James McParlane's Blog

The Game – Progress Report #2

metawrap — Sun, 13 May 2012 13:20:09 +0000

Another good weekend of progress.

Decided that to document some of the user interface nuances we needed some kind of stop motion capture system. Back in the day when I was more hands-on in UI/UX I had a lot of success prototyping with paper animations and with Mr10 raring to go we turned this into a fun project.

So I took a pair of polystyrene containers, joined them together…

.. and we carved up a stop motion studio. Access from two sides and a secure mounting point for the camera on top. When we were finished I used a soldering iron to hot-knife and seal the edges so that we didn’t get polystyrene beads throughout the house.

Combined with some pins and some transparent plastic we can build layers of interface and animate them in real time with video or with stop-motion.

We started by creating paper mock-ups for the start-up sequence,

The company logo …

The engine logo … Mr10 had some wonderful ideas as to how this should animate, and a new way of erasing ink

The part of our flow was the login screen. The start-up sequence is modeled on Minecraft. You need a login to play so before the main menu, we have a gateway to pass. We also wanted the name of the game in Hex behind this. This is the point where we want to have UI elements and we want to really play with the Hex theme in the UI as well.

We thought about some ideas as to using the hex overlay grid for the UI elements.

Borders using Hex

Alternate layouts for widgets,

Fonts using Hex

The joys of Hex

We took the Hex theme to the extreme and ended up with deciding on three layers of related Hex, one generated from the next that will give us borders different levels of detail and we hope, when it comes together, something in keeping with the theme of the game.

Next week we will use this layout as the basis to design the UI for the game. This week I need to create a generator that will create a PDF template for us,

The Game – Progress Report #1

metawrap — Sun, 06 May 2012 10:59:14 +0000

We have made good progress in our Sunday sessions over the last few weeks.

I have resurrected my decades old physics engine. See these videos. (1 , 2, 3)

I have been comparing various game development frameworks, at this point MonoGame is looking like the platform of choice. I have working code on PC, Mac, iOS and Android. Path looks clear for XBox-360 and possibly even the PS3, Wii and Vita based on the gossip on the internets.

I want everything (within reason) in the game to be a plugin. I have managed to build a plugin engine and get downloadable plugins in MonoGame working on PC, Mac and iOS. I’ve modeled this on the way that Minecraft starts up and downloads content and updates. I want users to download a single small executable that can then pull everything down it needs and patch itself transparently. Unlike Minecraft I want plugins to be officially supported and available in an Eclipse/apt/Drupal/Pear style system of official and unofficial plugin repositories, or even just downloading from a URL.

Plugins for Android seems to be giving me trouble but at this point I’m not aiming for plugins to work completely on Phones and tablets. Working plugins under iOS is a cool win but I need to carefully re-read the Apple Store policy on downloadable code. I know they are particular about some scenarios and I have a hunch what I want to do may be frowned upon.

We have started the story-boarding and design of the game. Mr10 just loves the creative imagination and play that comes with this phase of defining not just the game, but the universe and back-story.

I have a plugin and download manager developed and I have the intro/logo screens running as plugins. See this video.

I’m easing myself into MonoGame learning all the basics with the intro screens before I dive into porting my engine from C++/GL, to MonoGame/XNA

Mr10 has been putting his Photoshop skills to work. He has actually had lessons in the most recent CS Photoshop and plays with it for so he is full of good advice and knows how to use it better than I do.

Here he is with a near final version of our ‘company’ logo for the game,

Next step is to map out the scenarios on how we can construct things in the game.

We have made some hex tokens we can use to try out some paper prototype scenarios.

I’m working on a template for each of the blocks that will explain how they work and more importantly the rules for the cellular automata that will define how they interact together.

Over the next few Sunday afternoons we should have a firmer idea as to most enjoyable and intuitive way for people to be able to construct ships and mines.

The Game

metawrap — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 10:38:28 +0000

My son and I have been writing MineCraft mods which had been fun and educational for him, but a little frustrating in the last month.

If you have been following the world of Minecraft you will know that there has been a rapid succession of updates, many of them buggy or bug-fixes for the previous bugs.

Every time MineCraft updates, we need to wait for the SDKs to update, deal with breaking changes and then re-release.

