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.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 02:51 PM in general | Comments (0)  

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...

Continue reading...
 
By Gary Lerhaupt, 07:12 PM in general | Comments (0)  

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?

By Gary Lerhaupt, 12:44 AM in general | Comments (0)  

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.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 03:51 AM in general | Comments (0)  

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.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 04:10 PM in general | Comments (0)  

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.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 01:15 AM in general | Comments (0)  

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).

By Gary Lerhaupt, 04:10 PM in general | Comments (0)  

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.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 02:25 AM in general | Comments (0)  

I spent over a half hour today fighting with Linux trying to get it to play the BBC's video of Bush's escape. It turns out for Linux you need to first download the .asx file that their internal pages point you to (figuring out that URL is a pain in itself). Open up the asx, and find the mms:// URL within that and then give that URL to mplayer to play.

At that point mplayer still couldn't really handle it so I encoded it to raw video and then in order to allow for Windows compatibility I then re-encoded that to msmpeg4v2/pcm. This took it down to 1.8MB and should make it universally watchable. Undoubtedly, given the mess of Mac/Windows/Linux video codecs, it probably still won't play on someone's setup. What a pain, though the BBC could do better.

Here's the torrent: pep_delicious-bush_escape.torrent

By Gary Lerhaupt, 01:14 AM in general | Comments (0)  

The last week and the next have been (and will be) filled with end-of-quarter hell, but the good news is that the summer is on the horizon. Over in a couple places today, I saw the mostly verbatim article about Sony's new DRM tech that allows one copy per CD. It was surprising to see just this directed message with little to no commentary by the news outlets.

Under the new solution, tracks ripped and burned from a copy-protected disc are copied to a blank CD in Microsoft's Windows Media Audio format. The DRM embedded on the discs bars the burned CD from being copied.

My, what consumer wouldn't want this? Gee, better yet I get my only copy in a Windows only format. This great line then followed:

Secure burning means that iPod users do not have any means of transferring tracks to their device, because Apple Computer has yet to license its FairPlay DRM for use on copy-protected discs.

So not only is the new DRM not compatible with old DRM, but Sony gets to get in a nice dig into Apple, Apple's licensing and their inability to play "fair". The irony is quite thick. If consumers weren't getting such a short end of this stick, it might actually be comical to watch these two MegaMediaCorps battle it out for who gets to tell you what to do with your stuff.

Meanwhile, today, I also had the pleasure of seeing a talk by Paul Kocher as the final lecture for my computer security class. It was a fast moving and engaging fly-through of the need to approach security problems by looking at entire systems instead of relying on layers of abstractions. One of the most interesting parts was where he characterized the emergent stalemate behavior of many computer security issues-- the back and forth of virus writers and anti-virus solutions, of crypto makers and crypto breakers, of spammers and spam filters that happen again and again.

This reminded me of an earlier lecture in the class where we learned that an impossibility result had been proven wherein it is simply not possible to write a virus detector that can detect all viruses. Seeing as how this was the first of the stalement examples above, it left we wondering if such a similar result can be proven for DRM systems. If music and video must at some point be decrypted so that we can enjoy it, how will any perfectly uncopyable system ever be created?

And of course, the goal of DRM is just to make it a nuisance for copiers to do their thing, but seeing the spin of these articles trying to sell their version of reality ("the sensible way forward") can make you cough a bit. If every computer stalemate has a good guy and a bad guy, who is who on this one?

By Gary Lerhaupt, 01:57 AM in general | Comments (0)  

I've gotten roughly 300 blog spams in the last 5 days. Even though I'm using nofollow, it's too much to deal with and so, without enough time to come up with a better solution, I'm turning off comments for now.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 02:47 PM in general | Comments (0)  

Lawrence Lessig is up in arms over a recent BillBoard article which, among other things, conflates the story of a rock artist who luckily chose AIDS medicine over the Creative Commons. Matt Haughey is also outraged over the story and Lessig gives a lot of great background on where this is all coming from. The bottom line message from RIAA-types is that the Creative Commons "is little-known in the music industry" and needs to stay this way-- that if choices are made available to artists, there's a chance they won't choose to put their fate and earnings into the Recording Industry as it is known today.

This all started bubbling up back in January of this year where Lessig first responded to such attacks (video torrent link) at the Creative Commons anniversary party in his animated style. And so it seems we have moved well past the point where we are to be ignored and are now actively being fought. As they say, the next step is to win.

