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• Launch Leech and the History of WMV

  14 septembre 2010, par Multimedia Mike — General

  I was combing through my programming archives again and came across an old Perl script called launch-leech.pl. This was a private script I used to maintain for the benefit of myself and a few friends. See, there was this site called Launch.com (URL doesn’t seem to do anything as of this writing but here’s the Wikipedia page). Purchased by Yahoo ! in 2001, Launch still maintained their independent branding. They also carried a lot of music videos, of which I am a huge junkie. launch-leech.pl was the tool I used to download the videos. This was particularly useful since I stubbornly clung to dialup internet access until mid-2004 and it would have been impossible to stream video at any decent quality (though there were 56k streams, so like I said– not possible at any decent quality).

  
  
  

  Technically
  I followed Launch.com for many years. To be honest, I only “followed” in that I figured out where their “latest videos” URL lived and regularly polled it. Each video had either a 6-, 7-, or 8-digit unique ID that could be plugged into the launch-leech.pl script which would then have a conversation with the relevant servers, determine the correct streaming URL with the highest quality, then download and save the URL by handing it off to an external program (first ASFRecorder, though I later switched to mmsclient).

  At one point, I even wrote a crawler that compiled an offline database of all the videos, their IDs and their metadata. I never thought of anything interesting to do with it, though.

  
  
  

  Windows Media Legacy
  During these glory days of leeching, Launch.com streamed using Windows Media. I admit, it’s a bit of a blur now — the site might have used Real or QuickTime, but I was obviously most in tune with the WM side. I remember when I first found the site circa 2000-2001, the videos were in MS MPEG-4v3, and the high quality bitrate was 300 kbits/sec. Eventually, Launch.com would stream WMV7, WMV8, and finally WMV9, with bitrates up to 700 kbits/sec. However, they never broke free of the 320×240 encoding resolution, which was frustrating. When I wasn’t able to notice any substantial difference between 300 and 700 kbits/sec, I felt it might be time to put those extra bits to work on a resolution upgrade.

  At least they were nice enough to re-encode a number of old videos using better codecs and bitrates with each revision, thus prompting me to scan through the site collecting updated video IDs for download.

  
  
  

  Epilogue
  I don’t clearly remember when I stopped visiting Launch.com. Video-wise, the web has been a blur of Flash video ever since about 2006. Meanwhile, I spent a lot of time collecting a bunch of music videos in the first half of the decade only to find that pretty much every version of every music video made since the dawn of time is available on demand thanks to YouTube. I have found that this phenomenon manifests in many areas as internet technology marches on.

  The Real Entertainment
  The launch-leech.pl tool represents a recurring pattern for me. I derive as much — if not more — entertainment from creating programs like launch-leech.pl (and implicitly reverse engineering something in the process ; in this case, a website) as I do from the intended entertainment media itself. I seem to have this issue a lot with games, too.

  Is this an issue for anyone else ? Am I the only one who would rather play with the box that a shiny toy comes packaged in ?

• Is it possible to pull a RTMP stream from one server and broadcast it to another ?

  16 août 2012, par TK Kocheran

  I essentially have a situation where I need to pull a stream from one Wowza media server and publish it to a Red5 or Flash Media Server instance with FFMPEG. Is there a command to do this ? I'm essentially looking for something like this :

  while [ true ]; do 
  
      ffmpeg -i rtmp://localhost:2000/vod/streamName.flv rtmp://localhost:1935/live/streamName
  
  done

  Is this currently possible from FFMPEG ? I remembered reading something like this, but I can't remember how exactly to do it.

• Museum of Multimedia Software, Part 1

  14 août 2010, par Multimedia Mike — Software Museum

  Many years ago, I found a boneyard of old software, much of it related to the creation and processing of multimedia. I was permitted to liberate anything of my choosing from this cache. This is the same pile where I found this Apple QuickTime format spec as well as this perfect form factor floppy disc box. So I have been sitting on the stuff for awhile.

  I thought I might get the chance to study it a bit more closely one day. But now I’m interested in getting rid of it. Before I do, it’s more or less traditional for me to photograph it and post it on one blog or another. Also, if you know of any software collection groups who would be interested in taking this stuff off my hands, do let me know.

  As usual, click a picture for a much larger image.

  Paracomp FilmMaker
  This is easily the most distinctive piece in this collection and it’s easy to see why— the software is packaged in a film cannister. Still sealed, and I don’t have a good reason to open it now.

  
  
  

  "The Professional Animation/Presentation Program for the Macintosh." No copyright date on the packaging, though the front does mention a 1990 award. System requirements : Mac OS 6.0.5, 5 MB RAM, 32-bit QuickDraw, math coprocessor.

  Strata VideoShop
  Version 4.5 (and not for resale), still shrink-wrapped. "The Digital Video Editor for Creative Professionals."

  
  
  

  System requirements : PowerMac with 5 MB RAM (8 MB recommended), Mac OS 7.5.

  BeatWare e-Picture
  "The Professional’s Choice for Designing Animated Web Graphics." Claims a best of show award for 1999 MacWorld New York Expo.

  
  
  

  System requirements : PowerMac with Mac OS 8, 32MB RAM, 10 MB of HD space and a 256-color adapter.

  BeatWare eZ-Motion
  Another offering from BeatWare. "The fastest and easiest way to create animations and graphics for the Web."

  
  
  

  This one is for either Mac or Windows. 32 MB RAM and 25 MB HD space required. Works with Mac OS 8.5, 8.6, or 9.0, or Windows 98, NT, or 2000.

  Much more to come...