Archive for the 'Web' Category

del.icio.us daily links and RSS media feeds

Published
by
David Wolf
on February 20, 2006
in Tech, Video and Web
. 0 Comments

del.icio.us/dpwolf by David Wolf

I’ve set up del.icio.us, a clever social bookmarking service to automatically post my daily links in the blog. I figure this place could do with a bit more activity and by adding a couple of lines of description to each link I can share the sites which catch my attention with a bit more clarity without having to sit down and write a proper post. I use del.icio.us quite a lot as I often move between different computers and locations.

While the daily post service is great, the interface for setting it up is a little clunky and cryptic unless you know what you’re doing. Thankfully Kevin Lim has written a helpful little guide to setting up del.icio.us with WordPress. It basically involves entering a username and password for your blog, the address of the xmlrpc.php file on your server, what time you’d like the post to occur in GMT and which category you’d like the post to appear in.

iTunes downloading video from a del.icio.us RSS feed

Another cool del.icio.us feature I’ve been meaning to post about for ages is the addition of RSS feeds for particular media types. Traditionally del.icio.us has provided RSS feeds of links for each tag, for example the RSS feed for links tagged “example” http://del.icio.us/tag/example is http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/example. Now, (since about halfway through last year actually) you can also search by media file type and generate RSS feeds for these complete with enclosures for use in podcasting applications like iTunes or FireAnt. So it can generate a feed of all the mp3 files people link to directly, or all the QuickTime movies or JPEG or MPEG files. Additionally, you can add tags to generate feeds of a particular media type about a particular topic, for example http://del.icio.us/tag/system:media:video+80s give you a collection of 1980s themed video files (mpeg, wmv, mov etc).

While I use iTunes as a media RSS client at the moment to harvest source clips which may be manipulated in live performance eventually it would be great to add a built in video RSS reader to my experimental video appliations (vidgets) and do live video searches.

[A disclaimer: subscribing to a feed of all mpeg or wmv files linked to by random strangers on the internet can lead to the automatic downloading of porn or other things you may not want on your hard drive (especially on a work or uni computer) so be careful eh ;-).]

Technorati Tags:

Glitcharama

Published
by
David Wolf
on February 13, 2006
in Design, Tech, Video and Web
. 1 Comment

A few months ago I began playing with manually corrupting jpeg files to see what kinds of artefacts I could create. I selected an image, compressed it down to a very small size (so I could easily manipulate large chunks of the data), opened it in a text editor (I like SubEthaEdit and TextMate) and added random text, copied pasted and generally shuffled the data, occasionally saving as new files.

Above is a QuickTime movie which animates through 12 of the resulting jpeg files. Click it to stop if it’s giving you a headache ;-) I re-compressed the jpegs just to be sure they wouldn’t crash QuickTime Player. Manually introducing errors and noise into files and then playing them is one of those “make sure you save any important files you have open” situations as things can grind to a halt.

I was playing with these images at Plug N Play at Kent St on Thursday night. I mentioned that I was planning on writing a php script which would similarly screw with jpeg images online and Sean told me about glitchbrowser.com.

From the site:

Computers are not allowed to make mistakes.

The glitch browser represents a deliberate attempt to subvert the
usual course of conformity and signal perfection. Information packets
which are communicated with integrity are intentionally lost in
transit or otherwise misplaced and rearranged. The consequences of
such subversion are seen in the surprisingly beautiful readymade
visual glitches provoked by the glitch browser and displayed through
our forgiving and unsuspecting web browsers.

This work was produced for New Langton Arts Packets programme,
by Dimitre Lima, Tony Scott and Iman Moradi.

Glitch Browser lets you enter a website’s URL and it will show you the page with all of the images randomly glitchified. For example, here’s the most interesting photos from Flickr through the Glitch Browser. Great stuff!

Technorati Tags: , ,

VJ Bertranol

Published
by
David Wolf
on October 27, 2005
in Music, Tech, Video and Web
. 0 Comments

VJ Bertranol

VJ Bertranol aka Bertrand Gondouin is a Sweden based VJ, video blogger and video software developer.

Through his company Mixnbrew he has developed a number of interesting bits of software including Symtonic A Flash based online video mixer application, Patchouli a video blogging uploader / content management system, and Scramble a granular video synthesis engine.