To top it all off, there is now going to be an official Modding API. Although this is a good thing, it still means we need to re-code things when this is released.

As we only really get 3 hours a week to work on this, we are in effect standing still trying to keep up.

Also faced with the new API, we have decided to down tools for a few months and spend our Father & Son coding time to start work on our own game.

My son has decided he really really wants to be a game developer when he grows up, but for me this is an excuse to get some practical maths, logic and problem solving into his life.

I’ve not worked as a game developer for 22 years and I stopped doing *real* graphics programming 10 years ago.

When Notch announced he was working on a space game http://0x10c.com/ it kind of sounded like the kind of game I always wanted to make, not that I would ever have the time or skill to build something as good as Notch

But it did remind me of my original project.

After checking out some of the screenshots (1 2 3 4 5 6 7) I’m kind of relieved that he is making an awesome game, but it is 3D, and my idea was always more of a 2D physics game. Notch’s new game looks like a reboot of Elite, which I loved, along with Mercenary.

I’m kind of building what Terraria was to Minecraft. As far as I can tell, what we are doing has not been done before, at least with the strong physics simulation angle.

We kind of want to make a cross between space-wars, little big planet and sim-city.

Epic slow lumbering space battles - Broadsides! Ships being torn apart! Physics!
Systems engineering - Design of ships systems, Energy and resource control
Simple visual programming -Lego Robotics style simple code.
Multiplayer – It’s probably only going to fun against a human.
Mining/Trading – Elite style trading + Mining and refining.

We in effect want to build a simple game but with enough emergent behavior that people would be able to do some surprising things.

I started design of this 10 years ago, here is one of my old sketches.

The idea is you build your ships out of modules. These modules need to be bought or manufactured.

As you build larger and larger ships, they take more effort to control you can buy or program control modules to help automate things.

Things we need to do.

Game Premise - The background story to the game.
Choose a platform – Java, NME or MonoGame.
World Structure – Squares, Triangles, Hex.
Game IA – (Information Architecture)
Physics Engine – I’m going to need something specialised.
Game AI – How the ships learn to fly themselves.
Game Mechanics – How you build. How you trade, How you refine. How you fly. How you fight. How you program.
Server Protocol – NFI
Programming Model - How logic modules can control other modules.
Financial Model – Minecraft?

I suspect this will keep us out of trouble for a few years.

Talking to The TV

metawrap — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 05:08:13 +0000

http://www.nbcsandiego.com/blogs/press-here/Google-Patent-shows-its-working-on-voice-control-for-Google-TV-140222103.html

.. I suspect this is in response to rumors of a Siri enabled Apple TV product being released end of 2012.

I think a big takeaway is that as the iPhone overnight mainstreamed gestural controls , we need to be prepared for voice control starting to feature more in TV UI/UX.

Even if this ends up being a folly, once Google and Apple, have a go, all the other TV manufacturers will most likely follow suit.

I don’t believe voice will replace everything a 5 button remote can do, but will augment the experience, in the same way that gestures on mobile/tablet are a layer over the traditional point and click. A big difference for TV is that the cost of switching modes is finding and picking up the remote as well as a complete mental switch from language to spatial navigation; a kind of inertia.

My suspicion is that it will influence that first 30 seconds where a user starts casual and then decides if they need to take the interaction to the remote.

The wildcard here is the ability for agents like Siri to facilitate the construction of a complex query and course of action through a conversation.

The cynic in me thinks that if conversational interfaces work and become the norm, we will be able to devote a lot less pixels to navigational prompts.. making more space for advertising :)

If the weak link in this,the voice recognition, fails to live up to expectations this could be a farce. As impressive progress as Siri is, it has not really lived up to expectations, so if Apple do introduce a TV with a Siri like function as a major component, I’m expecting it to bomb. … but deep inside, I want it to work and be a surprise and a delight.

The other possibility to this one, is that Apple are going to have a companion device with their TV half way in size between an iPhone and iPad – which would be just about the right size.

My Life In IPTV

metawrap — Mon, 09 May 2011 01:46:35 +0000

I was asked by a company to write about myself and my IPTV experience. I’ve left a lot out but here are the highlights.

