Aehso’s Output

The CD Turns 25.

You know you’re getting old when the CD turns 25 (years old that is!).

Wow. I have fond memories of pestering my folks to buy a microwave sized CD player back in the mid 80s. All we used it for was listening to Brothers In Arms and classical CDs in all their digital glory. At least we could listen though - according to Wikipedia:

This was also the first album to sell one million copies in the CD format. Indeed, when the disc was released, it was said that more people owned a copy of the CD than owned CD players.

What were they doing? Maybe they were trying to jam it onto their turntables. Interestingly, this kind of reminds me of the current situation with iPods - I’d bet money that not all iPod owners have a computer.

A Future of Media.

From Read/Write Web (comment # 2 was NOT from me):

The core future media concept is the Agav - an Agent-Avatar, which “finds information, people…

I love these videos, Lawrence Lessig (a future US Secretary of Justice) declares copyright illegal, Google buys Microsoft, Google buys everyone and so on. But it has some style so it is worth watching:

The concept of the avatar has been around for centuries, long before Ultima IV - man, that was a blast. This video extrapolates the concept nicely into derivatives of digital properties that most computer users should now be familiar with, now that social networking and MMORPGs are the prevelant forms of online communication.

The evolution of the prosumer will continue. I for one like being a prosumer - or maybe it’s just that I like knowing that I’m a prosumer. I’m not sure, best be aware of these things though…

Babelgum Public Beta now open.

Hot on the heels of Joost, Dublin based Babelgum have opened their public beta.  They are imposing a daily download limit at the moment though.  Content owners can go here to find out why they’d want to use Bablegum to distribute video content.

Initial impressions are good, the fullscreen UI employing floating transparent dialogs and widget panels that are all the rage these days.  Picture quality is excellent and they have some decent original material like Jesus Children Of America.

Let the content race begin…

Update: I forgot to also give a shout out to Democracy 0.9.6 - it is their last version before changing name to Miro.

N800 and UPnP MediaServers for Mac OS X?

Canola and the Media Streamer on the N800 are apparently both capable UPnP control points/players so I recently decided to set up a UPnP MediaServer on my Mac Mini, where all my media(photos/music/video) lives. I drew a blank though:

• MediaTomb - open source but I couldn’t find a universal binary anywhere.
• EyeConnect - the N800 could see the server, it did not list any available media content.
• TwonkyVision - music and photo streaming worked but I had no luck with streaming video and then the trial expired. It’s hard to justify buying commercial software when a major feature doesn’t appear to work in my environment.

Today, I notice the PS3 modders also have a list of UPnP Servers but alas nothing new there either.

Maybe I’ll have a go at building MediaTomb on OS X or maybe I’ll have to install Linux on my Mac Mini?

Update: I took the plunge and compiled and installed MediaTomb on my Mac Mini (using Apple Xcode development tools) following the instructions. There is a bit of prep work required to install the prerequisite zlib, libmagic, libjs, taglib, id3lib, libexif libraries though so this approach is not for the faint-hearted! I did hit a minor snag getting the MediaTomb configure script to use libjs v1.6 but resolved that with a little help from Jin. Streaming music and photos works great with Canola but some streamed DIVX-encoded AVI files won’t play - I’m assuming that is an N800 codec problem though…

Update 2: A day later, Jin announces that MediaTomb is now available via Fink. That should makes it easier for the rest of you to compile/install. Thanks Jin!

Site of the day: Scribd

I just stubled accross Scribd while looking for an online copy of Isaac Asimov’s The Last Question (I found one).

Quite cool, YouTube type upload and sharing of (copyrighted?) documents, downloadable as PDF, MS Word, Plain Text or machine-generated MP3 (not the easiest to listen to it has to be said) formats.

Babelgum in Dublin

Interesting to see Babelgum are setting up shop in Dublin. It is nice to see them cite the availability of skilled technical people as the key reason for locating here though I suspect that favourable corporation tax rates may also have been a key factor.

Coincidently, Read Write Web has a timely comparative review of Babelgum, Joost and Zattoo. (It also mention ChooseAndWatch and FreeTube but I guess Democracy doesn’t fit into the IPTV category?).