Friday, 30 March 2007

Sony BDP-S1E specifications: first European Blu-ray disc player






The DVD format is far from dead, but disc players for next generation high-definition high capacity discs are starting to take off. Earlier this week, Sony launched launched the first European Blu-ray disc player, the Sony BDP-S1E. Which, appropriately, has a blue panel at the front.

"Setting new standards in high definition audiovisual performance and ease of use .. it looks pretty good too!.. The BDP-S1E represents one of Sony's most powerful, intelligent and stylish consumer equipment models ever developed."

Sony describes the new player as "a super heavyweight, with the looks of a super model and truly simple and intuitive operation for
the serious AV enthusiasts. Such is our confidence in the Blu-ray format; we plan to announce a larger family of products in the coming months".

Here's a slightly different pic (all pictures copyright Sony):
Below are the official Sony summary specs. Those interested in further info can view the detailed technical specifications for the Sony BDP-S1E here (with thanks to Immediate Future) - there are 3 versions: French, German, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Swedish; English; and Russian.

Specifications

  • 1920 x 1080p (progressive) High Definition video for Blu-ray Disc titles
  • A 1080p video upscaling facility, which takes your old movies out of the DVD-Video domain and into near full HD resolution
  • 24p True Cinema, meaning viewers can watch films at the authentic speed and pitch as the director intended for the first time
  • Up to 8 channels of uncompressed linear PCM digital audio output via HDMI as well as Dolby Digital Plus
  • Highest audio performance is assured through separate audio circuitary, the use of finely tuned high-performance audio components, a rigid beam chassis construction, drive brackets and off-centre insulator feet
  • The adoption of x.v.Colour (Sony's implementation of the xvYCC video signal standard) giving viewers twice the colour or sRGB when playing back discs recorded with AVC-HD camcorders

Design specifications

  • Slimline aluminium and genuine specially coated glass finished exterior
  • No confusing multiple menu navigation as synchronisation of the BDP-S1E player alongside Sony BRAVIA TVs, HiFi systems and receivers is as simple as pressing one button
  • The player boasts compatibility with a diverse number of high quality video codecs including MPEG2, MPEG4-AVC and VC1
  • HDMI interfaces for broadcast level of device interoperability and an analogue component output for 1080i
  • Supports BD-ROM, AVC-HD, CD and DVD playback, as well as MP3 files and JPEG images.
See the detailed technical specifications for the Sony BDP-S1E here.

I haven't tested the new video player yet, but I hope to be able to do so and a full review of this gadget will follow as soon as possible. I watch a lot of television with the aid of my trusty Topfield 5800 PVR, but not much via DVD. Who knows if the advent of Blu-ray and HD-DVD change this; I may even invest in a new TV.

It will be interesting to see the outcome of the Blu-ray vs. HD-DVD format wars. Like many other technology fans, I wish that the two opposing camps had managed to reach agreement on a common format. At the moment the jury's still out, but I hope for the sake of the industry and consumers that it won't take too long for one or other to win out definitively.

There's been a lot of publicity about LG's Super Multi Blue BH100 Player, launched in January 2007, which is compatible with Blu-ray Disc, DVD, CD read/write and HD DVD-ROM (read) (and similarly their GGW-H10N drive for computers will support both Blu ray and HD DVD). I suspect that until a single format for high definition video and data storage is settled, it's the canny manufacturers of dual format hybrid players like LG who will be the real winners.

Adobe Acrobat Reader crashes Firefox, Internet Explorer - workaround






The problem

Do you, like me, find that the free Adobe Acrobat Reader often causes Firefox or Internet Explorer to freeze, i.e. the dreaded "not responding"? Here's a fix, of sorts, in Windows XP - not a full solution but possibly a helpful hint that may reduce the impact of the freeze.

I've had to end task the browser in which I was trying to view the offending PDF document because the "not responding" not only stops me from viewing the tab with the PDF, it also won't let me switch to or view properly any other tabs of the same browser.

Kills all known browser tabs and windows, fast! (and it's not even bleach)

Unfortunately killing the offending tab also kills all the other open tabs and windows of the same browser - not just the tab with the PDF document in it.

It's annoying enough that my other browser tabs or windows get closed down too; I can get them back via my history or Fox session saver, but it still takes time.

Kills Web forms too, ack

However if I've been filling in a Web form or drafting a post in Blogger's post editor, then I lose everything I've been typing out - which is a right royal pain in the proverbial, and can lead me to throwing things especially when I've been working on a draft for a while and been so focussed that I forgot to save it. Particularly when I've only opened the PDF to check something in it which I need to consult for the post I'm working on.
Frequently saving drafts on Blogger. Yes, I know I must save more regularly. I'm still waiting for a Greasemonkey userscript that will save my draft post and re-open the draft post for me automatically to continue editing it, instead of taking me to the Edit Posts page where I have to first find the draft in the list and then reopen it manually. Still, we should all save, save, save, bois and gels.

Acrobat Reader crashes often happens not just when I'm trying to view a PDF document on the Web, but also when I've already downloaded it, seemingly without problem, and then later returned to the browser tab or window, or just tried to scroll through the PDF.

Delays XP shutdown too

Furthermore, when I shut down Windows XP, if I've been using Acrobat Reader during that session (even when there have been no browser or Acrobat Reader freezes or crashes), it will often throw up errors, usually more than one, to do with Acrobat Reader - and I have to kill them before my PC will shut down.

A solution?

