The good folks at Benfei have sent me another gadget to review! This is a USB-C Video/Audio capture dongle. Plug one end into a device and the other into your computer - it will show up as a USB video capture device.

Notice the extra USB socket there?

USB Power

One great thing about this device is that it has USB Power Delivery pass through. This means you can charge your device while grabbing video from it. That's more than a "nice to have" - the Nintendo Switch will refuse to output video over USB-C unless it is connected to a power supply.

The capture device claims to be able to pass through 100W - I don't have any devices which need that much power, but my USB-C Power Meter showed devices happily slurping down between 5W and 20W depending on the device I was using.

So how does it do?

Video and Audio

It is limited to 1080p @ 60Hz, which is good enough for most things.

Here's a short clip from the Nintendo Switch:

And here's a capture from my Android phone:

Linux

For the nerds amongst us, this shows up in lsusb as 345f:2130 MACROSILICON USB3 Video which should be well supported.

OBS Studio was able to capture the video and audio input perfectly:

It is the epitome of Plug & Play. Shove one end into your device and plug the other end into your computer's USB-C port. That's it. Done. No software to install, no drivers to download, no switches to flip. There's also a handy adapter if you want to use a USB-A socket - although it will need to support USB 3 speeds.

Limitations

As with most HDMI devices, it will refuse to stream video protected by HDCP DRM. That means you probably can't stream your Netflix / Disney / Whatever subscription to your laptop.

It is limited to stereo sound. I couldn't convince the Nintendo Switch to output surround sound.

Obviously, it only works with devices which have USB-C video output. Modern Android and most hand-held consoles will work. Your PS5 won't.

So what about those devices without USB-C?

Bonus HDMI Dongle!

So you're a wannabe Twitch streamer, or you just want to capture something from your HDMI output? The good folks at Benfei also sent me their HDMI Capture Dongle to review.

There's absolutely nothing else to say about this one. It has the same internals - 345f:2130 MACROSILICON USB3 Video - and works exactly the same.

Shove an HDMI cable in there and you're good to go,

Price

The USB-C to USB-C cable a surprisingly reasonable £15. If you need to capture video for presentations or streaming, it will do the job splendidly. The cable is long enough to drape from a machine to a source - and the Power Delivery is useful.

The HDMI capture is only £12. They both work identically well and are supported on Linux.

Highly recommended!

This upset some fans.

The thing about widescreen is that it chops off the top and bottom of the picture. The top of Hawkeye's head? Gone! The bottom of Hot-Lips' boots? Vanished! אױ װײ איז מיר

But, there is an upside. Or should that be side-side? Anyway, the new remaster adds some previous unseen detail to the left and right of the picture.

Here's a grab from the original:

And here's the remastered wide version:

Perhaps an animated GIF will help?

As you can see, the remaster has great picture quality and bonus content at the sides. However, you might also be able to notice that the widescreen image has been stretched a fair bit. By my calculation it was originally a 1.72 aspect ratio before been distorted to 1.777.

This GIF makes it a bit more obvious what has been stretched and how the image has moved from the centre:

So, is it possible to take the sides of the widescreen version and stitch them on to the edges of the 4:3 version? Yes!

With a bit of ffmpeg magic, I scaled the 16:9 version back to its original ratio, then I added some black padding around it, then I overlaid the 4:3 on top - giving it some transparency so you can see how well it fits.

The (frankly overwhelming) command is:

ffmpeg -i wide.mp4 -i orig.mp4 \
   -filter_complex \
   "[0]scale=670:390,setsar=1,pad=670:480:(ow-iw)/2:(oh-ih)/2:black,setpts=PTS-0.375/TB[v0];[1]scale=640:480,setsar=1,format=rgba,colorchannelmixer=aa=0.5[fg];[v0][fg]overlay=(W-w)/2:(H-h)/2[vid];[0:a][1:a]amerge=inputs=2[aout]" \
   -map "[vid]" -map "[aout]" -c:v copy -c:a aac -strict experimental -b:a 192k copy output.mp4

That also shifts the first video by a couple of frames due to the files being slightly out of synch. I've also kept both soundtracks, for your discordant joy.

Here it is - the intro to M*A*S*H with extra side bits:

As you can see, they adjusted the font size of the main titles. As the video progresses, you'll notice the vertical offset changes - I don't know how much manual adjustment was made. The videos shift in and out of synchronisation - I assume the original was transferred from film to tape in a less precise process than the remaster.

ToDo

• Get AI to fill in the missing corners?
• Get AI to continually correct the placement of the video?
• Get AI to add a laugh track?

