DC Live park has basically the same exact same concept as Fideocam. Only the execution is better. The first mover advantage is nothing unless you are persistent and keep at it until the time is right.

Initially as I had setup the television set and connected to the Internet I was using a 2Mbit/s ADSL line my company provided. The Vimeo app wasn’t really playing nice with the poor network connection. The video would stop annoyingly every 10 seconds to buffer and playing any content was a pain. It does not help that you don’t have a setting to increase the buffer size or watch videos only after they have fully loaded. I think this has as much to do with the platform as the app itself.

Eventually our company upgraded to a 8Mbit/s connection. Now I very rarely need to buffer anything. Everything starts playing pretty much instantaneously. The way the app is built however is little annoying. First of all you can’t stop video halfway and continue watching it later. After you come back to the app you can find the previously watched video, but at least for me the does not work or the app needs to upload the whole file from the start. Since most videos are kinda short (under 15 min) that is not a huge problem, but I think the app would be much better if you could jump around more effortlessly.

Also the information architecture of the app is really not doing it for me.

• Channels
• My Stuff
• Watch Later
• Search
• Settings

The suggested channels are pretty ridiculous and there is no way to customize them. There is the Inbox under My Stuff where you can find things to watch, but I don’t understand why that shouldn’t be under Channels. In this day and age a channel does not need to be static contraption. Especially I don’t like the fact that clips you have watched already still show up in the channels and in the inbox as well. Also adding and removing clips to and from watch later list awkward as you need additional step to select the clip info page first.

Another of my pet peeves is related to how clip lists are shown. The grid format with preview pics is good, but I browsing videos would be much easier better if short part of the description text was shown. Since I’m currently the only user for vimeo app in our family there hasn’t been a need for separate accounts for different users in the family, but I would assume that would be useful. Maybe this is something the underlying Samsung platform could provide.

With all this criticism I have to say Vimeo is still my favourite app in the Samsung’s Interne@TV walled garden.

Setting up the NAS wasn’t quite as simple as I would have wished for. I started by installing the software that came on the cd, but the assistant tool is just plain useless. It just couldn’t find the drive on the network. The main issue is that the guide book expects your router to be upnp compatible. If not you are left to fend for your self. Unfortunately finnish telcos don’t supply compatible ADSL modems. Most people are bound to have a hard time with the setup.

The thing is troubleshooting network problems takes quite a while. Initially I thought I just had not had the network cable properly connected or with connection. I moved the drive closer to the Telewell router and used a shorter cable. I figured I should give or couple of the first DHCP addresses a try on my browser. With this educated guess I was able to get access to the admin page and at least figured the drive itself is working. In the end the break-through came when I assigned the modem ports to routed instead of the default bridged mode.

I managed to map the drive share manually (net use \\ip address\OpenShare) and take backups of most of the important data. Unfortunately I had to move the files around quite a bit. One thing I have noticed is that the response times are affected by any data intensive operations. The hardware feels especially sluggish since there is very little feedback on the status of different operations. Only thing that gives away that something is happening is the noise that the drive makes. I upgraded the firmware and now I don’t know how to initiate the automatic file downloads from camera or USB drives anymore.

All in all I would give the drive 7/10. I expect the mirrored drive to keep our precious home media safe and generally it is pretty quiet. If I didn’t have a master’s degree in telecoms I think I would have gotten totally frustrated during the setup process. Consequently I really can’t promote the product to somebody with limited computing experience. The media features are really useful and I will write another post on integrating with Samsung 7 series televisions.

As far as the technical specification goes the only real requirement in addition to cable (DVB-C) support was that h.264 video in mpeg-2 wrappers from my camcorder should be viewable. Sounds simple enough? Unfortunately browsing vendors and manufacturers sites I found it very hard to distinguish what are the protocols and file types that are really supported. Searching through different AV-enthusiasts forums gave very little additional information so to gather some reliable data for backup my decision making process the only option was to hit the shops.

To prepare for my excursion I initially prepared an USB stick with folders for images and videos. In the images folder I had .jpg pictures from my phone, old digital camera (Canon s90) and from the new DSLR (Canon 550d). In the video folder I had videos from my camcorder (Panasonic DSC-SD9) and DSLR (Canon 550d). While preparing I came to the conclusion that I should test at least models from LG, Panasonic, Samsung and Sony.

Before hitting the local electronics store I gave the USB stick a try on a relative’s Samsung. It became apparent very soon that I would need to rename the .mts files produced by the camcorder to .ts and .mov files from the DSLR needed a new wrapper. Once in the high street the good news was that generally both images and renamed avchd videos tended play fairly well out of the box. Unfortunately .movs are not supported and there were some usability issues.

The most notable usability problem was that video playback each clip would require an annoying loading time. Initially I thought I had exceeded USB1.1 maximum throughput of 12Mbit/s with 18Mbit/s HD video. I found out later that the stick and interface were indeed USB 2.0 compatible so that was not the problem. It became evident I would need to try accessing files over the 100Mbit/s home network wired LAN using DLNA.

