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Streaming video D-Day

Thursday, January 24th, 2008

Tomorrow is going to be an exciting day. The LLAS have one of there sympodiums tomorrow that they are streaming live on the internet.

They are using Flash and the Flash Media Server to do this and it is the culmination of ideas from the subject centre, designs from their graphics people and a lot of programming in Flash from me. I mentioned that I did a lot of ActionScripting over Christmas, well this is the first big project that will use the things I’ve written.

The Flash movie has been tweaked, the Server has had 77 out of 150 people on it in the tests and hopefully there will be a good number on it. The live stream looks good and we’ve even sorted out some synchronised presentations to go with it (so the powerpoint is in crystal clear vector and the video can concentrate on the speaker).

This sort of thing has been done before, but I haven’t seen much of it done by the academic institutions. Most of the stuff I see is presenting one lecture theatre into another one when there isn’t enough chairs.

I’ll let you know how it goes tomorrow. You might even want to watch it… but I don’t think many language teachers read this. Shame.

24.01.2008 Modern Languages No Comments

Countdown to power down

Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008

In about a hour the university data centre will go down taking the entire computer system with it. As it is my job to make sure everything works, and it purposefully won’t, then the rest of my week will be ‘interesting’.

And I love this ‘lolcatz’ no-war picture, so I’ll share it.

funny pictures

02.01.2008 Funny, iSolutions (ISS, Central IT) No Comments

Christmas Actionscript

Saturday, December 29th, 2007

Have I been working over Christmas? Yes, but I’m actually quite enjoying it and it will only do me good in the long term.

I’ve been getting Flash to communicate with Flash Media Server 2 over the break and it’s not short work.

I’m very new to the server side coding of ActionScript. I’m armed with ‘Programming Flash Communications Server’, a very good O’Reilly book that is about 2 years out of date and Google. Shame there aren’t that many people who do this sort of thing so there is not much information.

The main thing I’m trying to do is security. Our system will have 3 levels of security – Internal only, passworded, none. None is easy as anyone can use the thing, internal and passworded are harder.

Flash can do a lot of checking of things, it can check to see if it is on the University network and whether you are logged into a site, the trouble is that anything tested on the client pc can be faked; so I need to get Flash to do the hard work and then get the server to check that the information is right. I think I’m on my way there now, but seeing as I’m on my 92nd version of the server application I should be.

I’ve managed to get Flash to check a PHP page and create a code that proves that they are internal and that they are allowed to view the video. Flash sends the time and key to the server, who then tries to create the same key with the same time stamp. If both the codes are the same then the server allows the video to stream.

The big plus side of using PHP is that we can get program information to appear inside the video, as apparently we have to show the title, broadcaster and date of broadcast with every video we send. We originally thought that academics would have to edit this into their video themselves so pulling it automatically would be a great way of making life easier.

It’s all hard to explain without a) going too technical b) going too simple or c) telling you how I made it so you can reverse my processes. But it is looking good.

29.12.2007 Computing, iSolutions (ISS, Central IT) No Comments

Flash on a Mac

Friday, December 28th, 2007

Seriously, how does anyone get any work done when this program has about a 33% chance of crashing every time you preview or publish a movie. This never happens on Vista or XP (well it does, but once a day rather than 3 times an hour).

On the flip side we set up a new Vista laptop yesterday. It got a virus by the time we had downloaded Avast and done the Windows updates. Typical.

28.12.2007 Computing, iSolutions (ISS, Central IT) No Comments

Why Macs are rubbish, by Graham Robinson.

Saturday, December 22nd, 2007

I’m going to lose some friends here I’m sure. But that’s what blogging is about right?

Lets get some simple things straight first
• We have increasing numbers of macs at work. But it is still under 5%
• I haven’t got past the ipod in terms of Mac experience
• I think Steve Jobs is cool
• Macs are pretty
• I am a Windows expert

That last part… I’m not a MVP (an accredited Microsoft expert) but I could beat 99% of the world in a computer fixing contest.

So I get my ‘work intuitively’ hat on and have started playing. Work gave me a Macbook last week to be able to learn about Macs in case of support calls and I’m trying to get the basics before being cocky.

So here is my list (more…)

22.12.2007 Computing, Work No Comments

Batch files

Thursday, December 13th, 2007

For the non-tech a batch file is something from 1427AD (or somewhere around there) that allows you to write, in a text file, the name of a number of programs. When you run the batch file the computer will run each program, and when it ends it will run the next one.

In my job I record the satellite TV in 8 different languages. Each day I run the videos through two encoders and put them onto a streaming server. It takes a long time to do but I can do other things while the processing goes on. But on Monday I got really bored of it.

Now after switching from a free piece of encoding software to a paid for version I can write a couple of batch files. From logging on to a computer 4 times a day to start each process off I now do the following

  1. Put my feet up until 4:25pm *
  2. At 4:25 I get an email saying ‘Files ready to be processed. Connect to server and press ‘squeeze’ (or an email saying ‘something has gone wrong’)
  3. I connect to the server and the correct files with the correct settings are sat there waiting for me
  4. I press squeeze

And that’s it. I’m very impressed. We could make it so I don’t even have to log in to press the squeeze button but that will cost $599. Now I don’t know about you but I can press a button every day to save £300. And at least it forces me to check it’s working each day.

G

*Obviously I don’t put my feet up, but at least I’m not doing Satellite TV stuff. And this means when I go on holiday I don’t have to hand a 2 page document over telling people what to do.

13.12.2007 Work 1 Comment

Protected: D.C.

Thursday, October 4th, 2007

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04.10.2007 iSolutions (ISS, Central IT) Enter your password to view comments.

Gross Negligence

Wednesday, September 26th, 2007

Do you know what happens when you don’t clean up your office before the summer holidays?

This happens!

26.09.2007 Work 1 Comment

“Other Modern Languages”

Thursday, August 23rd, 2007

It’s GCSE results day and the BBC have made a bar graph of results for all subjects. What I find very interesting is that you can go through just about every subject in the entire drop down list except music and history and find that the average is a C. On music / history the average appears to be a B, and it’s a close one.

Looking at Languages all of English, Welsh, Spanish, German and French the average is still a C. However ‘other languages‘ has an average of A*.

I can just about see how an average C can turn into an average B. They are pretty close, but this is a very clear A*. So how does it happen?  My guess is that it would only be the top, private, expensive schools that have the ability to offer a language that isn’t on the list; so they are expected to be clever. I might be right, I might be wrong, or it might be that the Japanese exam is on Pokamon rather than grammar.

In any case I’d need an expert and they’re all on holiday.

23.08.2007 Modern Languages No Comments

Customer Service (non-passworded version)

Wednesday, August 15th, 2007

I went on a customer service course today. However, if you don’t know the password to this blog it’s likely that you’re exactly the colleague or stranger that shouldn’t be reading my rant.

15.08.2007 iSolutions (ISS, Central IT) No Comments

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