Jackson Hole and Video Hosting
I recently spent a few amazing days in Jackson Hole. It snowed every day and the powder was amazing. The back country was not crowded and the terrain was immense. I also spent a day snowmobiling which was thrilling. All in all with Snowbird/Alta Jackson Hole now ranks as my top skiing destination in the U.S.
I also wanted to take an opportunity to present a really neat new feature in Phanfare (http://www.phanfare.com/). Phanfare just launched a video hosting feature that allows you to integrate videos in blogs, forums and eBay. You don’t need to go to Phanfare to see the video as you can embed it directly in any site. There are no ads. It’s in Flash 8 so the quality is much better than on Youtube which is in Flash 7. They keep a 3 megabit/second DVD quality version as well so they can improve the quality when bandwidth increases.
For demonstration purposes here is s brief video of me skiing in Jackson Hole:
You can see my other ski videos here.
Comments (6)
I just uploaded three videos, left them sitting in the background… and poof, there they are.
The only problem is, these videos are way too big to play in the browser (height and width)
I’m still waiting for the Flash conversation, but if there’s a good setting to reblog them smaller, you just sold me on paid usage. I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with all my videos for a while and most of the other video sharing sites are awful! YouTube butchers the quality, vSocial takes over a day to process…
I confirm for Phanfare – those guys are great !
I have been using the service since NOvember and it is the best ! Fabrice – what video camera do you presently use ? you shoot 640X480 video resolution or more ?
Bonjour Fabrice,
Je suis le petit français de passage a new york dans les locaux de zingy.
Alors bravo pour ta prestation en ski. C’est vrai que tu adores ça.
Et puis c’est peut etre sur les pistes de ski que ton nouveau business plan est entrain de naître.
Fabien.
Fabrice: I use a Canon SD550 which shoots in 640*480.
Charles: I will have Andrew answer that one :)
In 1998 I joined a company called Luxxon to start their Video team. The mission statement of the company was “video on any device, any display, through any channel”. We created a platform where a single source (live or archived) would produce multiple outputs for multiple devices, with multiple resolutions, formats, and bandwidths, all done in real time or faster. We were forced to focus on cellular (3GPP), as it was the only paying business model that was evident at the time. The company was acquired by Hutchison Whampoa and the mobile streaming and encoding platform is now used in 8 3G carriers world wide and supports 10 million mobile users. I think the time is now right for the technology to cross over from cellular to Internet enabled PC markets.
One of the ways to handle the fragmentation in quality, bandwidth, video formats and access devices is to encode the video into multiple formats at the time of ingestion and store it in a single file format to make it easier to manage. This can be very computationally expensive if done on the server side, however if the end users were provided with an easy to use encoding plug-in, the encoding load is distributed to the users. Pre-defined and customizable encoding profiles can provide users an easy mechanism to encode videos best suitable for there needs.
Technology today enables detection of device capabilities and estimation of channel bandwidth on the server side. Thus an optimal stream can be served to best match the capabilities of the viewing client. For the sporadic occurrence where the viewing device is not covered by the pre encoded file, the file can be transcoded either on the server side or the client side to optimize the end user experience.
3GPP file formats have come up with a standardized set of specifications for servers and clients to resolve the technical interoperability issue. There is work going on regarding DRM enabled distributed transcoding. It would be interesting to see how non-cellular, Internet-enabled devices adapt.
Not working from France on FireFox…