I spent the last day getting wordpress up and running for our use over at MoveDigital. So be sure to note http://blog.movedigital.com for your MoveDigital bloggy needs.

Also, I just posted over there MoveDigital is now supporting a user wide listing of mobile content directly from http://m.movedigital.com. Fire it up on your phone and see what's out there.

There was some delay in getting prodigem.com's DNS switched over earlier today. So, no worries, Prodigem URLs for user pages, user rss feeds, .torrent files, torrent info pages and the Prodigem torrent tracker should now properly resolve to their corresponding resting place at MoveDigital. All other Prodigem URLs will now resolve to the open greeting explaining the MoveDigital switchover.

Since there is no longer a master listing of content as was found in Prodigem's main torrent listing, Prodigem's main rss feed and category feeds no longer exist. In the future, we are considering adding a 'presentation layer' to MoveDigital to showcase user's content, but for our initial launch we didn't want to just throw something together that wouldn't be excellent.

If you run into any bugs with an old Prodigem URL, please let me know.

Today was a busy day of course. There definitely seems to be interest and we definitely look forward to adding on and improving our service so it's even better. Here are some highlights, all really positive except geeknewscentral was disappointed. My reply to Todd who runs geeknews and was in the past nice enough to include Prodigem in his book, continues below.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/07/18/movedigital-launches...

http://mobilecrunch.com/2006/07/18/movedigital-means-movies-on-your-mobile/

http://www.scripting.com/2006/07/18.html#edwardsDoesBittorrent/

http://digg.com/politics/John_Edwards_is_Using_Bittorrent

http://chris.pirillo.com/2006/07/18/movedigital-is-moving-forward/

http://techmeme.com/#a060718p58

http://www.geeknewscentral.com/archives/006264.html#comments

http://politicalwire.com/archives/2006/07/18/edwards_using...

In Italian:
http://skytg24.blogs.com/sky_tg24_pianeta_internet/2006/07/index.html

German:
http://www.de-bug.de/blog/archives/1066.html

Japanese:
http://jp.techcrunch.com/archives/movedigital-launches...

My response for Todd Cochrane at geeknewscentral. I wanted to include this on your blog, but wasn't able to add a comment. In general I think this is just a series of misunderstandings and I hope we can work it out. Continued...

Following Prodigem's acquisition back in March, I've been hard at work working with a great group of folks to retool Prodigem for rerelease as a new service. I'm happy to report that today that new service launches, and the web service formerly known as Prodigem is now known as MoveDigital.

http://www.movedigital.com

The focus of the service is centered on moving your digital data (hence the name). So beyond just publishing BitTorrents, the service also does direct download publishing as well as mobile phone video and audio publishing (just like our publishing of torrents, we convert your video and audio to mobile phone format for you, and then also take care of the streaming to your 3G cell phone).

So do stop on over and check it out. All Prodigem user accounts and content have been transferred over. Your usernames are still the same, and all Prodigem users also get a free 1 year membership. We're pleased also to announce that Senator John Edwards is our first official customer, not only using MoveDigital to distribute his videos for the mobile phone, but also to be distributed for the first time via BitTorrent.

There's a lot more too. We've created this very cool web widget that makes it very simple to reblog your MoveDigital links. And included with this web widget, via its 'Share' button, is a notion we're calling 'social bandwidth sharing' which allows other users to directly add bandwidth into your account from wherever you may have placed your widget. Moreover, MoveDigital bandwidth is different than what you'll find anywhere else. For direct downloads, we only deduct bandwidth from your account for completely delivered files. You don't get penalized if someone stops downloading half way through. As well, your bandwidth always rolls over to your next membership period, so it's always there for you.

A couple days running without being ceased and desisted, vistatorrent.com, impressive. They're torrenting Microsoft Vista Beta 2 to cope with Microsoft's distribution inability.

Update, 7/15: they got a cease and desist letter.