Now I've not figured out the full solution, yet, but I've worked out one thing that may help some people who have experienced the same problem but hadn't hit on this tip yet.

Tip for a workaround

When a browser tab or browser window displaying an Acrobat PDF document freezes and won't respond, you can kill that one tab or window without affecting your other open tabs or windows. Here's how to do that workaround:
  • Do the usual ctrl-alt-delete and click Task Manager to bring up the Windows Task Manager
  • Click the Processes tab, and find Acrobat Reader (I find it easiest to click the Image Name column heading to sort the list of processes alphabetically by image name) - it's called AcroRd32.exe
  • Highlight AcroRd32.exe, click End Process, and Yes.
All tabs or browser windows which were displaying Acrobat PDF documents will either close down, or go blank. That includes any PDFs which were in fact responding fine.

But the good news is, your other browser tabs or windows won't be affected. You won't lose the draft post or the form you were filling in. Now would definitely be a good time to go ahead and save that draft, quick - whether it's by the Save as draft button or the like, or by copy/pasting the HTML or text you were writing, into something else like Notepad, Word or (as I do) a draft Outlook email.

Next, you can get back the PDF you were trying to view. If the window or tab displaying the PDF is still open, but blank, just refresh it (while viewing that tab, F5 or Ctrl-F5 or the Refresh button will do it). That should open horrid buggy ol' Acrobat Reader up again and display your PDF in all its former glory. This works for other tabs with PDFs in them too. If the window has been closed down, then you shoud be able to find it in your history.

'Course if it crashes again then you'll have to go through the whole palaver again, but at least you won't have lost your other work.

Hope this helps some others. Me, I'll use this temporary workaround for the time being as and when necessary, but I'm off to try freeware or open source alternatives to Adobe Acrobat Reader (which hopefully won't take so long to open or use so much memory, and, of course, won't keep crashing browsers or hold up my computer shutting down).

When I find one I like which doesn't break browsers like Acrobat Reader does, I'll blog about it.

Blogger toolbar buttons problem: Firefox, Greasemonkey - possible fixes






I mentioned in passing that when I upgraded my Greasemonkey extension for Firefox to version 0.6.8.20070314.0 a week or so ago, my New Blogger toolbar buttons stopped working in Firefox. I've now figured out what was wrong.

The toolbar was still there, I could click on the icons for bold, lists etc, but some commands didn't work at all (e.g. the Preview link) or else all they did was turn the background of the highlighted text greyish:


As well as losing my Preview view, the most frustrating thing was that I couldn't bullet lists easily, never mind change font colour etc. Oddly enough, some keyboard shortcuts worked (I'm a hotkeys fan and wish Blogger would introduce hotkeys for bulleted lists, hint hint pretty please), but e.g. ctrl-b opened my history sidebar instead of emboldening the text. It was driving me mad. How to fix it?

Try clearing cache and cookies

For many people who have problems with their Blogger post editor toolbar (e.g. it vanishes or isn't visible at all), a solution which usually works is this:
  • clear the Firefox cache (Tools->Options->Privacy tab, under Private Data click Clear Now, tick Cache, click Clear Private Data Now); and
  • delete Blogger.com cookies (Privacy tab again, Show Cookies, highlight the Blogger.com ones and click Remove Cookies; or else tick to clear all cookies when clearing private data if you prefer).
I did all that, several times, but still my Blogger toolbar buttons were not working. Well my toolbar didn't disappear, the icons and links in it just stopped doing anything.

Another cache clearing tip that may work when the first one doesn't?

Next possible fix to try: Tools->Options->Advanced, then under Cache change it to Use up to 1 MB of space for the cache. Surf around until the 1 MB is filled up (e.g. by watching free online TV on FreeTube).

Still no dice.

Try disabling and re-enabling Firefox extensions to see if it's one of them

Well the problem started after I downloaded a bunch of updates to my many Firefox add-ons (a.k.a. extensions), so I was pretty sure it was one of those updates that was interfering with the Blogger post creator toolbar.

So I disabled all my Firefox extensions (Tools->Add-ons, highlight extension name and click Disable, highlight next extension, Disable, and so on) and restarted Firefox (i.e. closed and opened it again). Tried to create a new post and, voila, the toolbar buttons were working again, so I knew it had to be an extension.

I re-enabled my extensions one by one, restarting Fox and trying the Blogger toolbar buttons again after each re-enabling, and luckily I found that the culprit was the first or second one I tried. Sadly it was my favourite extension Greasemonkey - because after I re-enabled it, the toolbar icons were no go again, and when I disabled Greasemonkey and enabled all my other addons, the toolbar operated as normal again. (I tried to revert to the previous version of Greasemonkey, but very strangely the toolbar problem was still there, when that version had previously been trouble-free. That's technology for ya.)

Try disabling and re-enabling Greasemonkey userscripts to pinpoint the culprit

So, next step: enable Greasemonkey, but disable all installed user scripts (Tools->Greasemonkey->Manage User Scripts, highlight the name of a userscript and untick Enabled, repeat for next userscript and so on). Then I enabled them one by one, but luckily I didn't have to restart Firefox each time, I just opened a new Blogger post editor tab after each re-enabling and tried the toolbar buttons there to see when they stopped working.

The script that was having some issue with the new Greasemonkey? Luckily it wasn't the Magical Sheep multiple-word Technorati tagger userscript. But it was another Greasemonkey script, the Keep current time on draft posts script (by Jasper and updated for New Blogger Beta by Aditya) that to me is equally essential, because I often have several draft posts on the go at once and without that script they very annoyingly get published with the date/time when I started the post, not the date/time I finished it and hit Publish.

