main window, a separate window (Engadget as a good screenshot), or...full screen.

As you can see from the screenshot, movie content is stored directly within iTunes, much like a regular audio file. The fields don't make as much sense, but that's easy enough to fix in later versions.

The AppleInsider forum thread is filled with various bits of dis-information, but there were some good tidbits.

One of the lines of discussion was about the different apps and how they fit together. iPhoto 5 supports storing/organizing videos from your camera, and iMovie is for editing movies; why in iTunes as well? Well, one view is that iTunes is for paid content (movie/TV downloads!) and organizing (think video playlists/search/etc.) not importing/editing of your created content.

Oh right, and of course, iTunes is the only app that plays with Windows, so that's where movie download/sales stuff has to live.

There might even be a smoking gun. The excellent ArsTechnica forum had this:

I just looked through the strings in the iTunes executable file.

The first one I found was "Has Video," mixed in with attributes like "Has Variable Bit Rate" and "Genre."

The second is a bit more interesting. After "Purchased Music": "Purchased Videos"!

Update: Christopher Allen points to "AirVideo" -- video delivered via an upgrade to the AirPort Express. Scoble isn't sure it's an Apple employee where the comments originated on Slashdot. I've always thought that there's more than meets the eye in the AirPort Express (like VoIP).

I'm still looking at LCD TVs and/or monitors, and haven't made a choice yet.

My next bit of information is about video connections. DVI is a new~ish interface for video, but it's already being replaced on the high end by HDMI. HDMI is a smaller, more compact cable than DVI, but actually has room to transfer more information, and it can include audio.

Two good articles I found basically said it was a good interface, but that most devices today only transfer simple 2 channel audio. And, there hasn't been any adoption in the computer market yet. Based on the quote below from AnandTech, HDMI has copy protection baked in, so we're likely going to see it overtake DVI over the next couple of years.

Read on for some HDMI links and a listing of some different models and prices that I looked at.

Om's post about the Sonos Digital prodded me to write up my Mac Tablet prediction (and Media Mac and movies from iTunes).

Well, that, and I said it out loud talking to Marc Canter and Robert Scoble at BBS05, so I need to make sure I stake my blogosphere claim.

(Note to Scoble: I'll get around to turning on full posts again one of these days. Sorry about that.)

Rick Anderson, president of Zip.ca, just posted to the ongoing comment thread on Zip.ca.

I posted the last time Zip found my comments, back in October 2004. The original post (a link, mentioned because my friend Dave was trying the service) was from February.

Almost one year later, the current statistics are: 2355 page views on the original post, and 64 comments.

Rick, as I posted the last time I brought this up -- feel free to contact me if you want some tips on setting up a blog, forum, other avenue to let your customers interact with Zip directly. I've also posted your comment in it's entirety below, so hopefully your point of view gets some more publicity.

Note: I have still not tried Zip's service. I have comments on my website. I do moderate postings from anonymous users, but only to remove spam.