As the title of the original offending article clearly states, music biz wary of copyright sharing movement.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 11:38 PM in general | Comments (0)  

Dan Gillmor has just announced the launch of Bayosphere, a project he's been working on since he left the San Jose Merc. Should make for an interesting CitizensMediaSummit tomorrow, err today.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 02:03 AM in general | Comments (0)  

Well, its been an especially busy day (and entire week stuck in the basement of the william gates stanford cs building) and only just now did I read that the broadcast flag was struck down. Wow! My appreciation goes out to anyone who had a hand in getting rid of this onerous regulation.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 04:13 PM in general | Comments (0)  

Here's Nina Totenberg's coverage of the Grokster case for NPR news (wma format).

By Gary Lerhaupt, 04:25 PM in general | Comments (0)  

With my ongoing tribulations with the Panasonic SV-AV50 mini digital video camera, my final conclusion is that Panasonic is producing an ill-conceived and poorly tested product. Of course, it could just be that my unit is a lemon, but I doubt it. Besides the fact that it records its high quality video to proprietary formats, besides the fact that its terrible in low light, besides the fact its audio is sub-standard, my dumb little camera will now only produce corrupted videos once I record for more than 5 minutes.

I've tried a couple measures including reformatting my SD card to get it back in working order to no avail. The corrupted video started happening after I recorded with the unit plugged into a wall socket (plugged in because the battery only runs for about 40 minutes and that's quite useless). Weirdly, all video still continues to play fine on the actual unit, but what good does that do me? I must say, Panasonic pulled off quite the coup by getting the SV-AV50 on the cover of Wired Magazine's 2004 Gadget Edition. Don't buy this product.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 11:58 AM in general | Comments (0)  

Reuters is carrying a story on today's broadcast flag hearings (via slashdot). The judge apparently told the FCC that they "crossed the line" and that "selling televisions is not what the FCC is in the business of".

I'm heading out this evening to the EFF event on Endangered Gizmos in response to the broadcast flag. Should be interesting with these latest developments. Hopefully I can grab some video.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 02:47 PM in general | Comments (0)  

What are you doing this Wednesday at 4PM (pacific)? Here are my 3 choices:

4:15 - Bram Cohen
"Under the hood of BitTorrent"
Gates Computer Science Building - Room B03

4:00 - Lawrence Lessig plus panel
"Getting Creative: New Perspectives on Music Distribution and Copyright Law"
Law School - Room 190
Panel discussion with the manager of Jerry Garcia's estate, the director of Creative Commons, a named partner at a law firm, the founder of the Magnatune record label, and Prof. Lessig.

4:15 - Steven Weber
"The Success of Open Source"
Wallenberg Hall, Room 127
As part of Howard Rheingold's ongoing "Literacy of Cooperation" Humanities course.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 12:12 AM in general | Comments (0)  

In a previous entry I discussed some of the tribulations of getting usable video off the Panasonic SV-AV50. While the 15fps video captured in "super fine" mode can be easily converted from Linux, the 30fps video from the "extra fine" mode is codec encumbered. I've finally figured out how to rescue it. First you must install the video codec for Windows Media Player that comes on the CD which comes with the camera (p_mpeg4.dll). Then you need to install AsfTools and separately also install Windows Media Encoder 7.1. Once those are installed (and you've rebooted), fire up AsfTools, select the ASF file that you want to free and click on "Re-Encode". This will convert it to a new asf using a different codec. To then convert it from new-asf to an avi, you can then select "Convert to avi", though I still recommend converting to avi using the method described in the previous blog entry as the output seems to be more universally playable.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 03:36 PM in general | Comments (3)  

Can anyone confirm this? I'm working here to convert some video that I shot of Jimmy Wales discussing wikipedia and was relegated to my Windows machine because of the file format. I attempted to use the Windows double-press Prnt-Scrn (its a button on your keyboard) trick to do an entire screen capture and then paste it into Windows Paint. Except, when I pasted it in Windows paint, I got the whole screen capture but where the paused video frame should be, it only shows a grey square. Has Microsoft gone out of its way to limit me from accessing my personally owned (soon to be creative commons) work? Below is a meta-screen capture of what Microsoft paint looks like on my machine. Of course, I'm just going to grab the frame from Linux now that I've got it converted, but this is a bit ridiculous.