James has been playing with computers on and off since he can remember. As a youth he cut his teeth on the periphery of the Australian demo scene and BBS underground of the 80’s and early 90’s. He then followed his passion by studying Computer Science.

During this time James became fascinated with using the computer as a visual instrument and developed software and hardware for the Amiga and later on the PC to allow output from the computer to be input to televisions and video projectors. James performed audio visual displays at various nightclubs with DJs and bands as well as using his knowledge of networking to set up live CB-Chat, IRC and CU-SeeMe hook-ups with the audience.

In the early 90’s he set up a warehouse, internet cafe and free ISP for electronic artists in Sydney Australia and co-founded the and ‘Kollektive’ and ‘Clan Analogue’ record labels.

In the process of getting electronic artists online, James started looking into cheap hardware solutions that would enable people to use the internet via their TV. This led to research into the software and hardware required to create a product that would allow the general public to interact with internet services on their TV.

This lead to the founding of a start-up, a crash course in importing, supply chain management, hardware manufacturing and some lucrative contracts in Asia just in time for the Asian Currency Crisis to wipe out all his clients.

James continued to develop software and take a keen interest in IPTV and started working at Massive Interactive in 1998 first as Technical Director and then as Chief Technical Officer, a role he remains in today.

While at Massive Interactive James was able to use his skills with Sky and Austar, a local satellite TV provider via development of many interactive “Red Button” style applications using the OpenTV platform.

For the first two seasons of Australian “Big Brother”, James ran the official IRC server that had a client that would also allow OpenTV, Java and Linux based devices to project the chat into the TV with the show.

In 2005 James architected and built the Telstra/BigPond Movies application for Windows Media Centre, PC, ViiV, Xbox 360 and DLNA devices. This allowed users to download movies and television episodes and watch them on their TV. This was nominated for an Technical Emmy.

In 2007 James designed, architected and built the innovative Telstra/BigPond V8Supercars project which ran on Windows Media Center, PC and the Microsoft Xbox-360. This took live television feeds from the devices digital receiver and combined it with internet video and telemetry data streams from within the car. This innovative application synchronised these three feeds together to give the user and multiview experience and allowed users to mix and match views of car exterior, in car and telemetry an leader-board information on their TV using their remote control. This was nominated for an Technical Emmy. Did I mention that it was innovative?

Since then James’s and Massive’s skills in the area of IPTV video on demand, catch-up and subscription services have been in high demand in various companies around the world. Understandably this has kept him fairly busy.

James sees the emergence of Trick-Play/Time-Shifting and the erosion of audience and advertising revenue as a major threat to the free-to-air market. Combining that with his experience managing and formulating live competitive and interactive events James believes that we will start to see the emergence free to air broadcasts with a time critical interactive element to keep users engaged in “real time”.

The great thing about Massive is that it really is a full service company when it comes to IPTV. User experience design, user interface design, front end development, back end development, systems integration, solution design, architecture and project and delivery management. We design and develop IPTV applications at each every stage of the production pipeline.

While originally Massive developed multi-platform libraries in Flash, JavaScript and C/C++ our new UI Library developed in the HaXe language and various cross-compilers allows us to practically target multiple platforms with a single code-base.

James has experimented with many single screen modes of interactivity and sees the new multi-modal/multi-device landscape as particularly exciting. The new Massive UI library means that the time and effort between an idea and a practical experiment is now greatly reduced.

WebTV 2.0

metawrap — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 10:22:59 +0000

As you may notice from my lack of posts, I’ve been rather busy for the last three years.

I’ve been working on my own personal project “ThumbWhere” which is “Software As A Service” Social Media/Video Transcoding API.

But this is not why I have been busy. Even my pet projects have been suffering from what has been taking up all of my time at work, getting the internet on the TV and TV on the internet

I’m talking IPTV.

If you follow me … in the last three years you may have noticed I’ve been traveling around the world a lot.

I’ve been involved either directly or indirectly in projects with most of the big ISPs Telcos and MSOs and Airlines in UK, Europe, Australia and the US and Television manufacturers in Asia. I’m under so many NDA’s I’m not even sure I’m meant to acknowledge that I actually exist… so I’m not going to mention any specifics.

For those of you who have known me over the last 25 years then you probably know that I’ve been working on getting stuff from Computers to Television for most of my life. From my dance party visuals days and organising Cu-SeeMe events.