So, I was watching that absolute banger of a tune "When You're Gone" by Bryan Adams (featuring Mel C) - when I noticed this:

It appears to be a desktop videophone! The interlacing looked artificial to me - but I've noted before that people think degraded images are somehow more authentic.

But something was niggling me. Were there really videophones of that ilk when that song was released in 1998? Well, yes and no.

There's a long history of prototype video-telephony - and by the mid-1990s there were some consumer products available.

This sweet number would set you back $1,600 (About $3,500 today). Better hope you had at least one rich friend who also had one.

If you scour eBay, you can find videophones from that bygone era. They are few and far between because they were a commercial flop. Video compression technology was in its infancy and modem speeds were poor. Even if you paid for an ISDN line, the video quality was guaranteed to be crap.

But what about this specific phone? Well, here I must reveal the disappointing news that Bryan Adams is a big fat liar and his music videos are full of falsehoods and shouldn't be trusted for serious historical researchers.

Ahem.

That's not a videophone in the music video.

Thanks to the sleuthing of Taig McNab and Stuart Langridge we can see that the phone is the Uniden Axis H0100.

I found one on eBay - here's what it looks like after a few decades of use:

The logos at the top and bottom of the screen have been covered with black rectangles - which is what made me think there was a camera embedded in the unit.

Far from a full-colour screen, this video shows the screen is a pretty rubbish LCD affair. White background and a choice of blue or grey for text. Indeed, it was used as a glorified calendar with address-book capabilities. Judging by contemporary reports it could connect to CompuServe - but, as with early videophones the reviews were not ethusiastic. And no mention of video-calling.

So, there you have it. Music videos should only be used for entertainment purposes and nothing more serious.

It led to an explosion of profitable ideas - Ringtones! Games! Premium SMS! Adult video clips! - but I want to talk about something which didn't make quite the same impact. Video calling.

You've got to remember that video calling wasn't even in its infancy - it basically didn't exist for customers. Skype didn't have video calls on the desktop until a few years later. The idea of video calls on the go was basically science-fiction brought to life. How do you create a market for that?

The project we were working on was to incentivise customers to make video calls. That's hard to do when you're the only one of your social circle with a Video Phone. So here was the plan - within 24 hours of buying and activating their new phone, each customer should receive a video call from customer service. The call was, ostensibly, to ask them how they were enjoying their new phone. But, really, it was to show them the awesome coolness of being able to make and receive video calls.

The project never launched. There were technical blockers - without decent 3G coverage, people's first call would be a horrible experience and probably put them off. There were cost blockers - video calls were significantly more expensive than voice calls. But there were two powerful social elements.

The first was that executives couldn't find enough attractive call centre workers. No joke! They didn't outright say that they wanted to institute a "no mingers" policy - but it was very obvious that their idea of "making a good impression" involved a certain amount of conventional attractiveness.

The second was that call centre workers didn't want to expose their faces to callers! Anyone who has worked in a call centre knows that members of the public can be abusive arseholes. Staff were incredibly nervous about being seen. It was a fundamental change in the relationship between the customer and the agent. Being face-to-face is an important part of customer experience, but this was such a huge shake-up that it led to serious resistance.

Two decades later, and things have changed!

Between Skype, WhatsApp, Zoom, and Meet - it looks like the world has got the video call bug. And we're not paying per minute for the privilege!

Big High-Street retailers - knowing that their only relevance is physically examining the product before buying, and knowledgeable sales staff - are jumping on the video call as a way to engage with their customer base.

It isn't just retail. Doctors and other medical practitioners now regularly use video calls with patients. I asked my friends where they'd seen two-way video calling in the wild. Some of the answers were surprising to me.

Terence Eden is on Mastodon

@edent

Interesting question from 7 years ago.
Aside from doctors, I don't think I've seen *any* online services offer a video call.
Amazon experimented with it on their Fire phone. But are there any modern examples?

Terence Eden is on Mastodon

@edent

Online services means less face-to-face contact (esp for elderly or housebound). Should we switch to video chat?
#UKGC15

---

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jdforrester

@jdforrester

Replying to @edent@edent United Airlines just announced video customer support for rebooking/fiddling with your flights instead of phone calls: travelandleisure.com/airlines-airpo… Not used it yet though (and not sure I’d want to).travelandleisure.com
United Airlines
The largest airline in the world by destinations served, United operates flights to 235 domestic and 138 international cities in 60 countries around the world. It flies out of hubs in Chicago,...

