- DVB & progress on 15th September 2005 by Ashok Argent-Katwala[ashok]
- I'm pleased to see that Marcus Overhagen has made significant progress with his DVB drivers, and released time-limited preview releases onto BeBits - see Marcus' BeBits profile.
- I'm in the middle of finishing my PhD thesis right now, while my Be machine needs some serious attention, so won't get a chance to play with them just yet, but it's good to see things out in the world.
- This also raises the question of how to pay for hard work like that which has gone into making these drivers, and I've some ideas, but they'll have to wait a few months.
- I still intend to return to this project, but it will probably change shape a little. The basic goals remain the same, but the world has changed quite a lot since this was first conceived. I'd still like to do something under a Be-like operating system, and Haiku is starting to look rather promising. That said, I may move the core code to something a bit more cross platform, to fit with other things I'm working on. I've got around 4 weeks pegged at the end of the year to grind away on videdot and release something worthwhile.
- London on 22nd July 2005 by Ashok Argent-Katwala[ashok]
- Just heard the most remarkable interview with Marie Fatayi-Williams on Radio 4.
- Her son was killed in the bus bomb at Tavistock Square two weeks ago. She is stoic, resolute - eschewing hate. She is respectful of other religions (she is a Roman Catholic, her husband is a Muslim), talking boldly of how people are twisting the Holy Qur'an. She refuses to judge her son's killer - leaving that to God.
- For anyone touched by the attacks this is obviously a traumatic and sad time and they have my sincere sympathies.
- However, this whole has really bolstered my faith in Londoners. For the vast majority of people these attacks are a transport problem - a question of 'how do I get home', and 'should I stop for a pint while things settle down'. This is much better than fear, doubt and tail-chasing as we try to stop yesterday's threat and I dare say we'll keep it up.
- London's a great city, full of diversity and joy; let's not lose that in a round of finger pointing and insular rubbish.
- DVB-T update on 5th March 2005 by Ashok Argent-Katwala[ashok]
- Marcus Overhagen from Mad Scientist Entertainment has been hard at work on his driver for the Hauppage Nova-T 928 DVB-T card.
- IsComputerOn have an update on the progress, including a bunch of screenshots.
- DVB-T support for BeOS on 30th November 2004 by Ashok Argent-Katwala[ashok]
- Mad Scientist Entertainment have been working on a driver for the Hauppage Nova-T 928 DVB-T card.
- Thanks to IsComputerOn for the news. This addresses one of the key wishes for this project, and should make us much more useful.
- The card seems quite hard to source in the UK, but is abundant in Germany and works to the same standards on either side of the channel.
- Update: A couple of pictures (one, two) showing the driver in action have been posted at DeBUG (in German; rough English translation via Babelfish). Once again via ICO; thanks.
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- Broadcatching how-to on 24th November 2004 by Ashok Argent-Katwala[ashok]
- Engadget have a handy guide to using RSS and BitTorrent to automatically fetch your programming.
They focus on the Azureus BitTorrent client, which is in Java so we cannot use on BeOS (yet), but the principles are useful - particularly where to find useful RSS feeds, and what needs adding to schemes like this to stay legal and undisturbed.
I have a few thoughts about how this ought to behave for videdot / under BeOS and will ship the RSS tools and a trial client as soon as I have some time when I'm not working.
- Interview on BeOSJournal on 9th July 2004 by Ashok Argent-Katwala[ashok]
- Chris Simmons of
BeOSJournal (now HaikuNews) recently interviewed me, asking some interesting questions about media and life.
If you made it to the site via the interview then thanks to Chris. Do please have a look round and leave comments with any questions or opinions about the project.
- Haiku on 22nd June 2004 by Ashok Argent-Katwala[ashok]
- OpenBeOS has a new name - Haiku.
Haiku is one of the platforms targetted for videdot, and there has been much progress of late. See the OpenBeOS site for details, at least until the new Haiku site launches.
- Codecs on 10th May 2004 by Ashok Argent-Katwala[ashok]
- The BBC have a new wavelet codec - Dirac - on the way.
Dirac is open source and hopefully unencumbered by patents.
In the grand play over how much people will be charged to legitimately decode, encode or pass data encoded in a certain format this could be very interesting indeed.
- Quietly, cheaply on 22nd January 2003 by Ashok Argent-Katwala[ashok]
- The cheap, quiet boxes that LocustWorld are selling are worth thinking about.
Eventually, videdot should offer a similar proposition (free code, a nice box to buy, if you prefer).
I've been hard at thought working out some kinks in wireless delivery of programming to the area around your home (or more particularly to you within it), I should have some news before too long.
- 'Roll Your Own Video Recorder' on 16th October 2002 by Ashok Argent-Katwala[ashok]
- An interesting article on the O'Reilly DevCenter.
It talks about Klaus Schmidinger's Linux-based free video recorder - Video Disk Recorder. It uses a Linux DVB support to fish out the bits from a digital satellite feed directly and crucially it's ready for download now.
Most interesting to me though, is the last section of the article talking about plug-ins, and particularly the P2P speculation. This is one area where videdot should be strong, but in all the more people running boxes talking open protocols, the better for all the users.
- The need for reputation on 29th August 2002 by Ashok Argent-Katwala[ashok]
- What is needed to avoid being flooded with bogus content on peer-to-peer networks?
The recent rounds of deliberately crippled information being offered highlights the need for building a reputation system into efforts to build any form of shared-video system. This Register story talks about problems on the KaZaA network, but really this is about metadata and trust. If we build any system with rich metadata - data about the data - then one crucial bit of information is one of veracity. If individual users can pseudonymously claim or disclaim a recording, then there will, over time, be pseudonyms you trust and others you don't (or more likely, 'new' users who you have no reason to trust).
The Plan with videdot is to access any useful file-exchange network, and always publish as much metadata as that network allows. This means we can build a base of trustworthy nodes or pseudonyms and avoid the collapse of the whole scheme by any malicious party.
- Suing individual swappers? on 3rd July 2002 by Ashok Argent-Katwala[ashok]
- It seems the music industry, through the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is gearing up to sue individual users of file sharing networks.
Dow Jones story on SmartMoney.com
This is interesting, and pertinant for video-sharing applications like videdot in that there are still a number of open questions as to what forms of sharing are acceptable, legal or appropriate.
It's also interesting to see how they might manage to do it, and whether it will just lead to another round of indirection, redirection, misdirection or continent-hopping to evade legal wrangling.
Moreover, with published statistics about the small proportion of users on various file-sharing networks providing the vast bulk of the content, this may be an effective way to clobber those users.
- Site update on 3rd July 2002 by Ashok Argent-Katwala[ashok]
- Comments, news and progress.
So, the site is shaping up to be something a little more useful. The front page still needs some work to show the the real meat a bit higher up. I'm working some things out which should help.
Your input is always welcome here. Soon we'll need testers for this stuff, and suggestions are appreciated. Read the docs, and comment on them at the bottom, that keeps everything visible, which will matter as more people get involved. I'll set up proper forums later if there is need, and use some smart stuff I've planned out to tie forum posts in to locations on a site.
Progress on the code is coming along, I'll add some screenshots of the functional BeOS-app listings soon.
Some other projects have soaked up a fair bit of time lately, so the last couple of weeks have been less productive, but ideas are still flowing, and a practical local application isn't far away (August?). The fun is in the network though, as has always been the goal here.