UPDATE: mibus commented that this is just due to hardware acceleration. If you turn off hardware acceleration in the Control Panel > Display > Settings > Advanced > Troubleshoot, you can grab video. Thanks for promptly pointing this out. I should also note that with ksnapshot in Linux, it just works without tweaking anything.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 02:02 PM in general | Comments (3)  

Nice story at the New York Times on the rise of mythtv and the implications of bit torrent meets the network line-up.

Mr. Poltrack of CBS said that according to his network's research, a large number of viewers would welcome the chance to pay $1 to watch each television show, if they could do it on their own schedule and with the ability to skip commercials. With commercials, they'd be willing to pay 50 cents. And because the average viewer sees only half of a show's episodes, he said, this on-demand viewing won't hurt the regular showing.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 11:32 PM in general | Comments (0)  

I'm off to NYC tomorrow for Vloggercon. I'm a tool, or should say Prodigem will be one of the many tools demonstrated during the Video Blogging tools discussion. Something tells me that video of the event will be made available.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 12:33 AM in general | Comments (0)  

The day I follow google's suggestion and install the new MT plugin, I get more comment spam in any one day than previous. Who forgot to tell them?

By Gary Lerhaupt, 11:15 PM in general | Comments (0)  

I've been trying to come up with a good general recommendation for how people should advertise their torrents on their blogs and webpages. The overall problem is overload. Per each entry item you start with at least the direct link to the content (.mp3, .avi, .etc). On top of this now you also want to direct people to the torrent for that item to try to save your bandwidth. Do you link to the .torrent itself or link to the details page for that torrent or link to your enclosure enabled torrent feed? It's a good thing to have these problems and all these choices, but a good web interface is both concise and consistent.

Linking to the .torrent seems the best thing to do as this ultimately shortens the distance between your audience and your content which drives downloads. I've noticed at least on the Prodigem tracker that people that put direct links to .torrents do in fact get more activity. Over on one of In.the.Trenches, I posted a comment about this where I noticed a lack of a direct .torrent link was having a negative impact on use. Kevin brings up a point about the need for merging all these feeds that people keep aquiring for their content. This is an interesting idea ... the superfeed, which is created by melting all your feeds together into a multiple enclosure per entry format...

Instead of having the list all your separate feeds, it'd be just one feed which declares what it supports (mp3, torrent, atom, rss, etc) and the aggregator would be responsible for choosing either based on its limitations or by the preferences set by the user. This certainly places a lot of emphasis on the aggregator to do this correctly, but it sure would be nice to have to only present one feed URL to your user. Another implementation would be to create some sort of stardard by which everyone would have a consistent interface to a singular syndication url on their site. Your aggregator would then poll the url for something like http://mysite.com/blog/feed?type=rss&enclosure=torrent and in turn, the feed script on your site would either provide the feed in this format or return a standard error that it doesn't support that format.
Hmm.

In the meantime, in a world of multiple feeds this isn't such a bad thing. I think its best just to have a separate corner on your blog where you present all the links to your feeds. Standard mp3 feed for the ease-of-use downloaders and torrent feed for the supportive-audience downloaders. Apart from that place for feed listings, each entry would then have the direct download link for that item and the .torrent link for that item.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 09:19 PM in general | Comments (0)  

The guys over at the Promiscuous Bullet have published their latest podcast which includes an interview I did with them over the holiday break. We talk bit torrent and the future of Prodigem. The torrent can be found over on Prodigem. Notes to myself, need to avoid saying "umm" in interviews and already since the interview, more info on exeem has emerged and it turns out to be just some disappointing hype.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 01:34 PM in general | Comments (0)  

Had the pleasure of attending the Creative Commons 2nd Anniversary Party last night. Besides all the kibitzing and the fun part of actually putting faces to the names of random people I've shared email with in the past year, there was a half-hour presentation by the Creative Commons honchos. Amongst the varied speakers, topics included Creative Commons highlights of the previous year, introduction of the new Science Commons, but the highlight was the ending sendup that Lawrence Lessig did of BillBoard and BillGates (replete with darth vader imagery). This, of course, in response to new campaigns launched by both attempting to discredit the Creative Commons, open licensing and the free culture movement through various FUD techniques.

