I had so much fun at last year’s WordCamp that I decided to register for this year’s festivities, which have been expanded to cover 2 days. I’m always on the lookout for ways to improve this blog and the communication it provides, as well new multimedia technology angles.

The first talk of the day — PodCasting — was highly relevant to multimedia, in fact; it was about PodPress, a WordPress plugin that makes PodCasting more ergonomic. The author talked about how much complexity the PodPress plugin currently embodied, which actually confused me a little. To my thinking, the plugin just processes a little bit of a multimedia file in order to find its metadata and knows how to spit out that metadata along with a MIME type via PHP. But I oversimplify. Actually, the demo he gave presented the plugin in its slickness, going so far as to show you, the admin, how your PodCast will actually appear to the users of various services, most prominently iTunes, but also several other PodCasting client programs. Plus, the plugin deals with an impressive array of multimedia files and probably handles lots of idiosyncrasies that arise in various file types.

Next up was a debate regarding Blogging vs. Journalism featuring John C. Dvorak and Om Malik. It was an interesting discussion though I personally didn’t take very much away from it since I don’t care about the blog vs. serious news source distinction for the purpose of this research journal-style blog. One take-away point: Blogs and news sites have very distinct styles and stigmas attached– so, do you want your site to look like a blog or a news site?

It was during this talk that I started thinking… there was a 4.2 earthquake here early yesterday morning. Though it was scarcely notable in the grand scheme of things, if that earthquake had waited about 30 hours to strike — during a bloggers conference — it could have had unprecedented live internet coverage.

After lunch came a wonderfully animated speaker delivering her talk about Kicking Ass Content Connections. She spoke of how last year’s fad was tagging while this year’s fad is relationship building — and proceeded to extol the virtues of the latter. I thought it ironic that she would introduce the topic in that manner as the comparison immediately cast it in a negative light. However, this relationship building notion is something I ponder from time to time as I periodically seek out other blogs that deal with similar interests as this one. I generally find that the few blogs that pertain to the subjects at hand are all hosted right here @ multimedia.cx. But I keep searching, disbelieving that we could be alone in this vast universe called the internet. Another point she made was that even some of the most mundane blogs that record an individual’s tedious day to day activities may, at some time in the distant future, provide archaeologists a clue of what life was like in this day and age. During this discourse, I was reminded of this Onion article: Recently Unearthed E-Mail Reveals What Life Was Like In 1995.

Still, I must say that I admire her for the yeoman’s work she does in her primary role of documenting WordPress.

Next was Blog Monetization, a topic that I still stubbornly refuse to care about. However, a key takeaway point from the speaker was: would you read your blog if it wasn’t your blog? I.e., if someone else wrote the same content as you, would you find it interesting?

Contributing to WordPress was a tag team effort– As for the first speaker, I thought Tobey McGuire’s Peter Parker was delivering a convocation. But I have to give him credit because his pre-written and obviously oft-rehearsed speech worked surprisingly well. This led into the second speaker whose talk sounded incredibly familiar to me– because it’s basically the same speech I gave at LinuxTag last month. That’s because both presentations dealt broadly with how a prospective contributor can get up and running with helping on an open source development effort, so there is much room for similarity. (This also reminds me that I still need to post my presentation from LT’07. Really, I plan to do this, but I would like to properly annotate my slides for the web since the slides themselves provide zero context.)

The presenter for Designing the Obvious needs proper credit for his courage to dump his entire stock presentation the day of the conference and tailor a brand new, virtually slide-less presentation for this specific crowd. I jotted down a lot of ideas for how to improve my blogs based on the ensuing discussions, just as he warned would happen.

The last talk of today was delivered by a big Google guy who discussed benevolent search engine optimization (SEO) strategies. Quite interesting, though common sense stuff, and I didn’t take away much personally. I operate on a slightly different level for this blog in particular– my SEO strategy is to simply write about stuff that no one else on the entire internet writes about. However, this often comes with the caveat that no one else on the entire internet cares about the stuff.

I expect myriad museums on any touring vacation. However, I did not expect to see a highly relevant museum before I even left the country for my trip. At San Francisco International airport, there is a History of Audio museum exhibit sponsored by Dolby in terminal 3. Countless people have to walk by it on their way to and from flights but few people probably ever get a chance to study it (nor do they care, I imagine). Fortunately, I had loads of time to spare and made plenty of notes about things I wanted to look up later.

The exhibit features many artifacts from the history of audio recording. Two artifacts that stand out for the codec nerd are the hardware AC-1 encoder and decoder (2 separate units). AC-1? That’s right, AC-1. We all know of AC-3. The only reference I have ever seen for AC-2 is in the master Microsoft audio codec list (AC-2 has a wave format assignment of 0x0030). This is the first I have ever heard of AC-1. The specific hardware was the Scientific-Atlanta 97085 AC-1 enabled satellite receiver and the Dolby Model DP80 encoder, both from the year 1985.