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Simon Willison

@simonw

Replying to @edent@edent Airbnb virtual experiences and Amazon's equivalent, Amazon Explore amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node…

I keep meaning to try a cooking lesson

---

Rachel Clarke

@rachelclarke

Replying to @edent@edent one area that is growing is shopping. Companies are offering "personal shopper" experiences.

---

Stefan Czerniawski

@pubstrat

Replying to @edent@edent John Lewis carpet fitting an unlikely candidate for the bleeding edge, but there indeed they are

---

Dan Jordan

@danjordan

Replying to @edent@edent There’s a NatWest advert on TV at the moment about video banking natwest.com/banking-with-n…

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Mark Buttanshaw

@buttansma

Replying to @edent@edent Court or tribunal video hearings? It’s based on multiple things so not quite just a service a user can opt into…

---

David Turner

@DJTurner90

Replying to @edent@edent Car mechanics when they find a problem with your car and need to prepare you for a large bill. The video call is to show the fault whilst the car is on the ramp - somehow makes it feel more real and believable.

---

I find it continually surprising that it takes society a while to become comfortable with new technology. Any of the above services could have launched 10-15 years ago. The technology was there - but society, and the market - needed a nudge to make it happen.

YouTube hosts 360 videos. Here's one of mine, wandering through the Houses of Parliament. You can drag the video to see all around.

If you let YouTube-DL download the "best" version, you'll end up with a video which looks like this:

Each lens' view has been horizontally stretched, and then stitched into an over/under view. This is in Google's Equi-angular Cubemap format. Grim!

There are two options available to you to get the equirectangular version needed to playback easily on Linux

Easy Way

Running youtube-dl -F https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=... will show you all the formats available.

136          mp4        1280x720   720s 2325k , avc1.4d401f, 30fps, video only, 24.94MiB
248          webm       1920x960   1080s 2375k , vp9, 30fps, video only, 25.53MiB
137          mp4        1920x960   1080s 4127k , avc1.640028, 30fps, video only, 41.92MiB
18           mp4        640x360    360s  705k , avc1.42001E, 30fps, mp4a.40.2@ 96k (44100Hz), 7.63MiB
22           mp4        1280x720   720s 2514k , avc1.64001F, 30fps, mp4a.40.2@192k (44100Hz) (best)

I found that -f 22 worked. And there's a way to test that!

If you run ffmpeg -hide_banner -i filename.mp4 then you should see this in the metadata:

Side data:
   stereo3d: 2D
   spherical: equirectangular (0.000000/0.000000/0.000000) 

That's the magic which tells a video player that this is a spherical / 360 video.

If you play back the video in, say, the default Linux video player, it will look like this:

It's a weird view out of both lenses simultaneously. Yeuch!

But if you play it using VLC version 3 or above, you'll be able to drag the video around.

There is a downside. This only gets the 720p version. If we want the full resolution version, we need a bit more trickery.

Hard Way

There's a bug in YouTube which means YouTube-DL sometimes gets served up slightly weird formats. The fix is to pass a blank user agent:

youtube-dl --user-agent "" ...

Now, when you download the video, you'll get the full resolution copy in equirectangular format. HORRAY! But without the correct metadata. BOO!

This is because ffmpeg strips out Side data. *sigh*

So, run this:

youtube-dl --user-agent "" -k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=...

That tells YouTube-DL to keep the original video and audio separate. They need to be merged with the standard compliance mode to unofficial .

ffmpeg -i video.mp4 -i audio.m4a -c:v copy -strict unofficial spherical.mp4

Phew! Easy when you know how, eh?

NHS

@NHSuk

Need help fast, but not sure what to do? Go straight to 111.nhs.uk .
To find out more about NHS 111 including how to use the NHS 111 BSL interpreter service visit nhs.uk/111 #NHS111 pic.x.com/tk18uvm2vy

---

Is it possible to have multiple Sign Languages available to a video?

What you may not know is that British Sign Language and American Sign Language are completely different languages. Not like written English and American English with the occasional difference in spelling, but mutually incomprehensible.

Wouldn't it be nice if users could flip between different Sign Languages as easily as different subtitles?

HTML5 gives us the power to add multiple subtitles to a video. For example:

<video>
   <source src="example.mp4" type="video/mp4">
   <track label="English" kind="subtitles" srclang="en" src="en.vtt" default>
   <track label="Español" kind="subtitles" srclang="es" src="es.vtt">
</video>

How could we do the same for Sign Language?