Lessig puts it this way: we certainly aren't communists (where the state owns everything) and we certainly aren't fascists (ahem, where monopolistic corporations own everything). We're COMMoNISTS. And we're not alone.

In fact, you can watch the full 30 minute presentation in asf format from the Creative Commons party yourself. And if you're impatient, the Lessig stuff starts at 24:30. Here's the torrent (as hosted on Prodigem, sheesh couldn't make it a whole entry without mentioning prodigem).

By Gary Lerhaupt, 04:53 AM in general | Comments (0)  

Went to the first session of Howard Rheingold's Literacy of Cooperation Humanities course at Stanford. Today's assignment was to blog about it :). Favorite part was the tidbit about the Inuit saying, "the best place for my surplus is in my neighbor's belly." The plan is to have the video from the sessions put up as a torrent on Prodigem so I'm looking forward to that. In other news, I booked a flight today for Vloggercon, the Video Blogger conference. That's being held in NYC on Jan 22nd.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 10:11 PM in general | Comments (0)  

From January 2005's Wired Magazine, The BitTorrent Effect:

One example of how the world has already changed: Gary Lerhaupt, a graduate student in computer science at Stanford, became fascinated with Outfoxed, the documentary critical of Fox News, and thought more people should see it. So he convinced the film's producer to let him put a chunk of it on his Web site for free, as a 500-Mbyte torrent. Within two months, nearly 1,500 people downloaded it. That's almost 750 gigs of traffic, a heck of a wallop. But to get the ball rolling, Lerhaupt's site needed to serve up only 5 gigs. After that, the peers took over and hosted it themselves. His bill for that bandwidth? $4. There are drinks at Starbucks that cost more. "It's amazing - I'm a movie distributor," he says. "If I had my own content, I'd be a TV station."

Read the article, its an interesting profile on Bram Cohen and what bit torrent will bring. Of course, we're already seeing that today with Prodigem. :)

By Gary Lerhaupt, 07:08 PM in general | Comments (1)  

The ultimate in self-referentialism. Here's a blog entry about a videoblog from bloggercon III as seen at Momentshowing. It gets better. You can see me in the video bringing up electronic voting. So then I thought if self-referentialism is actually a word and found this page from google. And then it occurred to me that the only self referential thing to do was to link to it.

As Kirk Herbstreit would say, it is what it is.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 04:03 PM in general | Comments (0)  

Just finished my interview about bit torrent with Joel Rose of NPR. Keep your eyes peeled next week (or your ears), for a 7 minutes piece on bit torrent either during Morning Edition or All Things Considered on Tuesday or Wednesday. I think I may have been a little nervous and amongst the various perspectives he's including in the story, hopefully I'll get included. We shall see (or hear).

By Gary Lerhaupt, 12:09 PM in general | Comments (0)  

I got a call from NPR today and it looks like I'll be recording an interview with them about bit torrent and Torrentocracy this Friday. I'm not sure how or when it will be used, but the real question is whether they'll let me torrent the interview...

By Gary Lerhaupt, 03:21 PM in general | Comments (0)  

BloggerCon today was pretty cool. Blogging about it seems somewhat useless, so you can just go check out other's musings from feedster. One of the cool moments for me, though, was getting the whole podcasting phenomenon. I've sort of managed to ignore it as its popped up on Engadget and perhaps even the NYTimes, but seeing the passion and potential in the room, they must be on to something. Particularly interesting was the whole idea of Podcast "celebrities," who I guess like "A-list" bloggers seem to be developing quite the following.

More interesting to me, though, is how podcasting might scale past its infancy. If the whole point is for the average joe to start creating his own radio show (or whatever the hell you want to call it), and the whole point is to get a lot of people to download the mp3 of your show, then certainly bandwidth quickly becomes a concern (especially for the average joe). Enter bit torrent.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 10:00 PM in general | Comments (0)  

There's a Reuters story out today claiming that bit torrent makes up over 1/3rd of global internet traffic. This is all a prelude to the MPAA announcing that they are set to follow in the RIAA's footsteps and begin suing filesharers. I guess they've decided the success the music industry is having is worth imatating(10). Thankfully, the article also discusses the legal uses for bit torrent.

"Almost any software that makes it easy to swap copyrighted files is ripe for a crackdown BitTorrent's turn at bat will definitely happen," said Harvard University associate law professor Jonathan Zittrain. "At least under U.S. law, it's a bit more difficult to find the makers liable as long as the software is capable of being used for innocent uses, which I think (BitTorrent) surely is."

