I have written several times before about Peerflix -- Now that I've started applying some tags as well as categories to my items you can now see all the Peerflix stories using that link -- and the issues behind doing a P2P media trading/loaning system. Unlike my own ideas in this area, Peerflix took a selling approach. You sold and bought DVDs, initially for their own internal currency. It was 3 "Peerbux" for new releases, 2 for older ones, and 1 for bargain bin disks.

That system, however, was failing. You would often be stuck for months or more with an unpopular disk. Getting box sets was difficult. So in December they moved to pricing videos in real dollars. I found that interesting because it makes them, in a way, much closer to a specialty eBay. There are still a lot of differences from eBay -- only unboxed disks are traded, they provide insurance for broken disks and most importantly, they set the price on disks.

One can trade DVDs on eBay fairy efficiently but it requires a lot of brain effort because you must put time into figuring good bid and ask prices for items of inconsequential price. Peerflix agreed that this is probably a poor idea, so they decided to set the prices. I don't know how they set their initial prices, but it may have been by looking at eBay data or similar information.

I've been seeing a lot of press lately worrying that the internet won't be able to handle the coming video revolution, that as more and more people try to get their TV via the internet, it will soon reach a traffic volume we don't have capacity to handle. (Some of this came from a Google TV exec's European talk, though Google has backtracked a bit on that.)

(Note I have a simpler article for those just looking for advice on how to get their Widescreen TV to display properly.)

Very commonly today I see widescreen TVs being installed, both HDTV and normal. Flat panel TVs are a big win in public places since they don't have the bulk and weight of the older ones, so this is no surprise, even in SDTV. And they are usually made widescreen, which is great.

There's a great tragedy going on in the Sudan, and not much is being done about it. Among the people trying to get out the message are hollywood celebrities. I am not faulting them for doing that, but I have a suggestion that is right up their alley.

Which is to make a movie to tell the story, a true movie that is, hopefully a moving as a Schinder's List or the Pianist. Put the story in front of the first world audience.

Over 15 years ago I proposed that USENET support the concept of "replacing" an article (which would mean updating it in place, so people who had already read it would not see it again) in addition to superseding an article, which presented the article as new to those who read it before, but not in both versions to those who hadn't. Never did get that into the standard, but now it's time to beg for it in USENET's successor, RSS and cousins.

At the blogger panel at Fall VON (repurposed to be both video on the net as well as voice) Vlogger and blip.tv advocate Dina Kaplan asked bloggers to start vlogging. It's started a minor debate.

My take? Please don't.

In an earlier blog post I attempted to distinguish TVoIP (TV over internet) with IPTV, a buzzword for cable/telco live video offerings. My goal was to explain that we can be very happy with TV, movies and video that come to us over the internet after some delay.

I'm back fron Burning Man (and Worldcon), and though we had a decently successful internet connection there this time, you don't want to spend time at Burning Man reading the web. This presents an instance of one of the oldest problems in the "serial" part of the online world, how do you deal with the huge backup of stuff to read from tools that expect you to read regularly.

An interesting article in the WSJ yesterday on the paradox of abundance describes how many Netflix customers are putting many "highbrow" or "serious" movies on their lists, then letting them sit for months, unwatched, even returning them unwatched.

This sounds great for Netflix, of course, though it would be bad for Peerflix.

These days a lot of conferences are being recorded and even live broadcast on the net. So they make a rule that people asking questions must wait for the microphone, causing long pauses that ruin the momentum of a debate or discussion.

I recommend conferences doing this get one of those small parabolic microphones if they can (mount it on the video camera if there is operator controlled video) or give it to an assistant. They can point it at the asker, and then they can talk until a better microphone arrives.

Jeff Pulver is a giant fan of the SlingBox, a small box you hook up to your TV devices and ethernet, so you can access your home TV from anywhere. It includes a hardware encoder, infrared controllers to control your cable box, Tivo or DVD player, and software for Windows to watch the stream. The creators decided to build it when they found they couldn't watch their San Francisco Giants games while on business trips.

And I get that part. For those who spend a great deal of time on the road, the hotel TV systems are pretty sucky. They only have a few channels (and rarely Comedy Central, which has the only show I both watch on a daily basis and which needs to be watched sooner rather than later) as well as overpriced movies. But at the same time you have to be spending a lot of time on the road to want this. My travel itineraries are intense enough that watching TV is the last thing I want to do on them.