Checking the comments on my post to slashdot about streaming myth to your phone, theres one from a MythWeb developer (MythWeb being a standard MythTV plugin) which mentions they are actively working to add a flash app that gives you web video access to your tv recordings in the spirit of "google video/youtube". That's quite awesome. Are there phones which do flash?

Electrical tape wearing thin holding together my old cell phone (Samsung i500), I decided it was time to give in and upgrade to a new phone. I drank the kool-aid on a 2 year Sprint contract given the discounts both on the phone and in my monthly service, and in the end settled on the Samsung a920. It's an EVDO enabled phone with Sprint's $15 unlimited monthly data service. Playing around with the mobile TV functionality (that's an extra $10/month but I was enjoying the first month free), I had one of those lightning bolt moments.

Why not stream my own video to the phone? Better yet, why not just automate my MythTV to convert my recorded programs and automatically have them ready to be streamed whenever I care to watch them on the phone?

A bit of research later, I discovered SlingBox can stream your tv to your phone, but it needs to be a Windows mobile phone and then there's the monthly service fees and the box to buy. I also found random mythtv devotees with similar ideas at least as far back as January 2005, but couldn't otherwise find a concise guide or more information. Inspired by ZooVision, I knew it was possible for users to stream their own content to their phone, it was just a matter of putting the pieces all together. A couple hours of tinkering later, and I've got a working solution... my "tivo" on my cell phone wherever there's sprint evdo access. So here are the steps:

1. Get MythTV up and running. I won't go into that, but it's worth the hassle even if I couldn't stream it to my cell phone.
2. Follow these directions which will get you an updated version of ffmpeg (named ffmpeg3gp) and a myth3gp script which, in combination, allow you to take Myth recorded video and convert it to 3gp, a mobile video format standard that most multimedia phones support. However, instead of using the myth3gp script from there, you'll likely want to use this myth3gp script as I've included a couple of necessary changes. Save that txt file as /usr/local/bin/myth3gp on your Myth box.
3. Create a directory to hold your 3gp videos on your Myth system. Open up the myth3gp script from the previous step and change the line that says:

   out="/mnt/drive2/myth3gp"

   to:

   out="/directory/for/saving/your/3gp/videos"

4. Install gpac. Once you've compiled and installed gpac, it will provide you with an executable called MP4Box which is used to convert the 3gp file from step two into a 3gp file that is streaming enabled. The myth3gp script calls MP4Box to take care of this for us.
5. Find an internet connected server which can house your 3gp videos and be available to stream them at will to your phone. On said server you'll need to install Apple's Darwin Streaming Server. Installing it can be a bit of pain, but just be sure to have port 554 open so that it can handle the rtsp streaming protocol. For me, getting Darwin to work took the most effort. If your MythTV box has a static IP and is internet accessible, that should work fine, but in my case I'm uploading the videos to another server.
6. We're in the homestretch. We've got programs to convert Myth recorded video to a phone friendly format, and we've got a server that can stream them to our phone. We just now need an automated process to convert the video and upload it to the server running Darwin and we'll be in phone tv nirvana. Myth can do this automation for us. You'll need to exit out of Myth and run:

   mythtv-setup

   From there, choose the "General" menu item and hit enter until you get to the "Job Queue" screen. Put a checkmark in "Allow User Job #1 jobs and continue to the next screen until you get the page with label "User Job #1 description". Give it a description like "Myth 3GP" and for the command, use (note the quotes):

   /usr/local/bin/myth3gp %DIR%/%FILE% 
   
   "%STARTTIME%~~~%TITLE~~~%SUBTITLE%"