When I disabled that script (and re-enabled all my other user scripts), yep the toolbar was working properly again. That's the answer for now, I'd much rather be able to use the Keep current time script but I'll just have to live without it for the time being.

So if your Blogger toolbar doesn't work, you may be having the same problem, and you could try the same steps to fix it.

Meanwhile, I shall be waiting hopefully for Jasper, Aditya or some other genius (ahem Kirk?) to tweak the Keep current time userscript so that it works with Greasemonkey properly again (and maybe even hides/shows the Comments/Backlinks section with a toggly link??).

(With thanks galore as usual to Kirk for his helpful suggestions.)

Nominative determism 10: dogs lead in Barking, woof woof!






Guess where you'd find the highest average number of dog owners in the UK (10% of households)?

Answer: an area of East London known as Barking.

How's that for nominative determinism (of sorts)?

BBC news story.

(More nominative determinism)

Tuesday, 27 March 2007

BBC iPlayer: free TV, radio programme downloads on demand - have your say, deadline 5pm Wednesday 28 March






Note: for a first look at the BBC iPlayer, which I'm currently trialling, with screenshots and videos, see this post.

It's now well known that the BBC plan to introduce, probably in late May 2007, new "BBC iPlayer" (formerly MyBBCPlayer or BBC iMP) on demand services more in keeping with this age of increasing digital convergence, to allow users to:
  • "7-day" catch-up TV - catch up on missed BBC TV programmes (aka "retrospective scheduling") and back episodes of certain series even where broadcast more than 7 days ago ("series stacking") via :
  • non-DRM podcasts - download BBC radio programs, freely playable on iPods or other MP3 players and transferrable without restriction (but excluding classical music, full book readings, and commercial full track music); and
  • internet simulcast TV - watch BBC programs streamed live (multicast) over the Net via computer, mobile phone or PDA etc e.g. in a wi-fi café.
The point of this post is to flag (for those who haven't already commented) that consumers and UK licence fee payers do have a say in the final shape of the new services - but comments must be in before the deadline of 5pm GMT this Wednesday 28 March i.e. tomorrow.

The BBC Trust (formerly BBC Governors) are consulting publicly on plans by the Beeb's management to introduce video on demand (VOD) and other services more in keeping with the digital age, mostly via the Net. Provisionally they've decided to give them the go ahead - but in some ways they want to change Auntie's proposals. They must consider all views, even if they decide not to act on them. So it's worth us licence fee payers weighing in on a couple of proposals which aren't as consumer-friendly as they could be. The BBC Trust must make their final decision by 2 May 2007 and the services will launch soon after, probably in late May.

I've been working on an overview of the proposals, but just haven't had time to get it all done, so I'm putting up this post now because of the consultation deadline. I hope to finish it after work tonight so please check back (late!) if you're interested.

How to comment to the BBC Trust

If you want to have your say, you can do so before 5pm on Wednesday 28 March by:
You can refer to the main consultation/provisional conclusions and public value assessment (text-only versions of both available), market impact assessment by UK communications regulator Ofcom and (if you've the time and interest) mountains of other supporting evidence considered by the BBC Trust in reaching their provisional conclusions.

Below are my own thoughts on some of the consultation questions (here, click the Questions tab to see the form). Your points may of course be different, but whatever your thoughts, please consider commenting (encourager of consumer activism that I am!) - you've a chance to put your views across to the BBC Trust if you get them in quickly.

[Updates since made to answers are in italics]

Q1 and Q2 - generally yes, I think the proposals are overall a great idea and the BBC should be investing as a priority in on demand services, it's not before time too, but I don't agree with all the changes proposed by the BBC Trust.

Q3 30-day storage window (see further below) - OK, but could be shorter if the original download window was increased from 7 days to 14 days or more, which I think is the better approach. 7 days is way too short if you're on holiday etc.

Q4 series stacking (see below) would be useful, but I'd like that extended to more series not just the types they say (see below). And there definitely shouldn't be any limitation on the number of episodes of a series made available for catch-up or the length of time for which they can be viewed.

Q5 platform - very important that non-Microsoft users should have access to the new services e.g. Mac and Linux users.

Q6 book readings - yes the BBC should be allowed to offer book readings as non-DRM audio downloads. Blind users would particularly benefit from that and they should not be forgotten. See answer to question 12 about "free" not necessarily impacting the commercial market.

Q7 classical music - I think a blanket ban on non-DRM podcasts of classical music is wrong. Ideally there shouldn't be a restriction, or if it's felt necessary for market impact reasons to limit classical music, I think at least that classical music which is by new composers or which is rarely-heard should be allowed to be freely downloadable in order to help increase exposure. Same point about question 12.

Q8 parental control - it may seem good in principle to introduce some means of parental control mechanism, but I'm cynical and think that many children will be able to get around that easily. I think it's fundamentally down to parents bringing up their kids sensibly, and if they do that no mechanism should be needed; if they don't, any mechanism will no doubt be subverted anyway!

Q9 non-BBC content - as I'm in favour of consumer choice yes I'd like to be able to access non-BBC content from the BBC, but it should be clearly marked as non-BBC e.g. in a separate subsection with clear titles in the title bar. (I'm not sure what they mean about offering that content "on" the BBC website - surely just linking to other VOD services would not be a problem. Do they mean, offer non-BBC content for download via iPlayer?)

