Charbax at the IFA show
p2p news / p2pnet:- BMG of Sony BMG fame recently unloaded GNAB, an alleged p2p application from its Arvato subsidiary.
BMG was, we’re sure you’ll recall, the first company to try it on with Napster once the latter had been suitably buried by Big Music. It failed dismally. These days Roxio aka Napster is still trying, sinking millions of (investor) dollars into the project for very little return. But, “"There is no relation between GNAB and Napster,” Arvato spokesman Gernot Wolf is quoted as saying. “Not a single line of Napster code was used while developing GNAB."
Oh. That’s OK then. Apparently, GNAB combines centralized and decentralized downloads, a marriage which "opens new possibilities for the delivery and protection of content".
Fantastic.
Anyhow, this morning we heard from Charbax who’d just returned from the IFA consumer electronic show in Berlin where he’d come across GNAB. And not only but also, he got some footage of it in action …
… together with a ton (sorry, tonne ; ) of other stuff which, lumped together, means you didn’t have to be at the show to get a taste.
Charbax is studying at the multimedia school in Copenhagen, Denmark, and, “I did my first videos from consumer electronics at cebit which somehow was posted on the slashdot and so thousands of people were downloading which made the torrents very fast at http://cebit.150.dk,” he told us.
“So that made me look for the videocoverage.org domain because I wouldn’t mind traveling to more cool events to simply film those events to report back using DivX and bittorrents.”
Which is exactly what he did at the IFA show, and you can see the results here.
We asked Charbax how he’d managed to accompish this, and here’s what he said:
Actually I have spent 3 days now working to release theese videos since I’m back from IFA. I filmed these videos during the 2nd and 3rd September, the first two days of the IFA.
- I filmed with my new HDR-HC1 sony high definition 1080i camera
- captured from the HDV tape using freeware CapDVHS program, to a program stream mpeg-2.
- I can open that 1080i mpeg-2 file directly in VirtualDubMod
- encode to 720p using DivX6, Extreme encoding mode (less than 2fps on a 3ghz), b-frames, 3908kbit/s, de-interlace and resize filters of DivX6 Pro. The encoding of the 3 hours of video took more than 24 hours using 4 computers (1,8ghz, 2,6ghz, 2,8ghz and 3,2ghz) !
- encode sound to 192kbit/s mp3, on those recordings which had too high microphone level (there are a couple of theese, when I was using the external pre-amplified microphone), I processed the wav file in Nero Wav Editor using the DeClicker enhancement and sometimes the noise reduction enhancement also, and adjusted the volume sometimes slightly.
- Then I built a .php file which can display Torrent status for each torrent, using the code from the Broadcast Machine http://participatoryculture.org php tracker system. (The php page though seems to not be totally optimized so I just did some cut and paste as it seems to load kind of slowly. But I don’t expect my server to have problems even if many people load it at the same time.)
- publish all the torrents using Broadcast Machine then, adding the different torrents to the RSS feeds for HiDef and StdDef collections of all the videos.
- Now I’m trying to use several adsl and cable internet connections to seed all the videos here in the beginning.
And, "Oh Yeah," he adds, "I edited and one or two videos with the free Trial software Mpeg Video Wizard.
"That software makes 100% quality direct stream copy editing of any Mpeg-2 videos, even 1080i 25mbit/s mpeg-2 which is what the Sony HC1 camera makes. Womble works very smoothly on standard computers, unlike all those expensive HDV editing softwares from Avid, Adobe, Pinnacle, Sony, some of which I tried. They seem to require time consuming intermediary 100mbit/s file, some of them, which I believe might deteriorate the quality a bit. I prefer the 100$ free trial womble mpeg video wizard. It’s very basic, on a timeline, with a few effects, titles, and that’s all I need."
When we were at his page, he was already listing six gigs of videos with Epson and Panasonic still to come.
Really nice job, Charbax, and thanks a lot for sharing the fruits of all your labour with us : )
(That’s him top right. "Look at me standing just next to the World Cup," he says. "Yep the real FIFA world cup in the Philips hall.")
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See:-
alleged p2p application – New (and phony) BMG p2p app, June 2, 2004
