My BonzoBox homepage.

You can store a custom title, description, and tags for every site you save.

About a year ago I was contracted to build a homepage that used screenshots of websites to link to the sites, had drag & drop to move the sites around, and was easy to use. Marcos Cantoni of Visual Dreams Interactive did the great design work, and I did the coding. Fast forward a year and BonzoBox has come a long way - it is a social website built around the sharing of websites. I am now a partner in the site, (and the CTO), and we are making it even greater!

BonzoBox brought my AJAX skills to a whole new level. It features drag & drop, ajax forms, tagging, dragging items out of flash movies, inbox widgets, and more, with more in the pipe. I also used a Javascript Library for the first time - I chose DOMAssistant because of its light weight and modular structure, and am extremely happy with it.

BonzoBox is currently in public beta and I encourage you to go Sign Up and try it out.

Goodbye to the old Summer Fun theme!

After over two years it is time to say goodbye to the old “Summer Fun” theme.

This new theme has been created in my spare time over the past couple of months. It is designed to highlight what I post. The sidebar, footer, and metadata all fade away unless they’re moused over, there is lots of white space, and with the introduction of ClearType I have updated the fonts to be more like a printed book. The new theme also uses no images!

There will, of course, be some tweaks to be made over the next while as I get some feedback, but for now, enjoy!

4RoadService.com home page after the re-design.

New search results on 4RoadService.com

Quite some time ago I was engaged to update some information in a database and increase the speed when searching the database. This small job bloomed into a lasting business relationship and a full re-design and modernization of the breakdown directory 4RoadService.com.

The redesign brought 4RoadService.com from a legacy-style table-based layout to a modern, semantic, layout using the latest web standards. At the same time I updated the data structure to further improve the site performance, updated the account system and more. To top it off, I added some AJAX scripting to make everything feel snappy.

A year after the launch of the new design 4RoadService.com continues to grow, and even more features are planned for the next weeks and months.

I wrote about Akoha about a week and a half ago after I went to their party.  I’ve been trying it out since then and I’m impressed.  I still can’t really say much more though.

DropBox is a dead-simple file synchronization service.  There’s a small client program that runs in the background and keeps your “Dropbox” - a folder you designate, synced with other computers linked to your account.  You can also share synced folders within your Dropbox with other people, making a super easy way for everyone in a team to have the latest version of everything.

I highly recommend checking out the presentations by both Akoha and DropBox this week.  DropBox is tomorrow, sometime between 3:45 and 5:00 PM, (I think they’re last in the session), and Akoha is Wednesday, sometime between 10:30 and 11:45 AM, (it looks like they’re second).  All times Pacific.

The Akoha folks really know how to put on a party and get a group of people excited about their product.  I’m excited.

I will write more later, when I’m allowed, and have used it for a while.  For now, pay attention, and if you have the opportunity to try it out for yourself then give it a shot.

The judgement states the ad was banned because the statement that “all the parts of the internet are on the iPhone” was deemed misleading because the iPhone does “not support Flash or Java, both integral to many web pages.”

This judgement hightlights the fact that regulators don’t often truly understand the internet, even if they are sometimes required to regulate it.  If we take the ASA’s ruling at face value then nobody can advertise any computer as being able to access “all the parts of the internet” since most computers ship without Flash or Java plugins installed.   To take that arguement even further, since most computers that are sold run Windows, and windows comes with Internet Explorer, and IE, in it’s current form, is not 100% standards-compliant, so all of the Internet is not available computers either, at least not out of the box.

Granted, the iPhone is much more difficult to add a Flash or Java plugin to, (I believe it is impossible right now), but governments and regulators seem to pass strange, mis-informed judgements sometimes.  On the other hand, we’re really wanting some regulation when it comes to net neutrality.

LeDernierContinentLeFilm.com

The problem is that most IP cameras are not made for streaming live, full-motion, events to the web.  They’re made for surveillance at 11 FPS in Motion JPEG format, (that’s just a bunch of JPEG images coming one after another).  This is obviously not ideal from a bandwidth perspective at all.  The cameras that our project uses are Axis 207 and 210 cameras.  These cameras are capable of streaming MPEG-4 video, and when you look at the video in a web browser it looks pretty good.  When I first saw that, I was excited - I could just stream into a Flash media server, (We’re using Wowza Media Server Pro at the moment), and that would send everything off to the player, right?  Wrong.