… even my first real commercial venture…

… and my experiments with early social networks on television 10 years ago..

… and 5 years ago probing the the interaction between internet streaming, live television, telemetry and chat…

So I certainly have been consistent in my career path.

Back in 1996 I was quoted in the AFR as predicting that the IPTV experience would be visually very similar to what we saw with the new Flash applications and animations that were starting to take hold. That prediction was fairly spot on.

I also predicted at some point that every single video library would install a server and you would download your videos from them… that was not so correct, but the spirit of it encapsulates what I have been doing for the last three years.

So in effect what I have been doing is solving the problem of getting applications and streaming video to your television and designing the systems that allow media to be ingested, transcoded, encrypted, catalogued and purchased by customers for various corporations around the world.

I thought I would sketch out where we are now and where we will be in the future.

But first some background…

History

In the beginning there was the analogue VCR. If you wanted to record a show on the spur of the moment, you had to have a blank tape handy. If you wanted to record a show that was on when you were not at home you had to “program your VCR”, and if you knew how to program your VCR you were a bit of a geek. This was something you had to learn and practice and rehearse.

With the advent of devices with an inbuilt computer, hard drive and a tuner we had devices that could“trick-play” – otherwise known as “pausing live TV”, skipping over ads. They could record and play at the same time. These are also known as DVRs, PVRs or by the referring to the popular generic brand “Tivo-like” devices. With these devices you picked the show you wanted to record from a list and pressed a button. There was not much to learn.

Modern DVR devices have multiple digital TV receivers and a hard disk. The device reads an EPG (Electronic Program Guide) from the digital broadcast. This is a list of what shows are on what channel at what time. You can then choose a show or a series and have it recorded to the devices hard drive. At a later date you can watch the show.

It means you can set a show to record, forget and then a month later binge on 4 episodes of your favourite weekly show.

It means that you no longer need to watch a show when it is broadcast – it is so easy and practical (compared to what you needed to do with a VCR) that you find that you never watch live TV again.

I have a Windows Media Center with 4 tuners. I can be recording 4 shows at once while I watch one recorded show in the bedroom on my XBox360 while others are watching another show in the lounge room. This happens all the time in my house.

This is life changing technology. We are now free from the TV schedule.

This technology has also been introduced into Cable Television Set-Top boxes, so you can record and playback content from your cable provider in the same way you can your “Free To Air” television.

It’s only recently that this reached critical mass in the mainstream.

Its worth noting that many IPTV solutions take the standard DVR for Free To Air or Cable Television as a starting point and then add the internet and applications on top while others are pure IPTV and lack the DVR function.

What is IPTV?

IPTV can be broadly classed as some Internet like services on your Television… and some Television like services on the Internet.

Which is a simple view focusing on what a consumer gets from it, but how that is done is is a little more complicated.

This is the kind of system I design an build for a living – but here is a simple diagram that is not too stressful of the truth.

There is a lot of systems integration that goes on, but enough of that end of the problem.. What I’m focusing on at the moment is all the stuff that happens in this bottom layer, where the rubber meets the road, in your home.

As a consumer, there are four interesting things that IPTV lets you do.

Video On Demand/Catch Up/Video Subscription Services/Live Streams – The ability to purchase and play video content on your TV or PC. The models range from free ‘Catch-Up” and content to “Pay Per Play/View” and traditional Cable-TV style Subscriptions.

Live streams are virtual TV channels that show a procession of pre scheduled content. This allows anyone with a streaming server to set up a virtual TV station.

While scrolling forward through your EPG, that program scheduled for next month can be purchased now but scroll into the past, there is something you missed that you can watch now as “Catch-Up”.

You can have the content delivered to your TV or your iPad.

You can watch what you want to watch, when you want to watch it.

Enhanced Television – Using widgets or other mechanisms as you watch content on your TV to interact with applications or online services. E.g. IMDB for more information on the show you are watching. Interacting socially with your friends via Twitter, Facebook as you all watch something simultaneously.

Applications – The ability to download and install widgets and applications onto your television. If you have an iPhone or an Android phone then you know what this means.

