Present Perfect

Six years ago, we did the first large scale Ogg Theora stream from the 2004 GUADEC conference.

It was a dime on its side to get things ready for this year. I purposely removed myself from the organization, because for various reasons I’m not going to GUADEC this year, but I was hoping the rest of the company would do their part to get this working, and I just provided the necessary prodding along the way. I’ve been told one of the organisers in charge of this got ill at some point and communication went a bit south during that period, so I had some complaints from our support guys that they had to do last-minute rushing.

But the streams are live today, and a few developers here are giddily running around looking at the stream, the image, working on some typical bugs you get when you’re doing stuff like this for the first time (the artifacts on keyframes the encoder seems to have remind me a lot of the Theora bugs we had to squash back in the day, and obviously they are worse on still images, like, say, an empty conference room…)

Go check out the stream and make sure you have a WebM-enabled browser, like the Firefox 4.0 beta or latest Opera.

Congratulations to our intrepid hackers like Zaheer and Andoni for their hard work a few weeks ago on WebM, and I’ve been told Marc-André actually went to Holland just to deliver the encoders :)

So obviously, blog-wise I fell off the face of the earth for close to two months.

The immediate reason is some personal stuff happening to me that I needed to bounce back from (well, ok, I lied – it’s not stuff, it’s just one tiny little thing.)

As a result I haven’t done much hacking at all, beside a few fruitful morituri hack sessions.

As a consequence, I don’t have much useful to report, but I am going to slowly get back to some hacking. My Lego Mindstorms are already with me here in Barcelona so I am going to get started on that CD ripping robot Any Day Now.

I’ll get more specific about what non-hacking stuff I’ve been up to recently after the fallout of the personal stuff, but for now I’ll just mention I’ve been hugely enjoying getting back to playing basketball over the last year. A while ago Farid taught me a nice layup trick, and yesterday I had Pepe film it:

I haven’t pulled that one off correctly during a game though!

Oh wait, I lied. Yesterday I got a proof of achievement of something hacker-related: my Spanish diploma in Twisted!

I need to buy me a wall to hang that on, it’s just too cool! And the back lists all skills achieved, in Spanish. Check this out:

“El manejo de errores robusto con diferidos”. I’m sure that official had a field day translating deferred into Spanish.

Life! I’m back to eating you, one bite at a time. Make sure you’re ready for me.

For personal reasons, I haven’t been blogging lately, but lights are starting to prick through the clouds.

The past week however was a very interesting week in multimedialand as I’m sure most of you already know. In a nutshell, Google bought On2, a codec company (responsible for VP3, the seed for Theora, and VP6, used in Flash). Then they released VP8, their latest codec, as an open source codec.

Read all of the other posts for the nitty gritty about patent issues, code and codec quality. But it was amazing to see the community active, patches show up everywhere for programs, and rallying to make open source do what it does best.

Meanwhile, back at the farm (our little streaming company), a bunch of our hackers got excited too and executed on the match made in heaven. Zaheer’s blog has all the details, and yesterday all I did was check out a bunch of code and run this simple Flumotion launch line:

PYTHONPATH=`pwd` FLU_DEBUG=4 bin/flumotion-launch videotest-producer ! vp8-encoder ! webm-muxer ! http-streamer

And it Just Worked in the WebM Firefox build.

The part I like best about this ? I didn’t have to do a single thing, or say a single thing, or ask a single thing, to get our guys excited and hacking and delivering. Just as well, because again for personal reasons, I wouldn’t have had much time or energy to help them out.

It makes me proud to be a CTO of this company. A big thanks to Zaheer, Andoni, and Xavier, and anyone else I may have missed because I wasn’t paying attention.

As we are deluding ourselves here into thinking it’s snowing in Barcelona, I thought it appropriate to post some videos from the past few snowboarding trips.

Coincidentally, this is my first foray into the HTML5 video world – more on that later.

Let’s start with my favorite, the one where I show off how years of gymnastics in my youth help me keep my body in one piece:

(Also notice the cool new orange snowboard pants that I settled on. Snowboard fashion was really boring this year, mostly grey and black only, with some ugly flashy colours as exceptions. I leave it to you to judge whether orange is one of them).

We spent eight full days in Tignes, France, with only about three days of sunny weather, and the rest filled with clouds and snow.

My goal this year was to learn how to do a 180. With the help of an instructor, that’s exactly what I did! Here’s an admittedly simple one – all the good ones are not caught on video.

Here’s a more aggressive one with a bad ending:

A few weeks before our snowboard trip, we also had a business planning weekend which included one day of skiing. Xavier risked life and limb following me around with his iPhone to record this. It’s not the most exciting descent in the world, and he ended up missing my one fall in it, but I was surprised to see how short the whole descent really is if you don’t take any time to stop!

And here are Xavi and me relaxing over cheese fondue and raclette the day before the skiing:

Some notes about the HTML5 video part:

• there is an enormous difference in colour between playing Ogg in Firefox, MP4 in Safari, and MP4 in Quicktime, on the same MacBook. My pants range from a soft orange to a bright red. Something is obviously up!
• To learn about HTML5, I started with Dive into HTML5 Video, then learned about Video for Everybody, some web code that handles all of the stuff I don’t know how to do for me and just makes sure the video can play on Firefox/Chrome/Safari/iPhone/…
• Then I looked for WordPress integration, and found a plugin with a long name that implemented most of Video for Everybody. I modified it a little to do something more sensible for the poster image in case it’s external, and to accept .mp4 as an extension instead of .m4v (which is not suggested by Dive into HTML)
• I configured our transcoding platform to generate the three types of output file needed to support HTML5: the thumbnail, Ogg/Theora/Vorbis, and .mp4 with H264 and AAC.

The embedded video should work fine in Firefox/Safari/Chrome/iPhone/Opera (except in Aitor’s “I plug mplayer into Opera” case), and work fine in Explorer too where it falls back to Flash.

I couldn’t get this to work in Android. 2.0 is rumoured to support the video tag, but so far no dice, and I couldn’t find a single HTML5 video page online that the Android phones over here can play. If you can see these videos embedded in Android, or know what I should to fix them, please do let me know!

I’ve seen other people blog about it as well, so I shouldn’t stay behind – obviously it’s noteworthy.

In a good seven hours, our platform will be streaming a talk by the eminent Mr. Lessig from Harvard. Apparently the stream is going to be projected in various locations around the world as well where people will gather to follow the speech. While we’re only the technological medium and hence a small piece in making this possible, it still makes me proud to be part of this chain. It’s moments like these participating in a chain of openness that make me think business and technology can be used for the greater good.

For more info, see our blog. I’ll be tuning in after landing in Brussels at midnight tonight!