Q10 non-BBC services - again as I'm in favour of consumer choice I think it would be good if BBC content was available via other services like multi-channel providers or net downloading services, but only if the BBC (and licence fee payers) get paid adequately for it by those providers, who'll no doubt be able to profit from having BBC content accessible via their services.

Q11 licence revisions - would be fine if they incorporated the changes I'd personally like about increasing the initial download window time, allowing audio books and classical music etc!

Q12 other issues:

First, free isn't always "free" - when assessing market impact, remember that providing free services won't necessarily prejudice commercial providers. A similar argument's been made about MP3 downloads in the past, and I think it's a valid point: people sometimes download free material because they don't have the resources (e.g. students) or are too cheap (e.g. me!) to pay for it, and if it wasn't free they simply wouldn't get it at all (as opposed to buying it from the commercial provider instead); so making something free won't necessarily hurt sales or affect the bottom line of commercial suppliers as hard as they'd like to make out. I've certainly used products or services which were free or open source, which I wouldn't use at all if I actually had to fork out hard cash for them. Plus, free downloads help to publicise material and increase exposure and may lead to people paying for further material, e.g. Arctic Monkeys.

Second, the use of home hubs and the like (particularly wireless ones) by consumers will increase and in my opinion soon take off in earnest, fuelled by the availability of VOD not only via iPlayer but from other broadcasters like Channel 4, Channel 5 and ITV. Most people prefer to watch video material on a TV set, not a PC monitor screen. It's down to:
  • visual quality (picture/screen size and quality) and
  • sociability (TV watching is often a social or family activity: talking about how hot that actor/,actress is, how cool that goal/jacket).
The BBC needs to ensure that iPlayer will be as home hub friendly as possibly, though I appreciate they're not in the business of producing suitable hardware themselves. If the BBC want to extend audience reach, it's important that high quality video suitable for viewing on a bigger TV screen is available and that they make iPlayer as compatible as possible with home hubs and non-"all in one" or multifunction products which may be less sophisticated, variously known as digital media receivers or digital multimedia receivers, digital media adapters (DMA), etc - not to mention the much heralded Slingcatcher, Apple iTV and so on. Which may be difficult with the DRM, but...

Third, usability as well as accessibility. I took part in the BBC iMP trials and I found the precursor to iPlayer not as easy or intuitive to use as it should be. It should support full keyboard shortcuts and standard Windows (or Mac etc) controls and layout. The BBC Trust do say iPlayer "should also provide adequate access for those with sensory, cognitive or physical impairments within a reasonable timescale". But if they want to extend the BBC's "audience reach", they should insist that the iPlayer be much more user-friendly generally (even to those without disabilities) than iMP was.

Finally, bookmarking in advance (to schedule a download in advance of its broadcast) was dropped by the BBC, and the BBC Trust seem to think it would need another round of assessments if they wanted to introduce it, but I think it should have been a feature of iPlayer. Why restrict people to being able to download only after the broadcast, why can't they use the EPG to book in advance of transmission when they want to download something? (This post sets out the arguments very well.)

Bookmarking would also help improve reach and address service quality issues i.e. concerns about download speeds and time delays, if users can book in advance to download something in the background. I'm not sure bookmarking would affect the market for VCRs and PVRs, but if it did wouldn't those manufacturers be able to move into producing home hubs and DMAs instead if they thought they'd lose revenue from PVRs? It's a question of keeping up with the times and markets have to keep up with changes in consumer viewing patterns too. Wouldn't it be indeed artificial to shield VCR manufacturers from those changes by disallowing bookmarking?

Notes

Catchup TV over the Internet - what does "7-day" catchup mean?

Effectively, catchup internet TV is the next step on from the BBC iMP or MyBBCPlayer - see my posts on the 2005-2006 BBC iMP trials, which I took part in (key issues, tips and tricks, initial views).

They call it 7 day catchup but 7 days isn't really 7 days, hence the quotation marks, which the eagle-eyed will have spotted. What we'll get, borrowing from 9.4.1 of the public value assessment, is actually a succession of different windows (in total possibly 44 days to watch a programme after its broadcast):
  • 7-day download window or distribution window: after initial broadcast of a show, it's available for download only for a measly 7 days - useless if you're on holiday or very busy or just forget, and I bet people would download after 7 days if they could
  • 30-day (originally 13 weeks) catch-up window, storage window or convenience window: you must open the download at least once within thirty days after you first downloaded it, or else you'll lose access to it after the 30 days expire
  • 7 day consumption window: you then have 7 days after first opening the downloaded program to watch it in, but you can watch as often as you like in those 7 days. After those 7 days, pffft, the program disappears, becomes totally inaccessible.
All that self-destructing and automatic inaccessibility after certain time limits is done through the magic of DRM (well many might use ruder words than "magic" to describe DRM, but I'll comment no further on that here. At least some in the music industry are now wanting to get rid of DRM).

Basically digital rights management restricts how long you'll have to watch downloaded files, and also limits copying/sharing, though you can transfer and watch them on PMPs (portable media devices) like if they support DRM. Same time limits apply to watching downloads on portable devices, of course.

Series stacking

The BBC Trust want to limit this to series "where the series has a distinct run, with a beginning and an end and a clear ‘narrative arc’ or those which are defined as landmark series with exceptionally high impact. Long-running dramas, soaps, factual strands and magazine shows would not be eligible to be series stacked."

