The TV debate that isent happening with Miro

Good artical about why we are takeing a stand on the lean fowerd lean back TV non debate that is currently not takeing place: Time to resurrect lean-forward TV?

A churchman has some thoughts on and good quotes on the subject Lean forward or lean back?

We started out with a lean back approach with a simple playback app as the front end with Azureas with a RSS plug-in the background handling the torrent downloads. The viewer simply hit the on-button then the app scand the download directory and played the videos from a playlist it made up from template and the video metadata.

We had a beta version of this runing when along came first fireant which was very much to complex and geek centered, then PCF with BM and DP which with the promise of easily skinning the HTML interface. We put our development, which was having problems with complex sun based JAVA installs which Azureas needed, to one side and moved onto that project.

DP took a LOT longer and lost the easy skinning along the way - and is only now becoming useabel. However it is now very much a lean in interface, it seams the developers are ideologically reistent to the lean back interface which is key to get an ordence outside the current geek avontgard and early adopters/video blogers.

Of course both intefaces are they way to go - start out with leanback "oho look its TV on my laptop, and it just works" then this leads to lean in "oho how interesting the are all these options, the IS a whole other world out there" and back to leanback "Ok, lets just tune in relax".

What we have been planing to do for the last 3 years is described well here at Babelgum interestingly two early adopters have failed in this first brightcove - only lean in expirence/content and then joost prittey much a lean back approach/content - also Joost is failing as it could just be Telly - everything on it is crap just like telly...

Background info from wikipedia: interactive TV

Were is the money comeing from?

A good artical on the problems of funding from foundations from Economist's View

Googal is THE metadata company think about this when reading Znet story

Broadband Service Available Worldwide, But Few Can Afford It, this is why our project is designed to work offline as well as online. For cost of Broadband around the world cheack out this artical at wired mag

Its a fools game to realy on free hosting

Be very careful about putting anything controversial on sights such as utube read here for what is likely to happen when a corporation complanes. From NewTeeVee

Or to continue to use the new web2 applications after they have been bought by mega-corporations. Obverse but very scary story from Privercey Digest

And just to cheer you up a positive story about mobile phones. From Gizmodo

Newmedia?

Net neutrality debate kicks off in UK from Cnet

Interesting look at sustainability for "new media" from DocSearls

Should bloggers make TV? mediashift

Video aspect ratios

On visionontv we use aproxamations for encoding the video:

for 4x3 video we use 640x480
for 16x9 video we use 800x480

Both are de-interlaced to produce progressive video, in this process we lose around 1/3 of the resolution thus the re-scaling to a smaller size. We also remove the pixal rateo and anamorphic streach in 16x9 video to produce a file that will playback with out distortion on any computer screen. Finerly it is compressed to a standerd H264 MP4 file at around 1600Kps

We could use meay other sizes this is an excert from a good artyical about aspect ratios: Some obvious image sizes in pixels to use to generate square pixel images for digital video are as follows:

NTSC D1 (720 x 486) normal

4:3 square pixels 712 x 534

Full width square pixels 720 x 534

NTSC D1 (720 x 486) widescreen

16:9 square pixels 864 x 486

Full width square pixels 874 x 486

NTSC DV (720 x 480) normal

4:3 square pixels 704 x 528

Full width square pixels 720 x 528

NTSC DV (720 x 480) widescreen

16:9 square pixels 854 x 480

Full width square pixels 874 x 480

PAL (720 x 576) normal

4:3 square pixels 768 x 576

Full width square pixels 788 x 576

PAL (720 x 576) widescreen

16:9 square pixels 1024 x 576

Full width square pixels 1050 x 576

For the full story read the full artical at perrybits

Piracy of broadcast TV

TV Torrents: When 'piracy' is easier than legal purchaseNBC's recent withdraw from the iTunes store leaves the millions of users of Apple iPods without a legitimate way to purchase and watch NBC's content. Could this be the push that brings easy-to-use 'piracy' to the masses? This article discusses the issues, and then provides step-by-step instructions to setup a computer to automatically download any of hundreds of TV shows as soon as they are broadcast and put online. More from c-net
This is the guide to TV piracy I was going to wright (:

This is a good interview with joost CEO which summer the current state of IPTV up from NewTeeVee

Customized Miro V1.00 install with VisiononTV skin and configuration

Miro player is a GPL app currently in BETA testing near to launch (ver 0.98) The majority of the code is cross platform Python with platform specific front ends for Windows, OS X, and GTK/X11. The core of the GUI is written in cross platform HTML, with a native look and feel on each platform. Free software projects are used wherever possabel - VLC, Xine, Bit Torrent, and Mozilla just to name a few.

http://www.getmiro.com/code/

As a first step we need to customize the Miro Player app by making it less like a computer app and more like TV, we will start with the windows version.

The basic changes in UI for windows are:

* have a simple first interface. Take out the menus; left side channel bar and the search box in the default install view.

* Add a button "Guide" at the bottom corner that returns to the full Miro interface. You can get all the rich miro experience of interactive TV by clicking on this "Guide" button.

Thus as a default install you get a TV box with a VCR controls that starts a Channel template play list (to be written*) when you hit the Play-button.

Throughout the program skinning the Miro branding needs to have visionontv branding credits added to it.

- need to change the app name to visonontv

- need to add to the help in the menus to add a donation for visonontv link and a visionontv help option. Of course leaving full credits to PCF as the core developer.

- in preferences we need to tern on by default: the auto run and the bit torrent download speed limiter, reduce the number of simultaneous downloads to 6 all to minimise the performance impact of the application. Make the close option that of moving to icon tray. Increase the hardrive free to 5GB.

- the donation link in the menus needs to go to a visionontv page which will have a prominent link to the Miro donation page.

- we need to change the default channel guide to the visiononTV one and re-name the other to “World Guide”.

- Redirect the auto update feature to our web host.

- remove the “star” option as most of our content will be torrents and whount work in video boom which is pretty swamped with spam anyway.

- we need our channels installed by default into channel folders.

- Install that doesn’t ask you any questions except easy/full?

* the playlist scripting will come in the second version.

Alive in Baghdad: Can Citizen Journalism Done Right Pay the Bills?

Alive in Baghdad is arguably the best-positioned citizen news video outfit in the world. It boasts not only an on-the-ground team shooting unfiltered interviews in a highly relevant place like Iraq, but constructive goodwill from videobloggers and video startups like blip.tv and Next New Networks, and even acknowledgment from the mainstream media. It won six prizes, including best vlog, at the inaugural Vloggies awards last year, was recently featured on Good Morning America, and landed on the page-view mine of the YouTube homepage today.

More from Newteevee

Rarely good discushen in the comments.

Some more IPTV shows to look at

Lots of new shows out there from corporate copycat low bugit mainstream shallow plastic: http://9.yahoo.com/

To another women dose tec news show:
http://commandn.typepad.com/

Geek boys and tec
http://digitalunderground.tv/

Low budgit girl geek (looks like its stopped)
http://www.jenncutter.com/openalpha/

And finely lots of geek themed shows here:
http://revision3.com/

Are any of them appropriate for http://visionontv.net tell us what you think.