Some Simple Thoughts

The idea:
I have been seeing an increase in the number of video podcasts of class lectures on campus over the last year, and many people thinking about offering this feature. Many of the folks that I have worked with have decided to target iTunes and iPods, and so they are using H264 or mpeg4 video files. This seems to be working well (at least as far as I can tell) for individuals to access recordings of a class for review, reflection, or replacement for class lectures for individual students.

But what of groups? They could all watch individually, but that does not seem very group-ish. They could gather around a single computer and watch a recording, but the experience is probably bad enough to drive folks away from that. Besides, what we have seen when looking at the use of audio recordings by students, is that they like to access other info on their laptop while the audio track plays. That would be hard to do while sharing a computer with a large(ish) video playing.

One option might be to make the material available in a managed collaborative environment. This (at least my initial vision) would work best in a smaller school that has a central space that its students work in. This could be an informal study area where noise is not a problem, or dedicated study rooms.

Each installation would be equipped with a widescreen TV monitor (preferably with HDMI) and an apple TV. The Apple TV would be configured to sync to a managed computer (Mac or PC). This computer would host all of the content to be synced to the Apple TV (including subscriptions to the Podcasts of the class content, as well as non-class videos, Photos, Music, etc). The photos are usually the source for the screensaver on the system, so a little self promotion and info sharing might be possible here. Groups of students would end up with an easy and reliable place to go to view the content that is directly related to their course work.

The good:
The system is a closed system. Maintenance should be minimal for the client side. The “host” system would still have to be maintained, but that should be no problem for a group able to produce podcast content.

The system is simple. It does what it does, and little else. Students should not get confused, and no one should be tempted to try to make the system do more than it is designed to do (feature requests from faculty should be easy to deflect).

The current time between the end of a lecture and its publication in the automated systems I have seen is reasonable. Within an hour of a class ending, the content might be deployed to the apple TV(s) linked to a system.

The content would not have to be specially produced or published to update these client stations. They would just feed off of the already existent podcasting of the media.

The ability to produce and publish “extra” content on the system could be an interesting feature.

The bad:
The system is a closed system. As new features are added, controlling them may be hard. Some new feature could be unexpectedly disruptive to a space. Security issues could be hard to deal with.

The system is simple. Adding custom features (a news board for a screensaver) is not going to happen unless Apple provides it (or you want to do things that might really make the maintenance complex).

File type support is very limited.

Some faculty may not want their content shared in this way, and that may generate support questions from students that do what the content available this way. The control of what content gets pushed to the apple TV is fully controllable via the host computer, so any mix of data could be synced with the apple TV, but there is NO user authentication required before the content is viewed.

Some decision points:
Is Apple TV the right thing for this? I have no idea. There are other media streaming devices showing up these days. The XBox360 is being used for this purpose in many homes. Netgear has a solution. A full media friendly system could be used. I went to the apple solution in this initial thought-dump due to is easy configuration and navigation (it does not do anything else, so it is always ready to play back video) and its integration with what I am seeing as the most common target of class podcasts (iTunes).

Audio quality? You could either go with focused localized audio to minimized disruption to others in the space (like the art installs with audio we see in libraries), or you could go with a great audio configuration and possibly allow students use the system to listen to music while studying as well as the lecture content.

What about students sharing from their laptops? I have not been able to find good info yet about how the security of “who can be a source” is controlled. Right now, only 5 computers can be configured at a time as “streaming sources” but I don’t know if we could block that if we wished (ie use up all 5 streaming sources) or if we could allow sudents to bring their laptops over and stream their content and not end up in a state where all 5 slots are used and it is hard to recover. It is also unclear if a student could “take over” the Apple TV and synch their own data to the system, thereby removing the content we would want to have on it.

I had another little solution shown to me for a problem I have seen a few times.

The issue is that some browsers (most) do not show the embedded media files as linked items. This makes sense, as most browsers do not tout themselves as being RSS readers without some sort of plugins being installed. Firefox is the most common of them.

But people like to go to URLs with browsers, and as our studies have show, many folks like to listen/watch the content directly in the browser rather than subscribing to it in an RSS aggregator like iTunes. I was lucky enough to be working with the smart folks over in the Law school when this came up during some testing, and they were able to come up with what looks like the simple answer to this problem. So I thought I would share.

If you create a podcast that uses only the required info, then each of the items you list would look like this:

<item>                                                                             
<title>Episode 1</title>                                                           
<enclosure url="http://PathToPodcast/episode1.mp3" length="643565"                 
type="audio/mpeg"/>                                                                
</item>

Such an item will work fine to add content to iTunes, Safari, and other RSS aggregators, but FireFox will just list out the title, but not any links. But we can get around that by putting in a line that adds a browser type link as well, pointing to the same content. So the browser friendly version of the same item would be:

http://PathToPodcast/episode1.mp3

I have run into this problem a few times when dealing with podcasts, so I thought that I would jot down this solution to save myself from having to track down the details again.

Most web servers and browsers are reasonably good at knowing what an MP3 file is, and doing the right thing with them (typically this is to hand them off to a media play inside the browser).

But podcasting is starting to use other formats, either more efficient audio formats, or file types that support video. The list will grow from there. Many web servers and browsers are not as good at dealing with these new file formats as they were with MP3s. The most common of these new file formats that I have seen problems with are the .m4a, .m4v, and .mp4 files.

If a web server does not know about a file type, it will typically “give” the file to the browser, and tell the browser that the file type is whatever the server has listed as its “default” file type. That is usually “text”. Most browsers will then look at the file (usually the file extension on the file) and choose what to do with the file. In short, most browsers seem to ignore the mimetype that the server has given it. But not all browsers do this. Some browsers actually treat the file as they were told to by the server (the apple provided browser Safari is the most common example that I have seen). So what happens when you have a big movie file, and you tell the browser to open it as text? The browser does just that. You get a really really really long page of text that takes a long time to open.

So to avoid this, we need to teach our web servers about all of the file types that we are hosting. If the web server is an Apache web server, you should update the main configuration file to support these files if you want them to be global or edit a file called “.htaccess” in your websites directory if you do not have system configuration control or you want the file types to only be supported on some pages. If you are creating or editing a “.htaccess” file, you would want to add text of this format:

AddType audio/mp4 .m4a
AddType video/mp4 .mp4
AddType video/mp4 .mpv

If you are dealing with an IIS server, you would go through the following steps (support for the .mp4 file type is listed for this example)

1) Select the site to configure in IIS, right click and select “Properties”
2) Under HTTP Headers Tab, select “File Types” under the MIME Map section
and select “New Type”
3) Type “.mp4″ as the associated extension and “video/mp4″ as the
content type.
4) Click “OK”

That should resolve the problem.

Every year I get one of those little things in the mail from the Social Security Office that tell me how much money I will get if I keep working until I am 72. It has lots of little factoids in it, and it lists out how much taxable income I have earned since the dawn of time. My wife gets these as well. We all do. So this year I happened to have my computer handy when these things came in, and I thought I would push the numbers around a little and see what I could get. The really interesting thing, for me was looking at the “Purchasing Power” I had each year, rather than just the raw dollar amount. The dollar just does not go as far today as it did when I started working more than a few years ago. And who does not want a bit pile of graphs when they are thinking about this sort of thing?

I thought others might like to take a look at their earning power over the years as well, so I cleaned up the spreadsheet I had made, and provide it here for anyone to download.

If anyone has suggestions about how to make this better, or other graphs to generate from the data, I hope you drop me a line.