December 2006 Archives

On a recent trip to Shenzhen, CN, Bunnie found an iPod knock off and as he tends to do, he opened it up and shared it with all of us. It is interesting to compare the knock off and its capabilities with the real deal. Since you are only paying for hardware and the software and licensing costs go to nil, you end up with a very cheap device. He also mentions some of the reasons behind the sometimes blatant typos that tend to exist on these devices.

Bunnie has a monthly contest called "Name that ware" which asks visitors to name a piece of hardware based on pictures of its innards. I totally suck at it, but it is very interesting to see the experts at work.

A few days after my last day at DivX, I had some of my old co-workers informed me that Electronic artist BT (also known as Brian Transeau) was in the office. Obviously, being a big electronic music fan and I was bummed to hear I missed out, but simultaneously happy to hear DivX was working with BT. I have had his latest album, This Binary Universe, for more then a month now and it is quite an experience. I am normally not that much into downtempo type music, but combined with the video it sets a very different mood. I wish I could have gone to one of his screenings, but I rarely get a chance to go to a show these days. I think the last show was seeing Satoshi Tomiie at the Karma Lounge of On Broadway several months ago.

Anyways, you will find the BT track named 1.618 in DivX HD 720p with high quality MP3 Surround audio on Stage6, which is nothing short of amazing to watch. Unfortunately, I do not have a 5.1 setup in my studio or office, so I was not able to take advantage of the MP3S audio encoding. However, having listened to the DVD I must say surround sound is a must have. I tried to play back the HD clip on our Philips DVP 5960/37 DivX Ultra Certified DVD Player, but it said it didn't support 720p via the USB drive. Which is not surprising, but it was worth a shot. I would only assume that this would playback on a HD capable player, such as the I-O Data AVeL LinkPlayer2. If you have 5.1 speakers hooked up to your computer, or you simply haven't seen the beauty of DivX in HD before. Be sure to check it out, otherwise enjoy it in Home Theater with MP3S.

Also, be sure to watch the very candid interview by Alastair "Digital56K" Mayo at BT's home in front of a Elektron Monomachine.

BT talks about the creation of his latest album This Binary Universe in depth. He discusses how he found the animators, how he financed it and its tour among other things. It was also interesting to hear his thoughts around being a new father and how that relates to his music. It reminded me of my experiences with my daughter while messing around in the home studio. BT also talks about music discovery via the internet and how it is truly a curse and a blessing for someone who does music for a living. He mentions that his records did not bring in any money and how compensates other artists when he likes a particular track. He mentions a variety of ways to find music including one of my online favorites BeatPort. He makes a brief mention of csound and how he integrated orchestral works into his album, but the one hour interview focuses primarily on what it took to create his latest album.

All and all, some great new content on Stage6 provided in its signature quality. Enjoy!

Another beta build has been released and we are getting close to extending beta test invitations to more people. We currently have limited bandwidth to Leiden, which will hold back the amount of invitations until we manage to get our primary datacenter on line. It is very exciting, but somewhat scary at the same time. Doing estimates on how many people you will be able to support with our current infrastructure is more an art then a science at this point. The more traffic and data we get, the better we will be able to predict our usage and load in the future.

It has been great to work with the operations team in getting our primary datacenter up and running. We still have a lot to do, but everyone is making sure we flag every SPOF and plan to address them as we build out our infrastructure. While we scale up for all of you to check it out. I provide you with a screenshot of the service to hold you over. I will provide you with more of them as time goes along.

If you haven't already done so, but are interested in checking out the service in person, please sign up to be a beta tester. It is the best way to ensure you will be able to experience the service as soon as we have capacity. We will be expanding the user base with invitations afterwards.

The project is very exciting and obviously has been keeping me very busy lately and I suspect it will for the next few months, if not years, to come. If you have contacted me lately and I haven't gotten around to pinging you back, this is most likely why. People want access to The Venice Project and there are only soo many hours in the day. I mostly have been spending that time focusing on the project and maturing the operations department to provide you the best experience that we can give. It is about time television leaps to the next level and takes advantage of globalization and the internet. I hope you feel the same way.

On another note, we all know by now that licensing content is a long process that takes a lot of time and effort. As described in my earlier post, you would need to talk to the content owners even if you are using the content as background music. Now how about screen shots of a product that delivers content over the internet? If the screen shows content then that could be compared to background music. Therefore the above screen shot of the Venice Project User Interface was specifically cleared by the TV content owner. Of course, how to clear the rights and which rights you need cleared differs depending on where in the world you are. This is tricky stuff. I am happy to say that The Venice Project is doing their part in providing screen shots that have been cleared by the content owners and working hard to provide legitimate playback of high quality content over the internet. Something that has been lacking quite some time.

Update (12/19/2006): I have been getting a lot of requests for invites lately, so I wanted to provide a quick update. Since we are still running on limited capacity all invites that I have are sent out. Best way to get access when our infrastructure allows is to apply on the TVP site.

Update (12/22/2006): Applications for beta testing are now no longer being accepted. We have been getting a ton of interest, so thanks for those who have already signed up. Access will be granted gradually once we get the Luxembourg datacenter online and tested. If you had not signed up yet and you want to be a beta tester, you will have to be invited by a current beta tester to join.