Good work and good to see the whole video blog / vj / network video crossover thing happening.

Technorati Tags:

The Guild website

Published
by
David Wolf
on September 17, 2005
in Design, Tech, Video and Web
. 1 Comment

Yesterday I finally finished setting up a website for The Guild of Commercial Filmmakers, a film production company where I work.

The site is powered by WordPress and makes extensive use of customised templates, css and custom fields. The design is by Nicole Dominic, sliced up and css/xhtml-ised by me.

One of the main functions of the website is to present an easily update-able show-reel of the company’s work (primarily TV ads). Some of the tricks I discovered whilst making the site may be of interest to the videoblogging crew or others wanting to use WordPress as a content management system for video. The next step is going to be working out how to customise the site’s RSS feeds to include this information.

screenshot of The Guild website

For each of the ads I make a regular post, storing a lot of information in custom fields, such as: the url of a thumbnail image; the url of a poster movie and the url of the movie itself. I store this information here rather than in the actual post text in order to separate content from styling and presentation, allowing me to refer to the same clip in a number of different ways from different areas of the site.

Continue reading ‘The Guild website’

MPEG Streamclip

Published
by
David Wolf
on August 19, 2005
in Tech, Video and Web
. 0 Comments

Squared 5 - MPEG Streamclip for Mac OS X is a handy little application which converts and demuxes mpeg streams. I found it a few weeks ago at work when I needed to recompress a large file from a client to put up on a website. By itself Quicktime Player will only export the video of a muxed mpeg file. MPEG Streamclip is designed specifically to convert mpeg 1 or 2 files to Quicktimes, or split them out to separate video and audio files (mpgs, m2vs, ac3s and aiffs). Very handy and free!

Interact with Quartz Compositions in Safari through JavaScript

Published
by
David Wolf
on August 19, 2005
in Tech, Vidget - Discussion, Vidget - Download and Web
. 2 Comments

mDimension Technology have developed a plugin for Safari which lets you not only view Quartz Compositions in a web page, but also interact with them via JavaScript. This is very neat!

So far I’ve been experimenting with creating custom applications (Vidgets) in Xcode which control Quartz Compositions, this plugin appears to give me most of the same functionality within a web page. To control and manipulate the composition, first you must follow the same methods of ‘publishing’ inputs and outputs from a composition as described here.

View source on these pages to see how to send and receive information to and from these inputs via JavaScript. I’m still working it out myself!

Here is a demo page from mDimension with a Quartz Composition embedded.

Here is a quick demo I made up based on the above page. It allows you to load an image by entering its url into a field and clicking outside of the field (don’t need to press enter), and change the spinning text similarly.

A Quartz Composition embedded in a webpage, being controlled via JavaScript

Technorati Tags: ,

QuickTime 7.0.1: Security enhancements

Published
by
David Wolf
on July 14, 2005
in Tech, Vidget - Discussion and Web
. 2 Comments

QuickTime 7.0.1: Security enhancements

This sucks. QT 7.0.1 no longer lets you access remote web locations from within a Quartz Composition when played using Quicktime Player. No more playing such compositions from the Quicktime Plugin in a web page either. This means no RSS feeds unless you run the composition in Quartz Composer itself or in a custom app.

This is the direction I’m heading anyway (making custom apps) but it means you can no longer distribute a .qtz file or a composition in a .mov which accesses network data and expect it to work on machine running Tiger unless the user has Quartz Composer installed.

These were some of the coolest features of Quartz which I was only just starting to explore before the plug was pulled. Hopefully these features will return some time soon.

Update 18/7/05

I don’t think I made this clear enough but the change was made in response to the potential security issue whereby network access from within a composition wrapped in a .mov file to be used to leak information to a malicious third party when used in combination with Quartz Composer’s ability to access sensitive information about the host computer (computer name, local ip address, current username, results of spotlight searches etc). See the original security report from David Remahl here:

Full-Disclosure: [Full-disclosure] [DR018] Quartz Composer / QuickTime 7 information leakage

Regular (non Quartz Composer) wired Quicktime movies have had the potential to expose some information about the host computer via network access for many years, however it was never to this level and I guess never seen as a security issue. As much as I hope to see things like RSS access return to Quartz Compositions when wrapped in .movs I don’t think it is likely.