But at the same time it's hard not to be reminded of the kludge this is, especially hooked to a Tivo. And if you have a Tivo or simliar device, you know it's the only way you will watch TV, live TV is just too frustrating. I don't have Tivo any more, I have MythTV. MythTV is open, which is to say it stores the recorded shows on disk in files like any other files. If I wanted to watch them somewhere else, I could just copy or stream them easily from the MythTV box, and that would be a far better experience than decoding them to video, re-encoding them with the SlingBox and sending them out. Because of bandwith limits, you can't easily do this unless you were to insert a real-time transcoder to cut the bandwidth down, ideally one that adapts to bandwidth as the Slingbox does. And I don't think anybody has written one of these, because I suspect the MythTV developers are not that too-much-time-on-the-road SlingBox customer.

(Admittedly the hardware transcode would be useful, but a 3GHZ class machine should be capable of doing it in software, and really, this should just be software.) For watching live TV, if you cared, you probably could do that in Myth TV. If you cared.

So the SlingBox...

As I've written before, Google's Adsense program is for many people bringing about the dream of having a profitable web publication. I have a link on the right of the blog for those who want to try it. I've been particularly impressed with the CPMs this blog earns, which can be as much as $15. The blog has about 1000 pageviews/day (I don't post every day) and doesn't make enough to be a big difference, but a not impossible 20-fold increase could provide a living wage for blogging.

A buzzword in the cable/ilec world is IPTV, a plan to deliver TV over IP. Microsoft and several other companies have built IPTV offerings, to give phone and cable companies what they like to call a "triple play" (voice, video and data) and be the one-stop communications company.

There is buzz about how Jason Kottke, of kottke.org, has abandoned his experiment of micropayment donations to support his full-time blogging. He pulled in $40,000 in the year, almost all of it during his 3 week pledge drive, but that's hardly enough. Now I think he should try adsense, but I doubt he hasn't heard that suggestion before.

However, PBS/NPR are able to get a large part of their budgets through pledge drives, so it's possible to make this happen. I think we should be able to do it better on the web.

Found a thread on avsforum where NBC's engineers are participating. Turns out it would be very simple for them to include a second audio stream without the commentary. In addition, this has apparently been done by some European broadcasters.

Note 1: NBC doesn't have nearly enough HD cameras for the Olympics, and I can't really blame them for not having one for every section of luge track to show us something for half a second.

But it seems in many areas they are showing us a widescreen image from an SD camera, and it looks more blurry than the pillarboxed SD footage they show of past scenes. I wonder, are they taking a cropped widescreen section out of their 4:3 SDTV camera? If so, that's not what I want. Or are there a lot of 16:9 SD cameras out there?

Today many universities are doing video of their lectures, and making it available on the campus LAN (or older campus cable TV.) In some cases students are not going to class, but many just find it a useful addition.

I suggest an application where students, while watching the lecture, could press keys on their computer synced in timestamp with the video. They don't need to be online, they just need a modestly good clock. Buttons like "This is important, review this for the final." Or even comments like "I already know this" and "I'm lost."

I'm an earlier adopter with my mythTV box and fast connection. But I'm really keen to see the move to getting TV shows over IP. Cable's bulk pricing just isn't doing it for me any more.

Hard disk drives these days are cheap. Too cheap, in that while we love paying 30 cents/GB, the reliability is getting pretty poor. Doing backups, especially automatic backups is a must, but what about RAID?

One of the problems with RAID, at least RAID-5 is that you need to have 3, and ideally 4 or 5 drives in a machine. That's a lot of drives, a lot of power, a lot of heat, a lot of noise. And many machines only have two IDE controllers so they can barely do 3 drives and can't readily do more even if they had the slots and power for them.

So I propose a software RAID-5, done over a LAN with 3 to 5 drives scattered over several machines on the LAN.

Slow as hell, of course, having to read and write your data out over the LAN even at 100mbits. Gigabit would obviously be better. But what is it we have that's taking up all this disk space -- it's video, music and photos. Things which, if just being played back, don't need to be accessed very fast. If you're not editing video or music, in particular, you can handle having it on a very slow device. (Photos are a bigger issue, as they do sometimes need fast access when building thumbnails etc.)

This could even be done among neighbours over 802.11g, with suitable encryption. In theory.

Not that there aren't some major issues to overcome. The machines must be on most of the time. (A single disk can be taken out of a RAID temporarily, and thus a single machine hosting one disk can be turned off or rebooted, but not for long periods.) If you lose access to two disks (or your LAN) you can't get access to the data. And it's going to use a lot of your network capacity, though gigabit networking is starting to get cheap. And the idea gets better...

(You might want to see Tivo's actual press release about being able to move programs from a Tivo to an iPod.)

ALVISO, CA -- NOV 21, 2005 -- TiVo Inc. (NASDAQ: TIVO ), creator of and a leader in television services for digital video recorders, today announced an enhancement to it's system which actually allows the copying of files from one computer device to another, at least if its one of their partner devices.