“TV As A Second Screen” – Now that your TV is a real computer, you can interact with it via other devices in your house. Also other devices in you house, can interact with your TV. In particular mobile and tablet devices. Cool.

I’m not going too much further that that as going into any details on any of these is a whole series of blog posts on their own.

Where Are We Now?

We are now in a transition phase, kind of what the minicomputer market was like in the 80’s before PCs came in and took over. The age of the Wang, Honeywell, Prime, DEC, Alpha Micro and a hundred other computer manufacturers each rolling out their own hardware, operation system and software.

Same with the mobile phone industry as it was in the 90’s and early 10’s.

Its all a bit hard to cobble together. All the bits are not really made for each other. Standards are not consistent across all. Welcome back to the future.

The Devices

Connected Televisions

These are Televisions that contain some kind of middleware that let you run applications.

Check out Sony, LG and Samsung (Who publish a really good SDK).

These TVs are fairly modern so the software development process around these is thankfully sensibly “standards” based.

As a general rule these devices run Flash and have a Web Browser.

The versions of Flash supported range from Flash7 all the way up to Stagecraft and Flash 10.X.

Standards based browsers like Mozilla, WebKit and Opera are slowly pushing out the custom web browsers that are a pain to work with.

The key takeaway here is that connected televisions are generally standards based. HTML/JavaScript or Flash.

The television loads the application in the same way that a browser loads a web-page or a Flash application.

With these and some clever development, you have the chance to create something that runs on multiple devices. The question here is what API does the device provide you to control video playback, channel detection/change? I had a small hand in the API design for one of the popular brands.

If you are going to develop in this area, you really need to know your CEA-2014 from your HBBTV.

Now that TV manufacturers have done their 3D thing, the next thing is the internet thing. If you ask me they set the IPTV industry back a year by doing 3D first. The real utility is in IPTV – industries will be founded on IPTV. 3D TV was just a fad. As people start to upgrade their TVs over the next few years we will see this segment start to pop out as its own distinct platform.

Custom Set-Top Boxes

Custom Set-Top boxes with Custom Operating systems and Custom SDKs… Oh my.

These are the last of the dinosaurs but there are a lot of them.

For these systems you are breaking out the C/C++ or Java compiler.

Or if they are OpenTV based a C compiler or their authoring software. Disclaimer. I did a lot of OpenTV development for a long time a long time ago.

If you are lucky they will integrate a Flash player or a “Standards” based browser of some kind and its integrated enough with the hardware acceleration to let you get some decent performance.

Otherwise its C/C++ for the lot of you.

These still live because, they are cheap and companies are creating solutions that let them squeeze more out of their existing deployed set-top box hardware instead of expensively upgrading their deployed boxes. Which does make sense.

These also live because some companies are holding onto obsolete intellectual property and believe they can compete with Google, Apple and Microsoft who at this point in time are battling each other to be the dominant player.

Most boxes nowadays run Linux and many companies are taking a good hard long look at Android and Google TV. Much in the same way that many of the mobile manufactures have, except Nokia who are busy setting fire to themselves with Windows Mobile 7. Good luck with that guys.

See:

Pace

NDS

There are a lot of companies that build boxes….

The PC

For the PC there are websites and applications that can run on PCs that bring the television experience to your PC.

This encapsulates your Hulu, NetFlix, iTunes, iSky, YouTube, iView and iPlayer solutions.

Companion Devices

Video can also be streamed to mobile devices such as Android and Apple phones and tablets.

Applications running on your TV can offer enhanced functions via these devices.

Imagine watching a video and when you open a companion iPad application, you have ability to control what is going on on the TV from your iPad.

Taking this further you can have the IMDB page one click away to settle any arguments or be able to browse the content catalogue and purchase related content.

How about declaring to your friends via Facebook and Twitter what you are watching? Inviting them to watch at the same time?

See:

xFinity Remote

Motorola Social TV

TunerFish

The Publishing Model

As a developer you can’t just get your app onto the TV. You need to go via the Service Operator or the manufacturer of the television.

Traditionally the Cable Provider/MSO/Telco/ISP will ship your app with the firmware of the STB and it will get updated when they perform firmware updates. If you are lucky they have a system that lets you update the application over the net.