Overlays

The aim is to overlay one video on top of another. That is, have the main video in the background and the the person signing in front.

Here's a simple way to do it in HTML. Two videos, in a <div>.

<div class="video-container">
   <video class="main" autoplay>
      <source src="video.mp4" type="video/mp4">
   </video>
   <video class="sign" autoplay>
      <source src="bsl.mp4"   type="video/mp4">
   </video>
</div>

Then some CSS to layer one on top of the other:

.video-container {
  position:relative;
  width:400px;
}
.main {
    height: 200px;
    width: 400px;
    float: left;
    position: absolute; 
}
.sign {
    width: 100px;
    position: absolute;
    bottom:-200px;
    right:0px;
}

That gives you this effect:

There's deliberately no audio, and the Signing is not related to the main video. This is just an experiment. My CSS may break in unusual ways!

Source videos Creative Commons - How to greet someone in English and Learn Basic Greetings in British Sign Language.

Three points to note:

1. There's no synchronisation - both are set to autoplay, but some JS magic will be needed to keep them both in sync, or to pause at the same time.
2. No way to switch between different Sign Languages. Again, will need some JS to do that.
3. No transparency.

The last one is very annoying.

Alpha Video

Most Signers are usually "green screened" - that is, the background image is transparent and they are seamlessly overlayed onto the video.

HTML5 videos don't have an "alpha" channel. That is, no transparency. Chrome had an experimental alpha flag - but that doesn't seem to have gone very far.

There are some hacky open source plugins, and a few experiments using canvas - but nothing mainstream.

Separate Video Tracks

The final alternative is to produce multiple videos, each with a different Sign Language superimposed. In which case, you'd need a small user interface asking the user which video they want to see.

Standards

I do some work on web standards - but I'm ignorant about this area. It looks like there was some attempts at standardising having multiple video tracks, or improving the accessibility of web video - but they don't seem to have got much further.

I suppose what I'm looking for is:

<video controls>
  <source src="video.mp4" type="video/mp4">
  <video label="British Sign Language" kind="overlay" srclang="sgn-GB" src="bsl.mp4">
  <track label="English" kind="subtitles"  srclang="en" src="en.vtt" default>
  <audio label="English" kind="Commentary" srclang="en" src="en.mp3" default>
</video>

Would that be useful, I wonder?

MPEG-DASH is a simple method of streaming videos which doesn't require any specialised server software. You convert a high resolution video into a series of smaller resolution videos. You chop each of the videos up into several chunks. As the video plays, your browser then decides which chunk of the video to load next depend on the bandwidth available to it. Easy!

Aim

From the command line:

• Upload a video to YouTube
• Download transcoded video in several formats suitable for MPEG DASH Streaming
• Generate DASH manifest
• Generate the HTML5 markup

Uploading

There are a couple of YouTube video uploaders. These are useful if you've got a video on a server, or don't want to waste a browser window.

• porjo/youtubeuploader has binaries available for Linux/Mac/Windows.
• tokland/shoogle a Python interface for all of Google's APIs.

I'm using Porjo's client. After following the authentication instructions, the output is something like:

./youtubeuploader_linux_amd64 -filename testing.mp4

Uploading file 'testing.mp4'...
Progress:     1.37 Mbps, 9852099 / 9852099 (100.000%) ETA          0s
Upload successful! Video ID: 6NV5heuaVuc

Downloading

The only program worth using is youtube-dl.

We can see every video format that YouTube has created using:

youtube-dl -F 6NV5heuaVuc

That will return something like:

It may take several minutes for YouTube to generate all the video formats - the length of time will depend on the length and quality of the video.

We want to download all the DASH videos and the DASH audios. We also want the subtitles - even if they are autogenerated. Finally, we want the thumbnail image for the HTML5 poster.

The youtube-dl command to download all the DASH audio is:

youtube-dl -f 'all[vcodec=none]' -o '%(title)s-%(format)s.%(ext)s' 6NV5heuaVuc

To get all the DASH videos:

youtube-dl -f 'all[acodec=none]' -o '%(title)s-%(format)s.%(ext)s' 6NV5heuaVuc

This will create a separate MP4 video for each resolution, and separate audio file for each bitrate.

To generate a single thumbnail, run:

youtube-dl --write-thumbnail --skip-download 6NV5heuaVuc

To download the subtitles:

youtube-dl --write-auto-sub --sub-format vtt --write-sub 6NV5heuaVuc

Convert to DASH

For this step, we need the open source Bento4 toolkit.