Note: for a first look at the BBC iPlayer, which I'm currently trialling, with screenshots and videos, see this post.

Monday, 26 March 2007

Blogger: Hindi transliteration now available






Good news for those who blog in Hindi - I've just noticed that Blogger have introduced a new transliteration feature: an "automatic transliteration option for converting Roman characters to the Devanāgarī characters used in Hindi. This lets you type Hindi words phonetically in English script and still have them appear in their correct alphabet."

Once transliteration is enabled in your Dashboard settings, in the post editor toolbar a new button appears which lets you toggle transliteration on and off, with a new keyboard shortcut (ctrl-g) for the toggle. Plus, a nifty onscreen keyboard's available.

Blogger have provided a chart of Devanāgarī-Roman Character Mappings too.

Before anyone asks, my Hindi is non-existent - I just came across this while searching for more keyboard shortcuts for the post editor given that today my toolbar icons suddenly stopped working in Firefox (must be an update to an extension, haven't figured out which one yet, if anyone has worked out the fix please let me know!).

Sunday, 25 March 2007

FreeTube: free TV online - review






UPDATED links.

I've only recently found FreeTube, which has been going for a while now. It offers lots of TV channels free over the Internet (funded by unintrusive ads). This is a review of FreeTube (cum tutorial or howto introduction, though it's very easy to use).

As the site puts it: "you can watch tv online for free - no fees, no downloads, no time limits!... FreeTube eliminates the necessity for any expensive hardware or monthly subscription costs and provides you with free streaming television and video on demand. Essentially, you are to use your computer as if it were a TV, without the hassle of installing any special software or purchasing expensive hardware or satellites."


System requirements

Most people with relatively modern systems will be able to watch free TV programmes over the internet via FreeTube. You just need:
  • a computer with minimum resolution 800x600, and of course a Net connection (the faster the better),
  • a Web browser like Internet Explorer, Firefox () or Opera - but Javascript must be enabled (here's how) as the service uses AJAX, and
  • some browser plugins which most of us already have: Windows Media Player, Quicktime, Real Player and Flash.

Content

They basically seem to aggregate free TV channels available elsewhere on the Web so that you can easily access them all from one place.

You can choose from lots of genres and channels within them, from children's TV programmes and movies to live Webcam feeds and, somewhat surprisingly (or not!) even porn channels (yes, free, nuff said):
  • news
  • business
  • educational such as documentaries (e.g. Discovery Channel)
  • entertainment
  • religious
  • music
  • sports
  • fashion
  • web cams
  • movies, and
  • adult.
Just use the menu in the left sidebar to choose a genre, then click a channel to select it, and that's it. But it may take a while for the channel to load.

The full listing is best seen by clicking the "Full Listing" view on the site, left sidebar menu.

They add new channels continually. Helpfully there's a "New Channels" section in the right sidebar (there's even a newsfeed available) to help users keep track of new additions.

Remember, this is streamed live TV, so you can't pause anything - you have to watch it in real time. You can press a Stop icon which on Fox anyway seems to just reload the channel (ditto the Play button); not sure how they work in IE given the crashing and black box problems.

Quality, usability, problems or bugs, support?

Overall I like FreeTube, even though there are issues, but most are livable with given that it's free.

Crashing browser

The biggest problem - browser crashes.

It used to crash Firefox, though no longer with a recent update. However, while it worked for me in Internet Explorer 6, it's now crashing Internet Explorer 7, on my system anyway.

Luckily Fox mostly works, but it still occasionally crashes Fox, and that's not even on changing channels but on trying links to other parts of the site e.g. FAQs. I suspect it's to do with their AJAX coding of the site (side point: I hate the way you can't link direct to pages of certain AJAX sites, or you can but it's ugly. I wish they'd use plain HTML on pages where it's mostly static text. Big hint to FreeTube!).

So for now, I'd use Fox (or perhaps IE6) for this.

Picture quality and screen size

It's like watching videos from YouTube etc online, the picture is within a smaller screen inside your browser. The picture quality is what you'd expect for something like that. Not as good as real TV, but perfectly watchable in most cases (see the screenshot above). As is usual with streaming video over the Internet, there is the occasional pause and stutter.

FreeTube say you can doubleclick the screen to make it fullsize, but that doesn't work in Fox and I've not been able to try it in IE7 as it keeps crashing.

Even fullscreen though, because the resolution's not exactly huge the picture quality may not be that much better. Still, that may provide a more TV-like experience, if you can get it!

Blank box

On some channels, it seems the most popular ones usually, you sometimes get a black box instead of a picture. It could be taking a while to load, in which case patience will sort it, or it could be broken.

They give you a "Report Channel as Broken" link plus icon under the screen to report a channel as broken though you have to wait for a countdown to end before you can click them, I guess to stop the hasty or impatient from wrongly reporting a channel.

The FAQs generally cover the common problems.

Nice touches: My Channels, Top Channels and TV schedules

My Channels. You can save a list of your favorite channels for quick access. Underneath the screen there's a "My Channels" icon (hover over the icons and the description will pop up). Click that to save the current channel to "My Channels", then your favourite channels which will be listed in a separate section at the bottom of the right sidebar, which appears immediately through the magic of AJAX.

There's also an icon next to each channel in your My Channels to delete a saved channel from the list.

It's done by cookies so you don't have to sign up or login, and you can clear your My Channels list by deleting the cookie and clearing your cache. I like.

