Category: Video

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Computing Video

Beta testers wanted

Inspired by my encounter with the Miro team, and mindful of a need to broaden my skillset beyond client software, I’ve been busy the last few weeks. One comment that was made at the Miro presentation was that most of the channels are hosted over plain http, and make no use of the bittorrent client in Miro. In the pub discussion afterward, we seemed to conclude that bittorrent server software was still too hard to use.

Curious, I started looking around. Most of the bittorrent software I could find was limited in some awkward way – perhaps implemented in a less popular language, or designed to handle the needs of the high traffic pirate content servers rather than small providers of their own content. Two services stood out: Amazon’s S3 service lets you turn any hosted file into a torrent by adding the ‘.torrent’ extension to its URL, and the Miro Team’s Broadcast Machine did all the torrent generation server side, on your own server.

However, Broadcast Machine is no longer supported, and S3 leaves you needing to create an RSS feed. I’ve therefore been busy implementing a bittorrent server that can be hosted at any domain that supports PHP and MySQL. If you can install WordPress, I intend this software to work too. It can create a .torrent for any file already on your server, and then include it in an RSS based channel feed, ideal for clients like Miro.

I’m looking for a few beta testers to see if this software works outside of my own test set up. If you want to host some video content (perhaps you already post them to youtube) on your own domain, and you are familiar with installing software like WordPress there, you would be an ideal candidate. It would also be useful to see how multiple downloads work, so if you already use a torrent aware RSS reader (Miro is one), or would like to, please get in touch.

Feel free to email me (john@mcaleely.com), or post a response to this blog entry.

Incidentally, selling this software is not my business idea. This is BSD licensed open source.

Categories
Computing Video

Try Miro today

Other internet video products have frustrating limitations which mean I don’t use them very much: Perhaps the files can only be watched for a few hours; I’m limited to watching programming that can sustain a large technology infrastructure or I have to put up with muddy, low quality, pictures. Often they are just incredibly complex combinations of technologies and applications.

Miro eliminates all these gripes, and I’ve been impressed by the experience of using Miro on my TV over the last six months or so. I’ve tried to write up some of the reasons from a professional perspective over the last few blog entries: Miro respects my own honesty; respects the authoring effort of the people who create video; allows people to publish at low cost and is easy to understand and use.

There’s another reason I like it though – it has become easy for me to download and watch some really high quality video on my TV I wouldn’t see elsewhere. Right now, Miro claims to have more HD content than similar competitors, and it looks great!

I’ve not seen a better way to watch video on the internet.

Miro video player

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Categories
Computing Video

Blogs make great TV channels.

Miro makes Channels a central part of its user experience, using the same technology as a blog. Having chosen not to offer instant playback video (unlike, say, YouTube) I think that the metaphor of a channel to helps me to understand what I will see after waiting for a download to occur. The TV channel metaphor was easy to grasp, since I’m often asked to subscribe in some way to a channel on my TV. Using the technology behind a blog (syndication feeds like RSS), it makes me consider a flow of new videos in the future, again like a TV channel. By using bandwidth friendly downloading, it can allow a channel to make the promise that the download will be better quality than a live feed.

While it is running, Miro is capable of downloading in the background without impacting the playing video. Therefore it’s often my experience that once I’ve watched one video in a channel, the next has downloaded. By leaving Miro running on the computer attached to my TV, there are also always downlaods that have completed while I’m away. As such, whenever I want to watch channels in Miro, there is something to view. In practice, this means that when I encounter a new channel, I hit the subscribe button, anticipating I will be able to watch it next time I sit in front of the TV.

As an aside, downloading before viewing has another advantage – playback is far more reliable. Most of the internet live feeds I’ve used experience breakup and dropout, making them unpleasant to watch. Miro never suffers from this, which is great.

Whilst I’m generally sceptical about copying the user experience from traditional TV’s and HiFi’s, the channel as blog metaphor seems to work well for Miro.

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