If you want to target existing connected televisions –then you need to talk to the device manufacturer and convince them to let your app onto their main menu. If you are lucky it will go out on the next firmware update. The nicest TVs have your app just as a URL – but on some you still need that URL burned into the firmware somewhere in the first production run if you want your app to see the light of day.

App Stores for connected televisions are emerging now but are not widespread. Samsung are probably the best progressed at this point in time.

The Integration Model

If you want to deploy your own set-top box you need to select middleware, hardware and a hardware manufacturer and then get some application middleware developed and integrated and then get a custom application developed to run your storefront.

On top of all that is the infrastructure..

You need to stand up services to ingest and stream your video.

You need to license a DRM solution if you want to get any content from the studios.

You need to stand up services to manage your catalogue and make it available to the application running on the device.

These are big complicated projects that generally take at least a year from Go to first purchase by a customer.

The Future

So back to the transition phase I mentioned previously This is similar to what we are now seeing the tail end of in the mobile market.

In a just a handful of years we are going to end up with 99% of phones running just 3 operating systems. iOS, Android and Microsoft.

More and more manufacturers will abandon custom operating systems and take up the Linux/Android/Google TV stack. Instead of developing their own OS, Sony has gone with the Android Google TV OS.

The Devices

In the future I think you will see two classes emerging.

Generic devices based on standards based browsers. (covered above).
Personal Set-Top Boxes/Televisions.

Personal Set-Top Boxes/Televisions

Into this category I place Apple TV, Google TV and the probably soon to be announced Windows TV solution.

The utility of these owe more to the mobile phone industry than to traditional TV industry.

Like the mobile phone and the PC, these are personal devices.

These are devices dedicated to IPTV. Even the games consoles will get in on act. Rumour abounds that Sony will release Google TV on the PS3 and that Microsoft are going to compete in turn on the XBox-360.

As a developer you download/license the SDK develop and release your application into the App store.

See:

Google TV + Sony Google TV

Apple TV

Microsoft TV (Mobile7 + MetaCenter?)

The Publishing Model

In the future as an IPTV application developer will be able to simply develop your app and publish it to an application store.

This will work much like the Android and iTunes Application stores for mobile devices.

It will be that easy. As it should be.

The Integration Model

As a service provider you will no longer have to ship or design your own device.

IPTV devices will be products that people will already have. They will have bought them from a store. The same way that one now buys a TV, PC or mobile phone (outright purchase off a plan).

People will choose the one that suits them or just use the one that came inside their TV.

Much like the Apps are downloaded to Phones and Games are downloaded to consoles, you will develop your storefront application and register that with the App-Store.

MUBI for PS3

Your customers may for-instance have a Google TV device or a Microsoft TV Device.

You will be able to integrate with standard in-app payment solutions so your customers can purchase content but if you really want to there is no reason why you can’t integrate your own payment gateway.

It will be as as easy as getting a designer and an application programmer to construct your application and the rest will be configuration and simple integration.

Some Predictions

Likely.

There will be more systems such as Appcelerator and our own Massive UI SDK. Meta-Programming systems that will allow developers to “code once/deploy many” to deal with the 3-4 dominant IPTV platforms.

Many of the services you need to stand up an IPTV VOD/SVOD will be available as standards with standard plugins for the now standard operating systems.

Integration will be much more commodity software based. I’m intending that ThumbWhere will end up as one of these integration points.

The video watching experience will be one that users customise based on downloaded applications and plugins.

Exclusive content deal wars will be fought between service operators.

The ‘Social’ aspect will be mostly limited to companion devices.

I would not be surprised if..

Content licensing will start to appear as a service.

Apple releases a TV.

We end up with only three and maybe even only two IPTV operating systems.

A studio enters the market selling direct to customers.

Finally..

25 years of getting PCs talking to TVs and the last 10 years of interactive television and the last 5 years of IPTV have left me with a lot to talk about.

There is a lot more I could have discussed here. I’ve provided a very lightweight view of the industry as it stands. I’m under NDA to a lot of scary companies with lawyers who…. allegedly.. eat human flesh, so there are some products, companies and technologies I have not even mentioned here nor can I mention in “any universe”.

I’ve not discussed anything about what is going with DRM at the moment. Especially what is happening with Google having purchased WideVine. Don’t get me started….

