The XML 2003 conference was the first I've attended with an iSight camera, and with a plan to use it. Part one of the plan was to try bouncing a live stream off my home server, just as a test, but I was too busy to try that. Part two was to use video quotes in the blog entries I posted. This worked fairly well, though in the future I'll want a more time-efficient tool for capturing clips than QuickTime Pro.
As an aside, I had a bit of fun the morning of my keynote. At 7:30AM I looked out my hotel window and saw the lights coming on at Citizens Bank across the street. Watching the bankers boot up their PCs, I got to thinking about how XML is probably transforming their infrastructure, but not yet their desktops. So I took a two-minute movie and made it my first slide. Later, while demonstrating an XPath search of my slideset, my canned query -- which had originally been intended to find a reference to Apple's Knowledge Navigator video on one of the slides -- also (of course) found my opening clip. Which immediately began to play, right there in the dynamically-generated search results on the current slide. OK, OK, I'm easily amused. But it was an unexpectedly cool bit of behavior.
With regard to my ongoing media-deep-linking issue, I haven't seen evidence of either streaming or downloadable content at the conference. So, there's nothing to deep-link into. However I did see this entry from Larry Bouthillier, with pointers to some documentation that's been extremely hard for me to find. So, for future reference, here's an incantation for Windows Media:
<!-- This is an .asx file with starttime, duration and title elements --> <asx version="3.0"> <title>My Video Title</title> <entry> <ref href="mms://myserver.com/path_to_movie/myfile.wma" /> <starttime value="00:05:00" /> <duration value="00:03:00" /> </entry> </asx>[streamingmedia.com : business - technology - content]
Elsewhere, Larry notes with regard to QuickTime Media Links:
Notably absent are the starttime and endtime options, a disappointing omission. A full list of the options and values supported in the .qtl file's embed tag is available from Apple's QuickTime Media Link Documentation
Part three of the experiment was to use the iSight for personal notetaking. This was incredibly useful. At one point, for example, I interviewed IBM's Richard Thompson about WSRP, so I turned on the camera and let it take notes for me. Ditto for a couple of sessions. I'll probably wipe most of this stuff next week, but it's nice to know it's available in case I want to check something. Of course, were random-access streams just available to conference-goers, that'd be even better.
Suppose I had streamed sessions live, by bouncing them off my home server? It's not clear that IDEAlliance would be thrilled by that. And what should I (or can I) do with the 100MB QuickTime movie of Adam Bosworth's keynote that's parked here on my disk? I'm sure the two-minute clip I posted would be considered fair use. I doubt that the whole 45-minute movie would be. Interesting times!
Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2003/12/12.html#a867