It would be virtually impossible to modify Quicktime’s handling of QCs to differentiate between allowing nice, friendly information to be sent (get me links to all the recent images of “x” from flickr.com) and preventing nasty information such as (here is my username and ip address, please start trying to hack into my machine).

Using Quartz Compositions as screen savers expose the same potential risks but I guess in this case you are making a conscious decision to install a piece of software, as opposed to playing a .mov file unaware of its hidden code.

Technorati Tags: ,

Template Cinema

Published
by
David Wolf
on July 13, 2005
in Note to self, Video and Web
. 0 Comments

Template Cinema: A short film about nothing, by Thompson & Craighead

Template_Cinema is a collection of “low-tech movies made from existing data appropriated in realtime from the world wide web” by London artists Thomson & Craighead.

The works feature live camera feeds from various locations around the world accompanied by haunting mp3 scores, again appropriated from elsewhere online. Whilst beginning with film leader and ending with credits, these ‘templates’ are filled different every time they are viewed. Some are fixed views, others controlled by unknown ‘directors’.

The Template Cinema project began in 2002 with a networked installation: Short Films about Flying which featured live views of an airfield, snippets of audio from online radio stations and text from message boards.

In my own work I am interested in combining this is the sort of work (network/database cinema) with the real time malleability of sound art and VJ performance.

Also worth a look are these net.arty Web specific artworks and gallery works by Thomson & Craighead.

Dan Winkler’s this box of earth

Published
by
David Wolf
on July 8, 2005
in Video and Web
. 0 Comments

A new video by Dan Winkler

Dan Winkler has returned to his beautiful abstract video blog this box of earth after a long break. #19 is his latest piece but its worth having a look back at some of his earlier works like #05 which date back to June 2003.

Quartz Quartz Quartz ?

Published
by
David Wolf
on May 18, 2005
in Note to self, Video, Vidget - Discussion, Vidget - Download and Web
. 0 Comments

I’ve been having a good play with Quartz Composer over the last couple of weeks. It is very exciting and a bit scary at this late stage of my MA research: “Does it make what I’ve been doing for the past two years redundant?”; “Should I drop the whole interactive QuickTime thing and start from scratch in this new environment?”; “Should I ignore it for now and continue with QT because it is cross platform and more accessible?”.

In many ways it lets me do what I have been doing, experimenting with, and wanting to do (real time interactive online video) much more quickly and with exciting new visual results. In some ways it makes basic QT redundant but it is quite a different beast.

QuickTime excels on the network. Child movies can be sourced from anywhere, XML and QTlists while a pain to set up sometimes are very powerful and I’ve only really scratched the surface of their potential when combined with server side scripting such as php. Quartz Composer is much more at home on the desktop. It can import still image files from a URL but not movies. It can read RSS very easily, but is designed for human readable text and requires custom scripting to deal with generic XML files and attributes. I have had some success getting QC to load movies from the network via a local QuickTime link file pointing to a URL, but the targeting it is local, relative to the QC composition. It seems this link is lost if the composition is exported to a .mov file.

Here is a quick example (requires Mac OS 10.4). Apologies for the cheesy kaleidoscope imagery :-) once downloaded and unzipped, the .qtz file should play in Quartz Composer, importing link.mov which points to a video file on my server. The zip file is about 4k.

The cool thing is, in many ways this (Quartz Composer), builds upon what I have been doing in QuickTime and is mostly playable by both the QT player and plugin. While the linking to movie files online is problematic at this point, surprisingly live video and audio inputs are supported even in the QuickTime browser plugin! Here is an example which takes a live feed from a FireWire camera, layers it over itself on 3 differently coloured layers (red green and blue) and scales in real time based upon audio input from the computer’s built in microphone. Link to livergb.mov. This has been tested in Safari with a Sony HandyCam and my PowerBook’s built in microphone. Here’s the source .qtz file. While live video input into a movie playing in a browser is pretty exciting, unfortunately more simple things like keyboard and mouse input are missing.

Stay tuned for more examples as I play more…