The video should already have "fragments" - the chunks which make up the stream - you can check this with:

./mp4info "Video-133 - 426x240 (DASH video).mp4"

In the output, you should see:

Movie:
  duration:   0 ms
  time scale: 90000
  fragments:  yes

The audio downloaded from YouTube will not have fragments, so you'll need to run this command on every audio file you've downloaded:

./mp4fragment "Video-140 - audio only (DASH audio).m4a" high.m4a

Combine and create manifest

Let's take those audio and video files and make ourselves a manifest!

./mp4dash -o output-video 133.mp4 135.mp4 136.mp4 137.mp4 160.mp4 high.m4a low.m4a

This creates the folder output-video and creates folders for the chunked audio and video.

It will also produce the MPD - a manifest file which references all of the chunks.

We're nearly ready to play back.

Play DASH Video in the browser

As far as I can tell, no browser natively supports MPEG-DASH. You will need to use the latest version of dash.js to make everything work smoothly.

Add this piece of JavaScript to your page:

<script src="https://cdn.dashjs.org/latest/dash.all.min.js"></script>

Then reference the MPD in a video element:

<video width="1080" data-dashjs-player src="stream.mpd" controls poster="example.jpg">
    <track kind="subtitles" src="en.vtt" srclang="en" label="English">
</video>

Demo

Here is an adaptive stream of one of my videos - hosted natively on this site, with no server-side streaming.

Problems?

Fallback video

Some browsers can't play back DASH, even with the JavaScript - so you can put a fallback video in the HTML.

<video width="1080" data-dashjs-player controls >
    <source src="stream.mpd"   type="application/dash+xml">
    <source src="fallback.mp4" type="video/mp4">
</video>

HLS

Because Apple are special, they don't support DASH on its phones. So you'll need to use their proprietary HLS streaming solution. You can use Bento4 to create HLS in exactly the same way as you create DASH.

You may also need to use hls.js JavaScript to get things to work smoothly.

Subtitles

You can use DASH native subtitles, or HTML5 subtitles.

I found that the HTML5 subtitles downloaded by youtube-dl contain some strange CSS which didn't work well with the DASH video. You may need to test to see how it works for you.

All in one command?

Hahahaha! Not yet! If you know of a good way to do this - let me know!

Photographs often contain EXIF metadata - really useful for finding out when a photo was taken. It turns out that you can add similar metadata to MP4 format videos.

Here's how to do it with ffmpeg on Ubuntu Linux. The magic option is -metadata creation_time="2015-12-25T12:34:56" Stick that in when you're encoding your video and it will be added to the new file.

The time should be in ISO8601.

If you have a video that you don't want to re-encode, you can do this.

ffmpeg -i original.mp4 -c copy -map 0 -metadata creation_time="2015-12-25T12:34:56" output.mp4

To check it has worked:

ffprobe -show_streams -show_format output.mp4

Should spit out a whole bunch of metadata, including

TAG:creation_time=2016-12-25T12:34:56.000000Z

Here are my findings.

Caveats

These are not Google Glasses. These are £15 DVR Sunglasses. They are cheap and nasty and don't look anything like the futuristic Google Glasses. They record VGA quality video and have a mono microphone suitable for picking up close range sounds. There's no visual feedback.

I popped out one of the lenses to make it look everso slightly more like Google Glass.

Recognition

Several people in the bar asked if I was wearing Google Glasses - for an as-yet unlaunched product, there are plenty of people who know about them. In swinging London, at least.

I walked down Oxford Street to get some cash - there are a few moments when people seem to recognise that I'm not wearing a normal piece of eyewear.

The video should give you a good idea of some of the pitfalls of life logging - not to mention the tediousness of always on recording.

I'm A Creep

From playing back the footage, I spend a huge amount of time staring at breast and arses. Am I a lecherous old creep? Well, only partly. Because the glasses have a fixed camera, the record whatever my nose is pointed at - not where my eyes are looking. My head is facing forward but my eyes are pointing left - I'm looking at you but recording what's ahead of me.

So, if you were to pick out the worst moments of my video, you'd see me oggling a collection of bums (male and female) and checking out a swathe of chests (again, male & female).

Just like President Obama.

More than embarrassing, it also means you don't capture what you are actually looking at. Unless the lens has an incredibly wide field of view, you're going to miss out on a whole lot.

That's my story, and I'm sticking to it!

Eye Contact

Amazed by how @edent’s low-rent Google Glass-alike affects conversations. Even eye contact fails. Glass is doomed. Archived Source

Initially, people stared at the glasses rather than me. That was quite disconcerting. As the evening wore on, the glasses faded into the background and people seemed to get a lot more comfortable with them. It's quite easy to forget that you are recording - or that you are being recorded. Which leads to...