In the end I tried Samsung 7 series, Sony x800 and Panasonic Viera sets. In Samsung it was possible to select multiple files, but you need to select between video, audio and images instead of events. Sony was able to open the files, but the user interface wasn’t really all that intuitive despite all the awards. Panasonic Viera-range of televisions sounded interesting since our camcorder is from the same company. Unfortunately Viera seems to support AVCHD only from SDHC card. That just didn’t make any sense, because it would be very cumbersome switching between tiny memory cards.

In the end I came to the conclusion that my purchasing decision should be based on general looks. Sad fact is that none of the devices really were all that great as media players and I could not really see differences in image quality. There is clearly space for more innovation in the television industry. Despite strong focus on product development it seems the manufactures have forgotten the users needs. None of the vendors could provide playlist saving functionality for example. I went ahead and splurged on the prettiest set I could find.

• Backend for Autoviewer is a PHP content management script for managing multiple levels of Autoviewer image galleries >
• Automata is a CSS layout tool utilizing golden mean grid written in Java >

Feel free to fork the code or use as is. I might even share more later on.

While sensor sentivity (ISO) is seen as the most important competing factor these days things will eventually change as better imaging technology is developed. Higher resolution sensors enable building smaller cameras and will further push mobile convergence. On the other hand cameras as we know them might change all-together.

In the future it may be possible to just snap a shot and the camera will automatically crop several alternative compositions. Basic principle relies on a wide angle lens and auto-cropping algorithm. One very convenient way to store the images would be standard JPEG image with custome meta-data for the alternative compositions.

I went ahead with my plans and splurged on my first DSLR recently. While I did opt for a low end model I have been very happy with my purchase. Bottomline is Canon 550d is an amazing camera by any standards and brings high-end features to a totally new price range. The pace of DSLR development has been phenomenal and comparing cameras was difficult. The two factors that weighted in on my decision were handling and set of features I thought essential.

1) You can’t take good photos if you don’t have your camera with you.

The most important consideration for me was the fact that the camera needs to be portable. I really didn’t feel confident I would carry with me any of the more bulkier DSLRs (7D/5D/1D). 550d is not tiny either with my choice of L-series zoom lens, but I can see myself traveling with a wide prime lens. As far the handling is concerned out of all the cameras I fondled 550ds just fitted best in my hand. I’m still considering whether to buy the additional battery pack, but I’m leaning against it since this far I have been happy with the battery life lasting multiple days.

2) You can’t take good photos if you don’t know how to operate the camera fast

Intuitive user interface for controlling still and video shooting was a concern for me, but testing different cameras I could not tell which interface would be faster to learn since I had only limited previous experience. The Canon interface did seem quite clunky and disorganized at first. In the end I think I got to reasonably painless start with manual in one hand and the camera in the other. The learning curve has not been as steep as I expected, but of course I still haven’t gotten too deep into it yet. Basically I had to take a risk, but this far I’m happy.

3) All you need is… the right features

As far as the features go the most important requirement was good low-light performance. I had gotten sick of the fact that many of our baby photos turned blurry due to our old camera’s poor ISO performance. 550d can do 6400 and even 12800. Previously such sensitivity was reserved to high-end cameras and I expect that with a fast prime on my shopping list the low-light performance can get even better.

Obviously as a video man full HD video was a draw as well. The video mode works fine, but I would have preferred to have it accessible in all modes. Obviously that would have meant the mirror prism would need to be opened and closed for each frame separately. Not impossible to implement, but very grueling for the mechanism and lifetime of the camera would be affected.

If I had my wished come true the camera would have included a few additional features out of the box. New tricks tend to trickle down from consumer-grade gear and I was expecting something more from the creative mode for example. Also in my opinion camera is still missing some fairly obvious video features.

1. time-lapse video mode

2. slow mov video mode

3. manual video mode

Of course these things can be accomplished attaching a laptop via USB cable or using a dedicated controller hardware, but camera operating system software could do the trick as well. Despite these wishes bottom line is that 550d is whole lot of camera for a fair price. I’m very keen on keeping learning and I would like to follow-up with a post on tricks and hacks for 550d. Let’s see if I get it done.

The two separate projects do have different goals, but it seems that Google is taking video seriously and is attempting to force the market to function more efficiently. It seems that with their superior search technology the company will benefit if the market is opened up. Google has this shot at making a difference since they have acquired significant IPR and because they have the user masses.

The first project’s  background is that Google  earlier acquired On2, a codec house, that released several quality codecs for the Adobe Flash platform. While it would be the traditional monopolistic move the underlying goal may not really be to displace h.264 with a new codec (WebM) . Rather the hardware acceleration and effectiveness disabled codec is a pawn that is given in order to force MPEG LA to keep the constraints acceptable. So in effect WebM does not need to become the dominant medium in order to reach its goals.

The GoogleTV project with Sony is also an interesting venture. Home electronics giants have all dabbled with their own incompatible versions of interactive television. This far no single player has been able to make a decisive move. Some standards (eg. DLNA) have gained some traction, but It seems that there have not been any winners.  By leveraging ubiquitous web technology in the form of HTML5 the partnership maybe onto something.

Again while Google may be trying to gain control of the video services market it is likely they already have much wider encompassing strategic goals.  Broadband video services is just another platform that will improve usefulness of their bread and butter services. Immediately search, micropayments and things like google calendar integration come to mind.