We’ve now blocked USTREAM altogether: it’s just not worth the risk.

I’ll settle for the herky-jerky version of the Michelle show.

Pirillo is making the best use of ustream’s tiny space and bandwidth limitations that I’ve seen. How he’s getting all those graphics up there and that they’re legible is nearly a miracle. Thanks for linking the tutorial–I hadn’t seen that. He’s making some hard points about Mac vs PC that we might find problematic since I have all PCs around here. The boss does have a Mac though. He just said in the tutorial that Windows users are “out of luck.” Sigh.

My bad for coming down on you. We get a lot of trolls and actual jerks who pop us for all kinds of things, and I mistook you for one of them. And I get a little twitchy when I’m publicly testing something like this and not getting the results that we want. It’s more than a tad embarrassing to look at what we’re putting out and knowing that it’s not up to par even though it’s an experiment for us. The clunky bug was one of about half a dozen things that need some work.

Well, when you say “I think you need to learn a little more about the compression process” it comes off a little bit pushy and insulting.

I certainly didn’t intend it that way, but who am I to complain about having people misinterpret my intent — at least I don’t have Media Matters telling outright lies against me.

You had commented on how much you appreciated feedback, so I offered it. The chat room was closed by the time I saw this (Hint: Give us some advance warning so we know to tune in live).

Bryan, the stuff you’ve been producing on this site has been top-notch, particularly given the constraints YouTube etc. put on you. For an amateur like me to go into a detailed discussion of how rasterizing an image at one size, then resizing it as part of the compression process, causes blockiness, would have come off as arrogant as all hell. So I assumed you knew what I was getting at, that you’d only been playing with ustream for a short while and hadn’t figured out all the details yet.

Strangely, the moving flag didn’t seem to have the problem. Animated graphics usually get away with carrying a lot less information per frame than stills, so maybe they don’t need to be compressed so much.

Nor do the rotating ads in the LL corner of the tutorial their guru Chris Pirillo did. To my eye, it looks like he may have done some deliberate blur filtering to tone down contrast, making them a bit fuzzy. I think that’s a bit better than chunky, but he may have gone too far with it. There might be a happy medium in there somewhere.

The Monster on October 2, 2007 at 3:35 PM

Well, when you say “I think you need to learn a little more about the compression process” it comes off a little bit pushy and insulting. I’ve been compressing video for the web for quite a while going back to the years I worked for NASA, but ustream limits one’s options. It’s not as though I can tell it “Quicktime H.264 768k stereo 22kHz 24 fps” or what have you and get exactly what I want. You get a frame rate and a bit rate and that’s about it, the choices there are limited, and they compress their streams even more than YouTube compresses its movies. Quite a bit more, which accounts for the blockiness that you see all over the place in every stream. Ustream is evidently overlaying their own graphics downstream from the compression via the Flash player similarly to the way YouTube does (and if you notice, YouTube’s bugs look clean while the video they serve up looks like you’re viewing it through dirty cellophane half the time). Flash allows for that, and Flash is their platform, but it doesn’t help us get our bug to look better since we’re laying that in on the front end with our outgoing stream. Comparing our compressed bug to their pre-loaded bug isn’t really a fair comparison because they’re not being delivered in the same way. That’s not say that ours can’t look better. I’m sure it can with some tweaking in Photoshop.

Thank you for your suggestion.

Where in Texas are you from btw?

If you have constructive suggestions, send them in.

I did. It was on topic, didn’t use inappropriate language, or even comment on anyone’s sexual desirability.

There’s obviously something UStream is doing to your video to chunkify the bug, but their own logo in the top right corner looks just beautiful. They have the advantage of perfect knowledge of their own compression methods, while they apparently treat you like a mushroom.

I thought I was on hotair.com, not some left-wing echolocation chamber where any deviation from the Party Line gets bitchslapped instantly.

(I have an email address too, you know.)

The Monster on October 2, 2007 at 2:53 PM

I have an email address. If you have constructive suggestions, send them in. If you just want to be a jerk from the peanut gallery, buzz off.

- The Cat

Bryan how about 5 min review of BSG when its back on?

Also Japanese tv Bryan were you ever a contestant on Spiketv’s MXC?

So much better, Get Bryan more umbilical (Fireware) cord so both of you could be well centered. OK Bryan, how bout Near or Ginger Beer.

Also, when are you on the air officially. In Hawaii, where you are 6 hours behind us. But you are becoming more and more popular as I show the local Asian community that if they work hard and have their mind in the right place they to can make a difference.

Also, I am sure evolution will have you competing with ‘Red Eye’.

Stream on

When you promote the next UStream session, to minimize trolls p’raps you could email registered Hotair & MM users a day in advance.

Jaynie59 on October 2, 2007 at 6:47 AM

what do you mean , how many of you east coasters would wake up at 330 am just to catch Michele on F&F? After watching red eye before going to bed.

The 6est/9pst is great

I know. I know. Free show. Free advice. Ya get what ya pay for….

Thanks for playing.

Don’t waste your time. I work for a nationwide company and for more than 2 years now I’ve been trying to placate people on the West Coast who bitch and moan about online meetings and conference calls based on East Coast time. Nothing I do ever makes them happy. They are more than happy to let me and my East Coast colleagues work through our lunch hour and stay late for them, but they’re never willing to come in early or work through their lunch hour to make these meetings.

“3PM Eastern is lunch time! Can’t you make it 4PM?” Um, sure. I’ll just tell the people who work until 4PM they have to stay late for you.

You’ll never make them happy.

I love the show, but please consider the folks in the Pacific Time zone when you plan your schedules. Maybe you can use several standard time slots to give everybody a chance.

Won’t be very convenient for you guys though…. oh well sometimes success is a pain….

Musically speaking.

Bryan on October 2, 2007 at 12:50 AM

Thanks for the clarification. I was worried for a minute ….

Ali-Bubba on October 2, 2007 at 12:47 AM

Musically speaking.