Don't Record That Please

Tom Scott & I were having a chat, when suddenly he let slip one of his frequent rants about how David Cameron was born in Kenya (or something). He immediately realised he was being recorded and asked for me to edit out the last few seconds of footage. Naturally I sold his bizarre and spiteful theories to the tabloid press in the hope of ousting him from his throne as King of the Interwebs.

We quickly came up with a universal gesture which means "please delete the last 10 seconds of recording."

I’ve invented a ‘scissors’ gesture for “cut what I just said out of your lifelog”. It might have another meaning Archived Source

The scissors is fairly recognisable to both humans and computers. The "snip snip" meaning "to cut out" is fairly unambiguous and rarely conflicts with any other common gesture. It also has added significance in the UK.

Other people just seemed to forget that I was recording. Within a few moments they were bitching about their jobs, spouses, health - all the usual things that friends grouse about. They are reliant on my continuing friendship to keep those conversations private. That's a really uncomfortable feeling. I don't want people to be friendly to me because they're afraid I might post to YouTube a video of them talking about how much they hate their boss.

In a way, we've always had this problem. But before it was restricted to "he said she said" - now there's evidence.

Low Light, High Volume

Some of the most awkward social situations - and some of my fondest memories - happen in darkly lit bars with thunking music. I've no idea how well the real Google Glasses will perform, but it's likely they'll be overwhelmed by the noise and - unless they include infrared lighting - be practically useless in low light situations.

Towards the end of the evening, Shoe Blogger Sabrina Johnson - came up to me to ask if I was really wearing Google Glasses. Here's the only barely usable piece of video.

Final Thoughts

I've experimented with perhaps the least interesting - but most controversial - aspect of Google Glass. We already have the ability to record our daily lives, but a cheap pair of Video Sunglasses make the process a lot more subtle - and virtually effortless.

One of my favourite sci-fi books is "The Light of Other Days"

It explores, in part, what would happen if we could see into the past. Imagine if you could rewind to any point in your personal history and rewatch old arguments. If you could see whether you really were as funny as you thought. If you could add up how much time you spent playing Tetris.

Watching back my drunken escapades was, ironically, a sobering experience. I thought I had a good time last night, but it appears I spent much of the evening queuing for drinks, looking at my phone, or trapped in conversation with a bore. My inebriated wit isn't quite up to the standard of Oscar Wilde.

I've trapped my memories on silicon wafers. Not just my memories - but slices of other people's lives as well. Those recordings are now my hostages - and I don't know how that makes me feel.

Derby Museum using multilingual QR codes from Andrew James Sykes on Vimeo.

In 2011 Wikipedians wrote and translated 1200 new articles to allow the museums objects to read in over a dozen languages using QRpedia codes.

This is the video from the Derby Museum Backstage Pass where we gave the first public demonstration of QRpedia.

The Video

Video shot by Nick Moyes.

The Slides

All slides are a work in progress. This is a close approximation of what was presented on the day.

View more presentations from Terence Eden

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

BarCamp London

@barcamplondon

Replying to @edent@edent if you provide the cameras, the 20 person film / editing crew along with some budget sure ;) Its probably a bit much sorry!

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Does It Need To Be So Hard?

We don't need expensive crews. We have each other! The very idea of BarCamps is that they should be self-organised. So, if you're going to BCL8 this year, here's what I would like you to do...

• Got a smartphone or a flip camcorder? Video the sessions you're in.
• Got a less-than-smart-phone or a dictaphone? Record the audio of the sessions you run or participate in.
• Got neither? Offer to hold someone else's tech while they present.

Before long, every single session will have coverage of some kind and us poor sods who can't make it will still be able to vicariously share in the pleasure of London's greatest Unconference.

Video

There are loads of places to stick video up on the web. But most services have time and size restrictions or want you to pay to store your video. YouTube is limited to 15 minutes (no good for 30 minute BarCamp sessions) and Vimeo is limited to 500MB per week (no good if you've filmed in HD).

Here are two free services which I think will suit the BarCamp Crowd.

Archive.org

Archive.org is

building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public.

I believe this to be the best place to store the record of our culture. Here's a video of me running a session at BarCamp Brighton. The video is hosted by Archive.org and can be downloaded in several formats.

Videos can be any length and any format. They'll be transcoded to MP4 and Ogg Video. Best of all, video can be uploaded via FTP - which makes queuing large uploads very easy. You can, of course, upload via your browser.