Perhaps the strangest artifact was the Highway Hi-fi— an in-dash phonograph player that handles 45 RPM records. The exhibit didn’t actually have one of these specimens; the best they could do was an old advertisement featuring Lawrence Welk.

Further along on portable personal entertainment, the exhibit had a Toshiba portable MP3/AAC player claiming to be from the year 1997. This surprised me because I always thought that the Diamond Rio was the first. Perhaps it was only the first in the U.S. and the Toshiba model was available in Japan. There was also a representative sample of the legendary (which must have been their adjective, copied into my notes) Nagra portable.

I saw something called a Cartrivision cassette with a Fisher-Price logo on it, leading me to believe that FP was at one time into consumer electronics. Maybe, maybe not. They might not have actually made them, just branded them.

There were representative samples of gaming systems and games from various epochs. The last gen was well-represented since it’s so recent. Other random games showcased were King Arthur’s World (SNES) as well as 2 TurboGrafx-CD games. I took down the title of one as The Atlas [Atlus?]: Ron Voyage to which I can find no reference on the internet. The other one was Japanese and looked like an SNK fighting game but had a Hudson bee logo.

Getting into the movie side of things, my notes indicate that one of the exhibits had a remarkable replica of a Star Wars Y-Wing starfighter. That sort of thing always stands out for me. It turns out that Apocalypse Now was the first movie in 5.1 surround sound.

Cinema Digital Sound (CDS) was discussed and Dick Tracy was mentioned as the first film to use it.

The exhibit had a laptop with a static screenshot of a piece of software known as Dolby Show Manager. From the look of it, the software is used in digital theaters to schedule the main movie feature as well as commercials, trailers, everything.

Finally, perhaps the most well-specified — yet still mysterious — artifact I encountered was a hard drive that contains the first “DD-Cinema film”. I’m not sure what DD-Cinema is exactly. The HD listed a date of 2004 and had the following specs: “San Jose version, 2.39:1 unsqueezed 1920×803 letterbox, P3 color space, 5.1 surround EX ePCM, encrypted 100 Mbps, packaged for sys 1.0.4”. That’s all I know. It didn’t even indicate what the movie was.

The only other notable bit of multimedia from my trip was at the Beethoven Haus in Bonn, Germany. There is a studio with many specially configured PCs for studying Beethoven’s music. A firefox web browser is the primary vehicle for this. At some points, it would launch an external program for playing RealAudio or MP3 files. What did it use? Why, it’s Media Player Classic, v6.4.8.2. Particularly nifty, though, was being able to follow along with the music on original sheet music showcased through Flash. It all got me to thinking about music notation in the context of information coding theory.

A correspondent who understandably wishes to remain anonymous is perhaps the first to come forth and point out what others have undoubtedly noticed:

Those naughty websites have a knack for posting samples with lots of errors … Maybe it would be easier to have a “clip bin” that’s anonymous, where you can submit clips ..that break the library.

We already do have the anonymous FTP at mplayerhq.hu for uploading samples. IP addresses are logged somewhere, but big deal. The bigger issue is that you sort of need to ping a development list somewhere in order to make them aware of the problem.

If you are determined enough, you can always go through anonymous proxy services to upload the sample and then use anonymous remailers or email services to alert the list or someone associated with the list.

Just part of our… umm… commitment to quality.

Mr. Anonymous mentions that the second part could be avoided by having an automated script that checks for new material in the upload directory and logs the information somewhere. I’ll file that away for when I finally get the autobuild/test system operational.

Save for the yeoman’s work that our little community does on the MultimediaWiki, it’s generally quite difficult to come by solid technical data on specific multimedia codecs. That even holds true for the “open” MPEG codecs which are wrapped up in NDAs and licensing fees. So I was stunned to find a thick, colorful, well-illustrated book called “MPEG-4 Jump Start” at the local public library.

I thought this looked highly promising because, while I know a lot of the general concepts surrounding image compression, I have never gotten too deep into MPEG-4 video compression for the simple reason that everyone else works on it. Thus, I don’t feel a need to.

Unfortunately, this book is not quite what I expected. I once asked the guru in passing whether or not FFmpeg supported the entire MPEG-4 spec. His terse response: “Very funny.” It turns out that MPEG-4 encompasses a huge number of features relating to sprite movement and 3D stuff that no one ever uses in practice these days. And that, my friends, is what this book was largely focused on. It may help to explain why Amazon presently lists used copies of this giant tome starting at $2.81.

There is, however, a followup volume entitled “More MPEG-4 Jump Start” (why do I get the feeling that MPEG probably has a separate committee dedicated to developing the names of these books?) that claims it will divulge more information about audio and video coding in the MPEG-4 scheme.

You can read an amusing passage about the unused body of MPEG-4 features under the “Enter the MPEG-4 behemoth” section at Deconstructing H.264/AVC.