On a recent visit to the FlatIron Crossing in Colorado, the first thing that greeted me was a large, hanging widescreen television with a PC BIOS start up screen imploring the user to remove any system disks and press any key to boot the computer. Another hanging screen nearby showed a Windows XP login screen. These screens were scattered throughout the shopping center and luckily, many of them were showing what they were supposed to be showing, I suppose. The regular presentation was some rather choppy video that made me wonder if the video stream was being piped in via a constrained 115Kbit/sec serial cable.

I do not even want to guess how much it cost to deploy dozens of these widescreen, flat-panel monitors all over the building, or what the underlying justification was. And how are they administered? Is there actually one PC driving each monitor? I understand that 1 PC driving the whole show would be unappealing as all the monitors would be in complete sync for an eerie, techno-dystopian effect. Perhaps 1 PC is driving 3-5 monitors?

Then there is the potential for misuse. I hope the back office with the PCs is well-secured. The program running these video files ad nauseum could probably be easily subverted to show anything. One unlocked door and a prankster with a CD-ROM of some choice cuts from the internet “adult content” community could turn family-friendly shopping on its ear.

Then again, perhaps the video streams are being transmitted via DSL from some central office, hence the quality.

Now that I think about it, I was probably paying more attention to the multitude of monitors than any other patron in the entire mall.

There are few things that annoy me quicker than a licensing war erupting on a free software project mailing list. Self-righteous geeks with dubious grasp on legal matters tediously dissecting the minutiae of different licensing terms. But I could not believe what I found when I asked Google to bring up the text of the GNU LGPL:

Sure, there are those who claim that ‘GPL’ is more commonly searched for than ‘LGPL’. But I see so few good conspiracies to latch onto, can’t you just give me this one?

Hi! My name is Mike. I do a lot of multimedia technology hacking. I have an entire website dedicated to this pursuit, which is probably how you got to this blog in the first place. I spend a lot of time thinking about multimedia technology and helping to make sure open source software can play all kinds of common and obscure multimedia formats. Strange enough hobby, but it keeps me off the street and out of trouble.

After doing this multimedia stuff long enough, I actually got invited to a technical conference to talk about this stuff. I gave 2 presentations at The 2nd Swiss Unix Conference in Zurich, Switzerland in early September, 2004. The first presentation was entitled “Multimedia On Unix: Past, Present, and Future”. The slides are available here. However, slides never make much sense by themselves. So, if you have a fair amount of download capacity and about an hour to kill, you can watch or listen to this presentation by downloading the .AVI or .MP3 files from here.

The second presentation was entitled “Trash Multimedia And The Evolution Of Full Motion Video”. The slides for this one are available here. There is no video for this one which is probably good because it was 3 hours long. This presentation was not specifically Unix-related but just showcased a lot of different examples, good and bad, of multimedia technology I have encountered during my studies. Eventually, I may do write-ups of some of this multimedia in this blog.

So I am finally surrendering to the trend and starting my own blog. My goal is to keep better track of developments in multimedia technology, both in the closed/proprietary, and open arenas.

For the curious, this blog’s title, “Breaking Eggs and Making Omelettes” is a reference to the aphorism, “You can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs.” This is in reference to software reverse engineering (RE). RE usually has to take place in order to create open source multimedia software that is interoperable with proprietary formats. The mention (and practice) of RE makes a lot of people squeamish. The broken-egg aphorism always comes to my mind in such discussions.