Included, even, is a mention of Torrentocracy (though I'm only hosting the presidential debate audio, not the video). It's nice to have that in my back pocket once the lawsuits start flying. Keep it legal, keep it clean and you'll keep the old-world distributionistas scratching their heads. Just like Kerry (or was it Bush ... or is it both), they're an ostrich with their head in the sand. Come on guys, be the eagle. BE THE EAGLE.

As seen on slashdot.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 09:27 PM in general | Comments (2)  

Last night I was lucky enough to catch the Umprhey's McGee concert at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco. If I'd have to handicap who will eventually fill the jamband void left by Phish's retirement, I'd say there's good money to be placed on UM. The show rocked. Though, unfortunately, a buddy who was set to tape the show from front lip of the stage, was told he wasn't allowed to tape by some unknown person of the band's management right before the show started.

This is all the more unfortunate as I was really looking forward to torrenting this show out, and even more so when Phil Lesh (of the Grateful Dead) joined the band during the second set. A jamband torch passing moment? To hear it (and you should), I guess you'll need to wait for them to release the soundboard matrix for $9.99. Free distribution will always take a back seat when, in moments like these, there's good money to be made. That's just how it is.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 09:41 PM in general | Comments (0)  

I'm mid debate watching here, but just noticed that the Outfoxed torrent I'm hosting just hit its 1000th complete download. I've posted up screenshots of the torrent in action.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 06:46 PM in general | Comments (0)  

With my move to Northern California, I am now for the first time in my life confronted with not being in a Time Warner fiefdom. I guess I never quite realized how good I had it. Man oh man is the digital cable interface for comcast light years behind Time Warner. Their guide only shows what is on for the current half hour (as opposed to the next hour and a half) and the extra space on the screen is filled with advertisements you can click on. Who clicks on these things? They also don't have DVR available, which isn't a big deal for me since I'm running Myth, but I thought this was Silicon Valley. Oh well.

What really concerns me though, is the general localized monopoly that these companies get and the restrictions it places on the consumer's choices. More specifically, if you aren't using the digital cable box, you only get 80 or so of the 400 channels which are available. Austin's Time Warner was kind enough to throw us a bone by including HBO-East as one of the channels available without the box, but this is NOT the case for Comcast out here. So, while I'm left trying to figure out how to hook the comcast cable box directly to Myth so that it can access these channels (which I'm sure will make changing the channels *very* slow), I'm left pondering how choice is removed from us bill paying users just so the cable companies can ensure you are paying the extra charges which come with needing their cable box. Blech.

At the same time, for some weird reason, Time Warner's interface in Cincinnati was a million times better than what Austin had (Austin, I believe gets shafted for being an early adopter town, where they roll stuff out first and then leave you with the crappy beta version). So, I'm wondering if anyone has bothered to compile a comparison of cable offerings from city to city. I'd be most interested to see which cities get the most cable channels straight from the cable outlet without needing the cable box.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 04:05 PM in general | Comments (0)  

Wouldn't it be cool if PBS torrented out their content? I see no reason that they shouldn't. Presumably they have some sort of tax exempt status, they don't show advertisements during their programs anyway, and it would only serve to further the exposure that people get to their content. Sounds like a win-win to me.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 02:53 PM in general | Comments (8)  

Wired.com explores the Outfoxed creative commons release and discusses the history and future of movie remixing and the benefits of open licensing. Choice quote:

But Hollyn thinks Greenwald may be onto a smart viral-marketing campaign with the release of the raw Outfoxed content, and that it isn't hard to imagine other filmmakers following suit.

"I don't think there's a giant leap from Outfoxed to other kinds of movies," Hollyn said. "I think you'll see the smaller, independent filmmakers leading this. And the studios, if it catches on, will figure out a way to do this within their legal obligations."

By Gary Lerhaupt, 12:14 AM in general | Comments (1)  

Checking in from some free wifi in Albuquerque (on my trip to my new home town of Palo Alto) and I see that unmediated.org has listed Torrentocracy as a "featured project". Very cool.

Perusing their blog I also just learned that someone has released an enclosure enabling plugin for Movable Type. Although the latest release of Torrentocracy no longer relies on the need for enclosure tags in your XML, this is still really cool stuff.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 11:18 PM in