Web 2.0 Mash-Ups

June 26, 2021 on 11:33 am | | In Comic, Fun, General, Web2.0 | No Comments

comic004-520.png

NetBeans 6.0 M9 & Ubuntu Feisty Fawn

June 25, 2021 on 9:53 am | | In General, Java, Netbeans, Software | 8 Comments

Hacking a small Java interface for video transcoding was the reason for installing the M9 of NetBeans 6.0. At a first glance I was really shocked by the Metal Look & Feel. See the screenshots & decide yourself :-D

For everyone suffering the same shock … following startup parameters make NetBeans pretty again:

~/netbeans-6.0m9/bin/netbeans -laf com.sun.java.swing.plaf.gtk.GTKLookAndFeel

netbeans-gtk.png    netbeans-metal.png

User Centered Software at its Best

June 25, 2021 on 9:27 am | | In Comic, Fun, General, Managers, Software | No Comments

Consider the following:

a comic strip!

YouTube Videos for Mobile Phones

June 21, 2021 on 1:14 pm | | In FFMPEG, Mobile, Multimedia, Transcoding, Video, YouTube | No Comments

Having tested the YouTube Mobile portal I wanted to get the videos downloaded for my mobile phone. Unfortunately two facts hindered me from doing this: (i) Getting the video from an RTP stream is not that trivial and (ii) YouTube has only parts of its video converted for mobile access. Therefore I needed a way to get YouTube videos to my mobile phone :-D

  • First of all you need to get the actual video from Youtube. Surf to the video you like and dowÅ„load it using e.g. YouTube Downloader. Do not forget to rename yourvideo to .flv.
  • Then you will have to convert it to 3gpp. FFMPEG will do the trick. On Linux you might have to compile it yourself (as no AMR and AAC encoder are built in in many precompiled packages). On windows you might use precomiled binaries, e.g. from here.
  • Then let ffmpeg do the job for you:
    Windows: ffmpeg.exe -i [video].mov -acodec aac -s 352×288 [video].3gp
    Linux: ffmpeg -i [video].mov -acodec aac -s 352×288 [video].3gp

This command line shown above encodes the video to H263 with a bitrate of 200 kbps and AAC with a bitrate of 64 kbps. The video needs to follow the constraints of 3gpp and is therefore changed to resolution 352×288. This is the maximum possible with 3gpp. Alternatively one can also use the AMR audio codec. But this one has a rather low quality.

A ‘really strange approach’ for those of you running Linux, but not willing to compile: You can run the precompiled Windows with Wine ;-D

YouTube Mobile

June 18, 2021 on 2:37 pm | | In Multimedia, Social Software, Streaming, Web2.0, YouTube | 1 Comment

screenshot-realplayer-video3gp-1.pngAround last weekend the YouTube mobile interface was opened. As I’ve paid for a 100 MB / month never really using more than 20 for mails and some chatting I really had to test it :-D

The interface is clean and simple. It works like a charm with the Opera mobile browser (not the Opera Mini, I haven’t tried with this also with Opera Mini - tested by Daniel Goldman, thx to Daniel) . The videos are provided with RTSP in 3GP format. So one can also watch the videos using Realplayer (see screenshot). Some further information on the used streaming format: The video I tested was encoded with 40 kbps with H263. Taking a look at the RTSP communication reveals that there is a Darwin Streaming Server working:

Received PLAY response: RTSP/1.0 200 OK
Server: DSS/5.5.3 (Build/489.12; Platform/Linux; Release/Darwin; )

The only thing about mobile YouTube: You’ll need an UMTS connection or better ;-)

Some news on the Java Media Framework

June 15, 2021 on 9:29 am | | In Dev, General, Java, JMF, Multimedia | No Comments

Obviously people’s voices demanding media in Java have been heard. Chet Haase blogs about a new project called Java Media Components, which aims at providing media playback capabilities in Java SE. He’s saying in his blog:

“If you attended the Java Technology Desktop overview session at JavaOne this year, you learned, along 500+ of your closest friends in the room, that we’re working on a new project that we call Java Media Components (JMC). This new feature, hopefully shipping in Java SE 7, is intended to support basic playback support for Java applications. JMC is also, eventually, intended to address capture and streaming capabilities.”

Now that’s news! I’m looking forward to a multimedia Java! Find the article here.

VoIP now: 74 Open Source VoIP Apps & Resources

June 12, 2021 on 10:53 am | | In Communication, SIP, VoIP | No Comments

VoIP Now has published an article discussing 74 different VoIP clients, servers, libraries, proxies, etc.It’s quite a good summary of the current state. However many people suffer the same fate like me: I’m hidden behind a firewall with no chance to get out not using Skype :-(

Find the full article here.

Social Software Workshop at ECSCW 07

June 12, 2021 on 10:11 am | | In CfP, Social Software | No Comments

Many many workshops have been centred around the topic: What can social software do for us / SMEs / companies / education etc. This workshop on contrary focuses on “What is missing in Social Software? Current collaborative practices in social software”, which I interpret as “What can we do for Social Software?”.

In my opinion this a a very interesting topic. Currently most people have experienced social software as “working phenomenon” and try to adopt it to their needs. Bit we should also focus on means and constraints to keep the phenomenon running.

The workshop takes places in context of the 10th European Conference on Computer Supported Co-Operative Work in Limerick, Ireland. The ECSCW 07 is on Sept. 24th-28th, so the workshop will also be around this date. More information here.

Back to Normal: Multimedia Coverage of the Juggling Event

June 11, 2021 on 3:52 pm | | In Multimedia | No Comments

Broken Contact Juggling BallsThe convention was great fun, but one has to catch up with normal live. The photo and video coverage of the event was rather small, however I’ve upped some photos on Flickr and I will continue do upload as soon as I’ve taken a look at all shots.

Furthermore - thanks to a bigger memory card - I was able to record some videos at the event, which will be upped t YouTube. Be prepared for some really fancy not-everday stuff, like 11 club passing and 3 diabolo parallel tricks.

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