   Save your changes, exit, restart the mythbackend and restart Myth.
7. With Myth restarted, go into Utilities / Setup -> Setup -> TV Settings -> General and click through until you get the "General (Jobs)" page. On this page, put a check in the checkbox next "Run User Job #1 On New Recordings". This will ensure that our process gets run after each new recording. Important Note: For all existing recurring recordings that you had prior to setting up Myth3GP, you'll need to manually edit the recording options and in "Post Recording Processing", you'll need to switch its setting so that it says "Run 'Myth3GP'".
8. If your using your local Myth system for Darwin streaming, just be sure that Darwin knows where to find the 3gp files on your system. Otherwise, edit the myth3gp script from step number two and set the darwin_username, darwin_hostname and darwin_dir as appropriate for your external server. At the bottom of the script, it uses scp to transfer the file from your Myth system to your Darwin server. Though, for everything to be automated, you'll need to set up scp to not require a password. Directions for password free ssh/scp are short and sweet. Once you can transfer files between systems sans password, you are good to go.
9. The final step. On your Darwin machine, make sure you have a web server running (apache), php installed and place this php script somewhere in a web accessible folder. It's job is to scan your 3gp movie folder for movies and generate a webpage with rtsp:// links so that you can access your recordings from your phone. Edit the php script and change $directory to the directory path for your 3gp videos and set $hostname to your hostname. With that installed, you're done. You can manually convert your old recordings by starting the "Myth3GP" job on them and any new recording will automatically get the mobile treatment. Fire up the URL for the mythmobile php script and start streaming.

Triumph. Indeed some beautiful uses of fair use. Fair use to record the tv program to my hard drive... Fair use to convert the video format to one viewable by my cell phone... Fair use to stream it to my cell phone for my own personal enjoyment. Now imagine trying to do any of this with the broadcast flag in place.

Well, it wasn't a good weekend for my bracket. After round 1 I was flying high on yahoo's list, in the 95th percentile, but then things started to not go so well. More importantly, on Saturday while watching CBS HD, my DirecTV HD receiver decided to burn out. Presto, I'm talking full pungent smell of burnt plastic eminating from the receiver and no longer will it turn on.

The DirecTV (advanced) phone technician seemed quite shocked by this, especially since it never warned me as it is designed to, that it was getting hot. They're sending out a new unit and hooked me up with 6 months free HBO/3 months free showtime (without me even asking). I guess I should be glad the thing didn't truly catch fire. Still, questionable design, no? Here's the AVS forum post I started on the matter.

Good news! Prodigem has been acquired by a Bay Area startup. We'll be retooling the site, adding some functionality, and perhaps changing the name so keep your pants on and be on the lookout for a relaunch with some nice extra goodies. More info later ...

I've been playing with my new HD television, a Panasonic 42 inch plasma. First impressions are that it lives up to its reputation, but all the better to be surfing through its settings and come across the License menu. Clicking that brings up a special screen with just the GPL. Even if it's "so called," it's cool.

Here's an interview for eHub about Prodigem I did a while back that they put up this week, and here's an IPTV feature that PC Magazine is running on their site that puts Prodigem at the top of their torrent page (though I guess we need to work more on our description display ... though I wonder if they wrote this before the last redesign went live).

Phish may be defunct, but livephish.com, their download service, is not. Today they announced that they'll be moving into selling videos from Phish's live shows at $1.99 per track. It's mpeg4 encoded, supposedly ipod video ready and they're offering a limited time free track so you can test it out. Just like their audio tracks, there's no DRM (but it also looks like you can't currently download from FireFox, bummer).

I've given Prodigem's torrent page a facelift. The style is less tabular, more conversational and something akin to digg. It also allows room for a right hand column which I intend to continue to refine. I added some google ads to try my hand at those again. Hopefully I can coax google into providing more than just ads for illegal torrent sites with the added context of longer torrent descriptions made possible by this new layout. Look good? Yes? No?

Prodigem already has a few ajaxishy elements in its UI, but I've replaced the file upload mechanism with an ajax widget of its own. Rather than the old system which would spawn an ugly window to tell you the progress of your file upload into Prodigem, the new control, powered by Encodable has a progress meter which appears in the browser to let you know the progress of the upload. I still have some kinks to work on rather large file uploads (>150MB) where it seems to hang at the end, but otherwise its a nice enhancement and fun to play with.

Rocketboom has a great video of interviews of random NYers on their browser preference, Internet Explorer or Firefox. Here's the torrent. The best response by far is from the guy below. Via digg and boingboing.