I’ve not compared iTunes to Canvas/YouView or discussed Comcast’s Xfinity project because that is a book in itself.

I’ve not discussed any of the up and coming standards that are built on top of HTML/JavaScript that are trying to inherit the mantle from CEA-2014 or even the history of DNLA & CEA-2014. Take a look at HBBTV if you want to look at the best of these.

Not gone anywhere near the strategies for pushing customers back to real time consumption vs time-shifted.

And don’t get me started on EBIF because I have run out of space…

SFTP Added To ThumbWhere Storage

metawrap — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 21:54:21 +0000

Checked in SFTP support.

We need to test with more SFTP servers than we have in the development environment, but this is all ready for testing.

Now for FTPS and plain old FTP.

One side effect of the AmazonS3 Storage integration is that now every time we run automated integration tests it costs us a few fractions of a cent.

But it is well worth it

ThumbWhere AmazonS3 Support

metawrap — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 10:39:05 +0000

I just checked in the test candidate for external storage which supports Amazon S3 and FTP.

When this is deployed, API licensees can provide one or more Amazon S3 or FTP accounts and ThumbWhere will use that to store your media.

You specify an account and then a number of selectors which are used to select media for inclusion (or exclusion) with respect to a designated storage provider.

For example. You might want your videos stored in one S3 account and your thumbnails in another. In fact you might want to deploy certain thumbnails to a different type of storage altogether.

So by configuration of selectors and storage endpoints you can obtain a high degree of control over where your content is actually stored.

The system is architected to support generic storage providers via a plug-in model so I’m now investigating what others I can support in the first release. If I don’t see any easy wins then S3 and FTP will be the only ones in the first release.

I spent a good portion of Sunday writing automated tests to ensure that the core flow processor was able to handle the cases of first time deploy, revocation and update with the minimum amount of API calls and traffic. If multiple deploy instructions for the same media get into the queue, the engine is able to avoid double handling. If some of the media is modified and re-transcoded but all the media is marked to redeployment, only the media that has actually changed will be re-deployed.

You put a bit more thought into these things when you get a running bill from Amazon per API call and byte shipped. This weekends efforts added up to 3c

I’m also considering personalised storage, so actual end users of the system (members of each social network) could in theory provide their own S3 account info and have their own media shipped off to their own storage.

The media in external storage is represented by extra URL elements in the raw feed XML. The default XSLT for the account specific feeds will make this transparent by selecting a single URL and favouring external storage over files hosted on internal ThumbWhere storage.

We will start to factor this into our pricing model but the immediate effect is that this will allow you to ship most of your media traffic to cheaper storage and it will allow us to control our own storage costs.

Update

metawrap — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 08:05:50 +0000

We’ve been rather busy for the last year and a half working in the emerging interactive television market so unfortunately there has been no time or resources to devote to the public API as I’ve spent most of my time either head down coding or out of the country working with some amazing organisations.

The workload has recently started to get reasonable so I’m now looking again at deploying updates to the white site social networking site to take advantage of the last year or so of work in the commercial API.

This means that finally some of the features requested in http://feedback.thumbwhere.com that have already been implemented in the API will start to see the light of day.

Also we are taking on some pro-bono clients who have expressed an interest in using the API to make the world a batter and more interesting place. These will act as example implementations for integrating with the API. At the moment as we have been doing all of the integration, public facing documentation is a little sparse. This exercise is an attempt to do some good and get some good example code. The long term aim is to start opening up the API to a general developer community.

It’s amazing to see what people have been building with the API.

Thanks everyone for your ongoing support and encouragement.

ThumbWhere Image upload now supported by MahTweets

metawrap — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 00:45:19 +0000

‘MahTweets is a rich, awesome, twitter client, feature inline media, filtering, tracking (saved searches) and much more’

MahTweets can be downloaded from http://theleagueofpaul.com/mahtweets/

The ThumbWhere plugin was developed by @WillHughes

It supports Image uploading and uses ThumbWhere’s URL shrinking service ( tny.tw ).

You can get a ThumbWhere account at http://thumbwhere.com

Also you don’t have an account you can always MMS images, video and audio to +61-447-100-293 and ThumbWhere will publish it anonymously to the public feed.