Top 5 Channels. You can see which 5 channels are currently the most popular ones, from the list in the right sidebar. I bet you anything though that they edit out all the Adult / XXX channels from that list, otherwise I suspect other channels wouldn't get a look in on that list!

TV schedules. Theoretically you can check the TV timetable or schedule for a particular channel by clicking an icon underneath the screen. But everytime I've tried, for every channel I've tried, it doesn't work: "The connection has timed out - The server at freetube-tv-guide.uni.cc is taking too long to respond." So clearly they do need to sort this out. But the idea is good.

Help and support

There's a decent FAQ page and a diagnostics page (which however crashed my IE7).

I've not tried contacting them direct on any issues though so I don't know what their one on one support is like.

However they seem open to suggestions, providing a form especially for that (as well as a contact form), which is always a good sign in my book.

Verdict

FreeTube is an excellent way to watch streamed TV live over the Net, for free. A great example of the ad-funded model which may well pay dividends for those involved. There are some glitches to be ironed out, but hopefully they'll get there, and the problems I've encountered so far aren't bad enough to outweigh FreeTube's many good points.

IPTV / Internet television is clearly going to be a big growth area. Sites like FreeTube are only the start. I do wonder what the impact of sites like these will be on TV licence fees - as in, the debate about whether people who watch TV programs downloaded or streamed from the Internet onto their computers should be made to pay a licence fee if they don't already have a TV. This question has already arisen in the context of the BBC's proposals to make TV available for download over the Net, which I'm blogging separately. How businesses as well as government and consumers deal with the increasing convergence between media / television and the Internet will be very interesting to watch over the next few years.

Posture affects productivity depending on mood






If you want to work more productively and you're feeling sad, you should slouch; but if you're feeling happy, you should sit up straight. Really. It seems that your posture has an impact on your productivity, depending on the mood you're in.

Apparently "previous studies have shown that someone's emotional state can dramatically affect their performance on analytical tasks and that posture can play a role in this" - known as the "stoop to conquer" effect. "Emotion informs cognition, people whose emotion is inhibited don't perform intelligently," says Breazeal. However, people don't necessarily always sit in the "right" position for their mood."

In particular, studies showed that people are more persistent in trying to carry out tasks and solve problems:
  • when feeling depressed, or primed with a feeling of failure - if, while doing the task, they slouch (or see a slouching person or robot, which encourages them unconsciously to change their own posture in imitation!), or
  • when feeling cheery, or primed for success - if, while doing the task, they sit up straight (or see an upright robot).
So, now we know. It's not quite cognitive heuristics, but possibly it's a useful rule of thumb in life, though I think a lot of us know it instinctively anyway.

The "stoop to conquer" effect was mentioned as a relatively minor issue in an article in New Scientist primarily about robots and their interaction with humans, but I thought it was interesting. I never would have guessed it - it kind of seems counter-intuitive that slouching might make you more productive, if you're feeling low! (pun intended...) I'd love to know why posture affects efficiency in this way.

Is it a good answer to teachers, parents etc. who nag you to sit up straight, then, to say: "No, I'm feeling too depressed"?

Maybe not always. I've found a reference to a learned behavorial science article on posture and mood, which mentions the other side of the coin - that it seems to be easier to be positive and happy, and to remember positive thoughts, if you're sitting upright rather than slumped.

Friday, 23 March 2007

Win an LG Shine phone: photo competition - 13 April 2007 deadline






An LG Shine mobile phone (see my short review and other Shine posts) is the prize which 3 lucky people could win in a photographic competition just launched via the official LG Shine blog. As previously mentioned, the Shine itself sports a 2MB camera with Schneider-Kreuznach lens, and also records voice and video.


(photo above taken with a Shine at the LG Shine celebrity launch party, see this post)

"All you need to do is take a photo that expresses your shining moment (any theme that is relevant to you) and provide a simple explanation attached to your photo. You can send up to 5 photos if you wish!"

The deadline for submissions is 13 April 2007, 17h00 GMT+1 (and winners will be announced half an hour later).

I'm slightly uncertain about a couple of things though.

The competition entry page says:
"The 3 winners will be chosen by the amount of votes they receive, whoever has the most amount of votes and/or positive comments will be the winner. We will post each entry on the blog where users can vote for you under the comments section."

But the terms and conditions "small print" page says:
"The winner will be decided by a panel of judges."

So who decides on the winners? Web voters, or the panel of judges?


UPDATE: thanks to Hill & Knowlton for taking note of the uncertainty and updating their rules. Now, they say clearly that it's the voters who decide.

Also, even if it's voters who decide, the competition entry page says:
"The competition expires on the 13 April 2007, 17h00 GMT+1. Winners will be announced the same day at 17h30 GMT+1."

i.e, the winners are to be announced just 30 mins after the deadline time for submitting entries.

How would that work for late entrants? Doesn't that mean that someone who puts in a photo at say 17.29 on 13 April only has half an hour or less of "exposure time" (if you'll forgive the photography pun) for their photo, in which people will have a chance to vote for it?

If that is right, then it seems your best bet, if you want to maximise your chances of winning, is to submit your up to 5 photo entries ASAP.

Details of how to take part in this contest are on the competition entry page - there are several different ways to do that e.g. posting the pic on your blog.

I understand from LG that there are no geographic restrictions, you don't have to live in the UK to be eligible to enter. But note that this cellphone may not work outside Europe as it's only being launched here at the moment (following its initial release in Korea last year).

And remember that winners have to be prepared to take part in post-competition publicity.