It turns out that most, if not all, Axis products stream in MPEG4-ES, which flash cannot understand, and therefore our server rejects.  I had to find a way to change MP4V-ES to h.264.

The obvious solution to transcoding the video stream from MP4V-ES to h.264 is VLC.  While it looks like a media player that can handle a lot of formats, under the surface lies a powerful, command-line based, transcoding and streaming program.  I discovered that, in theory, I should be able to issue one command to VLC and have it receive the MPEG4-ES stream from the camera, transcode it to h.264, and stream it to the Wowza, which would handle the rest.

I started by opening a file, transcoding it to h.264, and streaming it to Wowza:

vlc -vvv /path/to/file/Extremists.m4v --sout "#transcode{venc=x264,vcodec=x264,vb=500,scale=1,acodec=mp4a,ab=32,channels=2,samplerate=22100}:rtp{dst=SERVER-IP-ADDRESS,sdp=file:///path/to/wowza/content/myStream.sdp}"

It was a little rough, as the testing server doesn’t have a lot of processing power, but it worked.  Awesome.  Now I just have to hook it up to the stream from the camera, right?

I added the camera as the source and removed the sound:

vlc -vvv rtsp://camera-ip-address:554/mpeg4/1/media.amp --no-sout-audio --sout "#transcode{venc=x264,vcodec=x264,vb=200,scale=1}:rtp{dst=SERVER-IP-ADDRESS,sdp=file:///absolute/path/to/wowza/content/myStream.sdp}"

With Wowza already running on the server, I typed that in to terminal, and it started to look good.  Then PAF! I get this error:

[00000385] access_output_udp private debug: mmh, hole (147841635484807 > 2s) -> drop

VLC seems to think that a frame, or some piece of information has been delayed 147841635484807 seconds.  I highly doubt that, but VLC is convinced.  Try as I might, I was not able to get VLC to realize that the frame, (or whatever bit of info), was simply missing a timestamp or something.

So, I figured I would debug just the connection to the camera.  I opened a VNC session, and ran this:

vlc -vvv rtsp://camera-ip-address:554/mpeg4/1/media.amp

To see if I could view the video.  I could, so I tried saving it to a file:

vlc -vvv rtsp://CAMERA-IP-ADDRESS:554/mpeg4/media.amp --no-drop-late-frames --no-sout-audio --sout "#std{mux=ts,access=file,dst=/tmp/camstream.m4v}"

This worked also.  It appears that the problem only occurs when I am trying to open, transcode, and send out the stream all at once.

I realized, if I can transcode from a file and stream, and if I can capture a stream and save it to a file, I should be able to do both at the same time.  It works!  The steps are, make the pipe:

mkpipe /tmp/vpipe

Then capture the stream and save it to the pipe:

vlc -vvv rtsp://CAMERA-IP-ADDRESS:554/mpeg4/media.amp --no-drop-late-frames --no-sout-audio --sout "#std{mux=ts,access=file,dst=/tmp/vpipe}"

And finally read from the pipe, transcode, and stream to the flash server:

vlc -vvv /tmp/vpipe --no-sout-audio --sout "#transcode{venc=x264,vcodec=x264,vb=500,scale=1}:rtp{dst=SERVER-IP-ADDRESS,sdp=file:///path/to/wowza/content/myStream.sdp}"

Shazam!

There are a couple of caveats, though:

• This sucks major processing horsepower.  Make sure you’ve got enough
• To make a stream work this way you have to have 2 copies of VLC running, plus your flash server.  That’s a lot of parts that could have a problem

Because of these caveats, I am still looking for an alternate solution, and may stream MPEG-4 to browsers until Axis has its h.264 products ready later this year.

Yesterday, I did find a second possible solution.  Instead of using the first instance of VLC to capture the stream, it is sometimes possible to use Darwin Streaming Server to capture the stream, then use 1 instance of VLC to transcode it. This seems to use much less processing power, but is not 100% reliable either.