Saturday, March 8, 2008

Vawkr* - Instant Video Chat Makes You a Talker

I had a chance to test out another new video chat tool called vawker*. It's a free browser based video chat solution that's easy to use and requires no downloads or sign up. Their slogan is "Look Who's Talking" and they gave it a fun and simple interface that works seamlessly within your browser using Flash. You can "grab a room" and get a unique URL to share with friends and start a video chat session instantly. You can also create your own permanent chat room by signing up and embedding the room on MySpace, Facebook, your blog or any website.

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My friend Rich and I took it for a test ride yesterday and had pretty good results. The controls are very basic with only volume and microphone adjustments and a chat window. There's no resizing of windows like other video chat applications. Audio is an issue as we experienced a lot of echo and had to keep adjusting the volume and microphone levels. When we selected "Reduce Echo" the audio kept gating and cutting out. The video looked clear when you didn't move too much and it seemed to run at about 300k while trying to give us 30 fps. We both were on iMacs down the hall from each other and noticed only a slight delay. Overall, it worked very well and I signed up and set up two separate rooms using two of my email addresses.

I tried a 3-way video chat today and it actually performed poorly. The video kept freezing, the echo increased and we ended up with a 30 second delay. We gave up on it and went back to Skype.

My initial feedback is that I'd like to see some improvements in the way it handles audio and I want to be able to scale and move the video windows around. I'll test it out some more before I render my final verdict but I suggest you give it try. It's fun and fast and you'll video chatting in no time.

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Wednesday, March 5, 2008

Adobe Air Lifts Off

Amidst the constant battles between competing formats we as end users ultimately benefit from the development of new tools and applications. A convergence between the web experience and the desktop environment is taking shape in the form of Adobe Air, the new cross-platform runtime that gives web developers the tools to build rich web applications for the desktop.

Andy Plesser of Beet.tv writes in his post, Attention Video Publishers: New Adobe Desktop Environment for Web Shows Could be Cooler than QuickTime Podcasts, "There's been a good bit of anticipation about the Adobe Media Player (AMP), the application that will allow users to download videos to a desktop environment. Up until now, virtually all Flash video files are streamed and watched in a browser... Unlike podcasts, which are downloaded and saved as files along with some enclosed metadata, the new AMP environment will appear as a sort of rich, Web-like environment. It is on the desktop, but connected to the Web and updated via RSS."

Plesser interviewed Ryan Stewart "Rich Application Internet Mountaineer" and ZDNet blogger who works for Adobe as "the Rich Internet Application Evangelist" and provides "an overview of AIR and its implications for video."




Associated quotes and video originally published on February 29th 2008 as "Attention Video Publishers: New Adobe Desktop Environment for Web Shows Could be Cooler than QuickTime Podcasts" by Andy Plesser for Beet.tv.

Related:
  • Live video from Adobe Engage event - February 25, 2008 - Scobelizer
  • AIR Goes Live: The Best Things About Adobe's AIR Platform - February 25, 2008 - ReadWriteWeb
  • 6 Adobe AIR Apps to Check Out - February 25, 2008 - ReadWriteWeb
  • Adobe AIR Vs Microsoft Silverlight: It’s All About Numbers - February 26, 2008 TechCrunch
  • Adobe Floating on Air - March 3, 2008 - eWeek
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    Monday, March 3, 2008

    Scobelizer Launches FastCompany.TV



    Robert Scoble launched FastCompany.tv today with two new shows - FastCompany Live and ScobleizerTV. On his blog , he writes, "The first is a show done totally on cell phones. If you’ve been watching my Qik channel, you’ve been getting a preview. The second is a new version of my show. This time done with high-end microphones and much better camera equipment. Oh, and a camera operator (that’d be my producer, Rocky Barbanica) instead of me trying to do everything."

    In his new role as Managing Director he will be building a business video network for FastCompany. Here's his welcome video.



    Congratulations Robert!

    Let me know if you need help producing any big broadcast videoconferences or web casts.

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    Higher Resolution Videos on YouTube

    CyberNetNews just featured a story on how YouTube has been quietly rolling out higher quality videos. While most the millions of videos are compressed at low quality settings (320x240 @ 300 Kbps) the example shown in the article, Watch High-Resolution YouTube Videos, offers a much higher quality version when you add a simple script to the URL of the video.













    (Update: Photo credit - Cybernet News)

    "Just add &fmt=6 onto the end of any YouTube URL. Using the skateboarding dog as an example you would take the normal URL:

    http://youtube.com/watch?v=CQzUsTFqtW0

    and add the &fmt=6 onto the end:

    http://youtube.com/watch?v=CQzUsTFqtW0&fmt=6

    The Google Operating System Blog added that, "If you append &fmt=18, YouTube downloads the video as a MP4 (H264 with AAC audio), encoded at 480x360."

    Here's the Skateboarding Dog video with the "&fmt=18" added top the original URL.



    This doesn't work on all YouTube videos because not all of them have a higher resolution version, but it worked on about half of the videos I checked (10:25), and I saw a noticeable difference in video quality in the number of videos. Although, the video playback choked up (on my DSL connection) due to the higher bit rate and larger file sizes and I had to pause the video and wait for it to fully download for a smooth playback.

    There's a great technical discussion on the VIDEOHelp.com Forum on how it works and some of the common settings and file types people are using. A variety of compression techniques can be applied prior to uploading the videos to YouTube to achieve higher video quality video.

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    Sunday, March 2, 2008

    YouTube to Stream Live Video in 2008? Co-founder Steve Chen Says Yes!

    As part of the third episode of her new show Pop17, video blogger and producer Sarah Meyers scooped the YouTube live video streaming story when she caught up with co-founder Steve Chen at a recent YouTube party in NYC. In describing the episode, Lifecasting and Lifecasters, Meyers writes that, "A variety of live streaming platforms with social networks are propping up a new kind of online voice." Lifecasting pioneer Justin Kan along with iJustine, Chris Pirillo and Sarah Meyers herself represent a few of the many online voices. She lists "several common live streaming platforms: Mogulus, Justin.TV, Ustream, Blog.tv, Stickam, Yahoo Live, Qik." According to Chen, YouTube has been wanting to do live video and may enter that arena sometime later this year.



    Related (courtesy of TechTicker.net):
    Update: (Two more live streaming platforms worth checking out)
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