Good luck to all who enter!

New Blogger (Beta): template tweaks after migrating






I've got a heavily customised "classic Blogger" template with old Blogger template tags, so I only took the plunge last week to migrate to the now feature complete fancy new Blogger, formerly known as Blogger Beta (initial overview and thoughts on new Blogger).

Here are some thoughts and tips from my experience with the changeover, which was more painless than I'd expected - probably because most of the issues have been ironed out by now.

I haven't at this point taken the further step of upgrading my template to the new, more graphical, drag 'n drop widgets / layout form. That would involve even more tweaks to make sure stuff still works afterwards. I'm too much of a scaredy cat to tackle that yet, though I've been experimenting with bits of new Blogger on and off for a while, but I may blog it separately when I do.

1. Template stays as template, not layout

As most Blogger users will know, "layouts" are the new "templates", although you can edit the HTML direct.

Because my old "Blogger Classic" type template was so non-standard, when my blog got migrated over all that happened on that front was that my existing template code simply got copied over wholesale. In my Dashboard, the link to it still says "Template" (whereas it says "Layout" for fully new Blogger blogs).

Instead of Page Elements, Fonts and Colors, Edit HTML and Pick New Template sub-tabs, I now have Edit HTML, Pick New, Customize Design and AdSense sub-tabs.

"Customize Design" is what will upgrade my template to the whizzy new widgety Layouts, but there's sensibly a big red warning that I'd lose many of my existing customisations (UPDATE: the Blogger help does say they'll backup your current template first and will keep the backup indefinitely so you can revert to it if all hell breaks loose after you upgrade. That's a relief!). I'm not quite ready to do that yet, until I've worked out how to incorporate the equivalents into a New Blogger-style template, so I won't be clicking the "Upgrade your template" button for a while.

Clearly Blogger have made sure that the old-style template tags still work in New Blogger, although who knows for how much longer - I imagine they'd like us all to move over to Layouts style as soon as possible.

By the way if anyone wonders why I don't use Labels fully yet, that's because Blogger seems to have imposed a "200-character per post" limit for labels, and as I use lots of variations of spellings, singular/plural etc for my tags, labels won't work for me - so I'm sticking with still using tags, for now.

2. Things to fix after the switchover

I didn't choose to convert my template to layouts form so it should have been a straight copy over of my existing template, on switching to New Blogger.

Still, a few things went wrong and I had to tweak my new Blogger template to fix them. These are the adjustments I had to make to my template after the switch to get it all to work again:

Non-Western European characters

I have Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters in my template, so that visitors who speak those languages can still read my blog by clicking to get the post or page translated via Google Language Tools (template code for that translation here; others have since produced better and easier widgets to do the same thing on New Blogger).

The characters got messed up on the switch, so I had to copy/paste them into the new Blogger template from the backup I had on my computer.

Old Blogger template tags replacements - www to www2

When customising my Old Blogger template I'd deleted some standard Blogger template tags and also I'd inserted manually a number of links to the Blogger website - notably for:
Those hardcoded links broke in New Blogger.

The fix was to change "www.blogger.com" to "www2.blogger.com" wherever they occurrred in my new template - both in the edit posts etc links themselves, and also in links to various Blogger CSS files in the head section of the template.

Other www references involving blogger.com should of course be changed to www2 elsewhere too e.g. if you have a bookmarklet or favelet in your browser for creating a new post.

Conditional tags fix

Another fix I had to figure out in relation to conditional tags has to do with a change that Blogger must have made previously (not quite sure when), but which didn't seem to matter in Old Blogger blogs.

In Old Blogger blogs, once upon a time, to make something on your blog invisible to everyone but you when logged in, you had to enclose it in a span whose opening tag was <span class="item-control admin-XXXXXXX pid-YYYYYYY"> (where XXXXXXX and YYYYYYY were unique to your blog).

It's now <span class="item-control blog-admin pid-YYYYYYY"> (you still need the YYYYYYY), but the old way still worked on my Old Blogger blog.

However on changing to New Blogger, if you're using that span tag in your template, you'll have to change all instances of "admin-XXXXXXX" to "blog-admin" for the invisible thing to become visible to you again.

Editing comments?

Unfortunately, doing those tweaks still won't let you edit comments in New Blogger. You could do it in Old Blogger due to a trick which Kirk discovered and I'd previously blogged. But Blogger seem to have closed that loophole. My New Blogger comments wishlist includes the ability to edit comments, but I doubt they'll introduce it. If anyone figures out how to edit comments in New Blogger, let me know!

Fixing and tweaking blog feeds

This isn't a template thing, it's a New Blogger thing. Two points:
  • new Blogger feeds by default sort posts by date last updated, not date published, i.e. they will show old posts at the top if you've recently edited them, not just recently-published posts. UPDATE: now Blogger feeds default to sorting by date published, but you can still get a feed that outputs posts last updated, see below.
  • new Blogger allows you to offer readers comment feeds for the whole blog, as well as per-post comment feeds.
Feed - change sorting - by date updated to by date published
UPDATE: I've left the text below for historical reasons, but since late June 2007 Blogger feeds have reverted to being sorted by most recently published new posts. If you want to get the "most recently edited" feed, you still can - just use this URL:
http://YOURBLOG.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?orderby=updated
or
http://YOURCUSTOMDOMAINNAME.com/feeds/posts/default?orderby=updated
or
http://www.blogger.com/feeds/YOURBLOGID/posts/default?orderby=updated

Because new Blogger feeds by default deliberately show most recently updated (including edited) posts at the top, if you've changed an old post and republished it, it'll suddenly pop up at the top of your new Blogger feed list (which makes me wonder if it's possible to use this feature deliberately to get old posts' tag picked up by services such as Technorati which base their indexing on feeds, but that's for another day and another test...).

