Subscribing to Open Media Projects with TiVo

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kreynen's picture

Scott Carrico posted this to the ACM list...

"Just saw this interesting article about how TiVo users will now be able to access hundreds of podcast channels, so if you have one or are thinking about adding one, here are the details:

http://hothardware.com/News/TiVo-Adds-Hundreds-Of-Free-Web-Video-Channels/

And here is a link to the TiVo content publisher page:

http://www.tivo.com/abouttivo/resourcecenter/developerpublisherdetails/i...

I wish Dish Net or DirectTV would offer something like this. The number one complaint I hear from elected officials and the public is not being able to see our channel on a dish service.

Scott Carrico
BPS-TV Station Manager"

I can't participate on that ACM list for a number of reasons, but I would like to respond to this as I see this becoming an increasing popular approach to distribution. Of the PEG-related sharing solutions discussed or demonstrated at the sharing session at national conference in Portland, the Open Media System was the only solution that supported RSS . Most of you know that each Open Media Project has it's own media enabled RSS feed, but the way we initially configured these feeds included the .flv. .flv works with Miro, but doesn't work with iTunes or TiVo. We haven't been creating an H.264 version of files, but that is relatively easy to add as a Media Mover config when you are starting a new archive. It is more difficult to add H.264, Ogg, or any other new codec to an archive as big as DOM's (3000+ shows and growing).

The option to include a specific Media Mover config in the RSS feed is in the advanced option of the Media Mover config interface. Once you've included a file in the RSS, any Feed you create with Views will include that file.

Creating Feeds with Views...

Exposing Media Mover managed filefield to RSS...

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expose_to_rss.png66.68 KB

Comments

As we're just about to add our archive...

synchlayer's picture

... Is h.264 also what you would recommend so that the Open Media Project works not just on computer browsers but across mobile phones too? I think it's really important that it works across the spectrum, especially as cells become the primary browsing experience for more people.

Licensing... Sigh...

PetePO's picture

I love this! I love it so so so much. This thought process goes even further than TiVo and iTunes subscription as a replacement for the flash version of the video files on OMP websites. From what I hear (haven't had the chance to config this yet) it's pretty easy to set Drupal up to wrap h.264 files as flash displays. This reduces the need for yet another transcoding for every program that's submitted and can streamline all sorts of stuff! Beyond Miro and iTunes and TiVo having an exposed h.264 feed would allow the OMP to interact with other hosting services much like blip.tv and would make crossposting super easy.

Unfortunately, these codecs are not FOSS. What I hear and know about h.264/MPEG-4 is that in order to legitimately encode to it you need to pay a licensing fee to the Consortium. That's why when using Ubuntu for transcoding, as suggested on this forum, you have to enable all good abd and ugly codecs and agree that you are using these codecs outside of the consortium's area of legal standing or that you are in an educational institution and using these codecs for research purposes.

Commercial software that encodes to this format has the licensing fee rolled into their releases but in order to encode from ffmpeg to h.264 this licensing fee creates a major hurdle for CMCs. Especially since they only offer bulk licenses. sigh.

I'm no expert at this. Tell me that I'm wrong. I'd love to help move this forward.

-petepo

Another thought on why licensing .4 codecs sucks.

PetePO's picture

I'm also wondering if licensing fees were a major consideration on the ACM Server Standards Workgroup. It makes me really sad that "the standard" is for ginourmous files to be shared across a select group of stations that have more bandwidth than they can use. When I worked at Quote...Unquote in 2002 we were using dial-up on the studio call-in line. Transferring 2g files is a little more than most public stations can reasonably do.

One solution to "the bandwidth dilemma" that I think might have legs is called TeePipe. It allows a center to have multiple small business-class connections combined for bandwidth and redundancy. Check it out: http://josh.com/teepipe/index.htm

Is anyone exposing thier RSS?

PetePO's picture

I'm setting up a little miro box on my laptop and I was wondering if there were any stations who have this setup yet? I'd love to see how they integrate...

Oh - and in response to my last comment I'm still really excited about that program, especially with the WiMax/4G services that are being offered in many major cities.

-petepo