One point to note, videos have to be CreativeCommons or Public Domain.

There are already around 40 BarCamp videos on Archive.org.

Qik

If you have the bandwidth, Qik is the ideal place to stream and store video. I've found the application can be a little hit-and-miss - especially if WiFi coverage gets congested. Here's my presentation from BarCamp Transparency.

(Qik videos autoplay - click on the screenshot to see the video)

Streaming Services

There are loads of sites which will let you stream video from your laptop's webcam. Please - whatever service you use - make sure that it is also recording the stream. It greatly saddens me that the presentations from awesome events like CharityHackDay are lost forever. They were streamed and then promptly vanished.

Audio

Video can be overkill. It takes a lot of effort to upload and just as much to download. It's often simpler just to record audio. Even the most basic phones tend to have a "voice record" function. Once you've got the audio, there are a number of places you can put it.

AudioBoo

Everyone loves AudioBoo. It's a great way of saving audio - although it's currently only available on iPhone. If you don't have an iPhone, you can upload any sound file you like to their website and they'll convert and host it.

Here is a recording of my session at BarCamp Brighton.

I decided to separate the main body of the talk from the discussion which followed afterwards.

Archive.org

There's a whole bunch of BarCamp audio already up on Archive.org.

Audacity

If you want to edit your audio, I highly recommend Audacity. It's free, open source, and works on Linux, Mac and Windows.

Collating

Ok, so every session is now recorded and stored somewhere on the Internet. How do we go about organising this mass of video and audio?

Let's look at how some other conferences have done it.

OpenTech

One of the great things about OpenTech was the effort put in by the organisers to ensure every talk was preserved on wax cylinders mp3. The session page is really well laid out and has links to audio and, in some cases, slides.

But what if you can't be bothered or don't have the time to manage a web page?

Lanyrd

Currently the darling of the conference scene, Lanyrd easily allows you to add "coverage" to sessions. You can attach notes, handouts, audio, video, slides, photos or links.

Privacy

Terence Eden is on Mastodon

@edent

Replying to @barcamplondon@barcamplondon @cbetta @tommorris doesn't need anything expensive. Just one person in each session recording on their phone / flip.

---

Richard Johnson

@chichard41

Replying to @edent@edent I recorded some videos of #bcl7 but they're massive to upload, some on my vimeo. Or some are "what's said in barcamp, stays in..."

---

• Some people won't want their sessions recorded. Please ask presenters to check that they're happy to be immortalised.
• Everyone hates the sound of their own voice - do let people in the audience know if you're going to be recording.
• When in doubt, edit it out.

A Plea

I really want to attend BarCamp London. And BarCamp Manchester. And all the other BarCamps which I can't get to.

Please - if you can - record your session and upload it somewhere. Even a poorly shot, noisy, unedited video is better than none.

This is our digital heritage. We should be proud of what we create and ensure that it is available for posterity.

File Sizes

The glasses, it turns out, record in 1.1GB chunks. If you really want to know the details, the videos are

1,231,771,216 bytes
1,233,678,696 bytes

Each file is 30 minutes and 1 second long. Annoyingly, there is a gap between the videos of roughly 10 seconds.

My calculations from earlier were incorrect - an 8GB card is enough to hold just shy of 4 hours of video.

Compressing

I'm hosting the video on archive.org. One of their services is to re-encode the video into a web-friendly format. What's quite stunning (to me) is the inefficiency of the MJPEG codec which the glasses use.

The change in quality is negligible - as you can see from the demo.

I wonder how much more expensive the glasses would be if they recorded in an efficient format like Ogg Video? Obviously, there would be battery life considerations - but being able to record 10 times as much video on a single memory card is a big gain.

Another demo

This is using flash, however, Archive.org also offer HTML5 video which I'll be moving to after #NaBloPoMo has finished.

Head mounted 3-megapixel video camera.  Seamlessly embedded within a pair of innocuous looking sun glasses.  At £250, they're not cheap.  While battery life looks good at 2.5 hours, they can only record one hour of video.

No method of playback means no deletion, so you're stuck until you can find a laptop.  No expandable memory.  Would it have been so hard to take microSD cards?

Regardless of any shortcomings, take a look at the video quality it provides.  Sound quality is mono - but good enough for capturing voices.

The only question I have is whether they use a standard USB socket, or whether they require some proprietary cable.

