Practical Approach to Live Streaming

Pro AV Magazine has a reasonably good instructional guide on live streaming, created by the guys at Viewcast, who make the popular Osprey video capture cards. While framed around a live webcast done in 2001 and using ISDN for connectivity, most other information contained in the article is contemporary.

Directory of Web TV Channels

Gartner has profiled MeeVee, a company which provides an online TV listings service. MeeVee listings put video content delivered via the Web on the same footing as traditional network content. Described as 'the future of television' this announcement is one of many to highlight the emergence of narrowcast webTV as a business in its own right.

Authoring with DVD Architect

I found an excellent guide to authoring DVDs using the software that comes with Vegas - DVD Architect. A couple of notes that I could add:

• You can remove the menu entirely if you simply want your video content to play when the disc is inserted. Do this by moving your MPEG2 video file to the base entry in the project overview panel, and deleting the menu folder from the project.
• If your video file is larger than 4.7GB (around 60 minutes) you can reduce the size by letting the software re-encode your video at a lower rate. Do this by selecting 'Optimise DVD' and on the video tab, enable recompression, and set 'fit to disc'. The re-encoding takes time, and reduces quality, but if the video is shorter than 90 minutes or so, the result is quite acceptable.

Migration

Migrated the blog from Blogger 1.0 to Google's Blogger 2.0.