Saturday, February 7, 2009

Improved Streaming at our Campus


I'm really exited about 2009 challenges. Today we are launching our new version of our Internet Campus, with an improved flash video streaming provider. To choose our provider we tried with different providers, until we found the best relation between price/quality/realiability. Now we are using H.264 Compression and a video frame size of 640 x 360, streaming at 492Kbps, that will allow us to reach even slow connections, allowing the viewer to have a pleasent and smooth experience.

We also included on this update the Microsoft SilverLight player, that works good on Windows/Mac Enviroments. Good news about it, is works fine in Internet Explorer and Safari, bad news is, doesn't work with firefox/Chrome. We also included Web 2.0 links to our Twitter, Facebook, Our Community, Myspace and Blog.

On the core we also included resources for kids' parents that allow them to print some materials and lessons to share with their kids.

Regarding our viral players, we keep on U-Stream.tv because even it has ads now, you can see our internet campus in your I-phone. At the moment, we are giving up on our Mogulus feed, after experienced their "PRO" version. While they were Beta, everything was great, and at NAB 2008 they annouced the Pro version starting on a suggested price of 29.95 a month plus bandwidth, and guess what... on December 08, they launched their package for starters at $ 350 a month including 25Gb of bandwidht plust $ 1.5 the extra Gb... We had a 600Gb monthly demand so do the math... With our current provider we get 1Tb (1000 GB) for $ 450, plus windows media and Quick Time on april 2009. Technology is always challenging and you have to be on the edgeline seeking, researching and fighting in order to get the best possible deal.

Monday, January 19, 2009

Live Stream on Iphone


There has been several changes on our website that I will explain on the next few posts, but now I want to share our latest update. Now we are streaming live on the I-phone: It has a challenge because there is just a little information on the field, but finnaly We got our signal live on the I-phone. There is two key elements:

One: Encoding side:

You must encode with Flash Streaming Encoder 3.0 or greater, and you should get the AAC codec for audio. The parameters for encoding should be as follow:

Video: H264 with Streamline 3.0
200Kbps
20fps

Audio: AAC @ 44100 Hz
47kbps

Two Server Side:

Your ISP should enable a HTML5 streaming...

Sunday, January 18, 2009

One Church where you are from your Iphone


Good news for the Iphone users: Mobile Video is on its way. U-Stream, is developing a new application for the Iphone. The application will let users watch any Ustream channel, live, directly from their iPhone. And not only that, users will also see and be able to participate in the live chat around the video as well, so now you'll be able to experience "One Church Where you are" live from your Iphone!

I found at TechCrunch an article about it and it includes the info required to get the Beta version of the application. You can get it from the article or just follow this instructions:

Instructions to get the beta Application:

1) Plug the iPhone into your computer
2) Wait for the iPhone info to appear in iTunes
3) click on the words “Serial Number” to cause it to change to “Identifier”
4) double-click the identifier number (the long string of characters) and then press cmd-C (Mac) or ctrl-C (Windows) to copy it
5) email that identifier to iphone@ustream.tv so we can build a custom version for that phone using the iPhone SDK
6) Wait for the response :)