Compared to something like a FlipMino HD, the Immortal glasses are really pricey.  Mini HD cameras on Amazon are between £130 and £150. So you're paying a £100 premium to have the electronics shrunk into your glasses.  And you only get standard definition.

But enough about the downside - let's think of the amazing uses these could be put to.

Possible Uses

Documentary / Social Commentary.  Wearing an pair of sunglasses is relatively normal.  It would help documentary subject forget about the camera in the room.  Also as a method of quasi-covert filming, capturing people's attitudes and behaviours when they think no one is looking.

Protesters. Watch the video of Sgt Smellie striking a protester, it looks to me like police brutality - yet he was acquitted. Imagine how much more potent the images would have been if we'd had the protester's eye view of being assaulted.

Augmented Reality.  As much as I love Layar, it's a pain having to hold a phone up to the world.  Combined with Vuzix - video-screen glasses - you could have perfect augmented reality superimposed on what you were looking at. Of course, video glasses are pretty pricey but it's a combo we'll see before long.

Movie Piracy!  Although even the best anti-judder technology isn't going to mask someone chuckling.

What Next

I'd love to get my hands on this technology, but at this price-point it falls a little short.  I would expect either higher quality footage or a longer recording time.  No doubt the next version will have a basic HUD as well.

You can buy the Immortal Video Camera Glasses for £250.

The BarCamp was excellent.  A great bunch of people.  The venue was beautiful, but the lack of walls (and floorboards!) meant that sound bleed was a problem.

The problem I have with BarCamps is there are invariably two or three talks which I really want to see which have clashing timeslots.

So, I decided to record the sessions I went to so that others could see them later.

I really hope that future BarCamps make it a policy to record every talk / discussion (where appropriate).  Think of it like a low-tech TED Talk.

I managed to get hold of a Flip Mino HD Camera. I'll put a review up later, but, briefly, it's a simple Point and Shoot cam which records in 720p.  Lovely.  It has a 4GB flash drive in it which gives a 1 hour recording time.  So a 30 minute BarCamp presentation is ~2GB

The only problem is.... THIS IS TOO LARGE FOR ANY ONLINE SERVICE!

YouTube - Will take files up to 2GB in size - but has a limit of 10 minutes of length.

BlipTV - Have a file limit of 1GB.  Annoyingly, they don't transcode to a lower resolution, so people with older machines won't be able to watch the videos. They do have a very nice FTP upload service.

DailyMotion - To upload videos of unlimited length, you need to become a "MotionMaker".  The process requires you to get approval.  I found that many of my videos just didn't work when uploaded to DailyMotion.

Vimeo - with a paid for "Plus" account, you can still only load 5GB per week.  If you want to use the free service, you're restricted to 500MB

GAH!

So, I've had to spend ages transcoding the footage I took so it can be uploaded somewhere. On a slow machine it can take a long time to convert to a smaller video format - especially if you want to keep the sound in sync.  Uploading videos of several hundred megabytes is also painfully slow.

Here are the talks I went to. Enjoy!

What Is BarCampBrighton

Star Wars Wedding on a Budget

High Altitude Photography

Zepplins

Some Robots

Widgets

There are only 2 problems....

1) I can't download the shows 2) I can't stream the shows to my phone (Nokia N95 and Blackberry 8800)

Now, the BBC have released a version of the iPlayer for the iPhone. As usual, the BBC has some great technical information on how it all works.

Basically, the iPlayer version delivers mp4 files to the iPhone. How can you grab those mp4s to watch at your convenience on your device? It's a doddle....

1. Get Firefox. It's a better web browser than whatever you're using at the moment.
2. Change your user-agent to "iphone" (hard step 1 - see below).
3. Install this Bookmarklet - drag that link to your bookmarks toolbar. (Thanks to HubLog)
4. Go to www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer and click on the show you want to watch
5. Click on the Bookmarklet. You can now save the show to your computer.
6. Watch show on your computer (I use VLC) or copy to your phone/media player to watch it (hard step 2 - see below).

Ok, so here are the hard steps.

To change your User-Agent you can either type "about:config" into the Firefox address bar and change "general.useragent.extra.firefox" to "iphone". Or you can install User Agent Switcher.

To watch it on your phone depends on your phone. My N95 would only play the files through CorePlayer and my 8800 would only play the sound. You may have to do some video jiggery-pokery to get playback on your device.Video files are around 100 - 120MB for 30 minutes. Resolution is 480*272 - not HD (or even SD!) but good enough for viewing on the phone and as good as anything you might download from a torrent site. Frame rate is PAL 25fps, sound is stereo.

Have fun!