Most people who subscribe to feeds aren't used to that kind of sorting, and many find it confusing or just don't want it. If you wondered why your feed display changed after your move to New Blogger or have had complaints from your readers that your feeds had gone funny, well as they say it's not a problem, it's a feature. Luckily, as Kirk spotted from a post by Pirate Pete, it's now possible to change feeds back to the way they were on old Blogger. (It would be most helpful if Blogger changed things so that the more usual way of sorting feeds becomes the default, but gave people the ability to sort by last updated if they wanted to.)

How can you update your feed URL? As Kirk points out, all you need to do is change the URL of the feed you offer to your readers to this format:
http://YOURBLOG.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?orderby=published
or if you publish by FTP (probably too if you have a custom domain),
http://www.blogger.com/feeds/YOURBLOGID/posts/default?orderby=published
(of course first changing YOURBLOG.blogspot.com to your own blog's URL or YOURBLOGID to your own blog's ID number - which you can find by viewing the source of your blog's webpage, it'll be blogID=somenumber near the top of the page, just search for it)

Same with the feed URL you give to Feedburner to burn (I offer several Feedburner feeds so for each of them I had to go to "Edit Feed Details" then tweak URL in the "Original Feed" box for each of them, see the bit highlighted blue in the example below, which is the key bit):

Comments feeds
Feeds are available on New Blogger (but not old Blogger blogs) for:
  • all comments made on any posts, old or new, on your blog
  • all comments made on a particular post.
If like me you have a classic template after the switch and you haven't risked the Customise Design tab yet, you can still give your readers the ability to subscribe for your comment feed or per-post comment feed.

There's Blogger help on how to offer the new types of feeds on your classic template blog after you switch, but I didn't find it easy to follow at first, so here's my take on it.

First, decide if you want to let people subscribe to your blog feed, comments feed or both. Go to your Dashboard Settings - Site feed sub-tab, switch to Advanced mode, and you can set each of those feeds to Full, Short or None.

To produce links to subscribe to your blog feed, comments feed or both (if you've set something to None then of course there won't be a subscription link), go to your template and in the location where you want the links to appear, e.g. your sidebar, copy and paste this code:
<p id="blogfeeds"><$BlogFeedsVertical$></p>
(you can change Vertical to Horizontal if you want the links to appear e.g. at the bottom of posts, again positioning the code appropriately).

Now my blog is set to output a full blog comment feed, but that code didn't produce the comment feed link, only the main blog feed link. It's broken for others too though oddly it's not in the official known issues list that I can see.

So the first lesson is, don't bother using the <$BlogFeedsVertical$> tag if you want to offer a comment feed. Best use the URL of your comment feed direct in your blog template (or burn that URL on Feedburner then use the burned feed), as I've done in my sidebar.

What's the URL of a New Blogger comment feed? There are two options, either will work:
http://YOURBLOG.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default
or if you use FTP (probably too if you have a custom domain),
http://www2.blogger.com/feeds/YOURBLOGID/comments/default
Personally, I just burned a full comment feed on Feedburner and then used that as a quick & dirty temporary measure, adding this to my sidebar (and a variation on it to the bottom of each of my posts on the main page and item pages or post pages):
<a href="http://COMMENTSFEEDURL">Subscribe to comments feed</a>
For per post comment feeds, the Blogger code did work to make the text "Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]" appear in my blog, with the "Atom" being a link to the comment feed, so again for speed I just pasted that code into my template at the appropriate locations:
<p id="postfeeds"><$BlogItemFeedLinks$></p>
athough the code given by Blogger made the link appear in a new paragraph so I changed it to a span instead, just personal preference:
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I could have tailored the wording if I didn't want "Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]" by using the code for the direct link to the per-post comments feed (which I won't give here) but I won't bother at this stage as I'll do that as and when I switch to layouts, it'll do for now.

(For those who want to customise per comment links, there's a helpful list of Blogger Beta feed URLs over at PurpleMoggy's. Personally I think it's best to change references to "beta" to "www2", even though "beta" currently still works.)

Update: reinstall Greasemonkey scripts?

Odd this. I just noticed that while my Technorati tagger userscript and large post editor script still work (both with a little tweaking), and the template editor enlarger for New Blogger is fine, the other Greasemonkey script I consider essential for Blogger, namely the "keep current time on draft posts" script (which had worked on test New Blogger blogs that I tried), seems to have stopped working.

However when I reinstalled that script, it was fine, the tickbox reappeared in my post editor (I didn't have to even uninstall the existing one and it still worked, though I'd recommend uninstalling it first to avoid confusion).

Future template upgrade...

As my blog still uses what they call a "classic" template, of course I don't get the benefit of the whizzy new layouts stuff. So I'll be getting all widgety with my migrated template as soon as I can, but not quite yet.

I'm still working through a long list of things to post about, comments to answer, etc so at the moment I haven't got the strength or energy to tackle all the changes needed to make my customisations work on New Blogger, even though someone else (ahem Kirk of course, sweet chap that he is, with the patience of a saint etc) is doing the really heavy lifting on that. Someday... but probably only the latest time that I can get away with it, just like my move to New Blogger itself!