He's Back!!!

Well, after an extended sabatical, I have finally returned.  There really aren't a ton of excuses for my prolonged absence from imparting my words of wisdom.  However, let me offer some tepid explanations.

My original hiatus began because of just shear workload.  As you may recall, I am implementing the platform technology to support the Mobile MUSE projects.  The platform provides various services that are ostensibly valuable for content developers in delivering their applications to mobile users in the cellular environment.  Well, as is the case with most technical projects, the task became bigger than I had hoped for.  I continued to experience problem after problem after problem.  Some were attributable to my own inexperience in some areas.  Some were attributable to changing requirements from the MUSE projects.  Some were attributable to hardware failures.  And some were attributable to arcanery in the mobile networks.  Whatever the reason, I was spending WAY more time on this project than I had planned.  I decided to bail on least pressing of the issues - namely my blog postings.

However, that only offers a weak explanation.  For in fact, since the Vancouver Film Festival ended in October, I really haven't had the over-worked excuse to fall back on.  By that time however, blogging (or more specifically non-blogging) had just become a bad habit.  I was having trouble getting that final 10% of the project completed so I could open up the mobile MUSE platform to the rest of the world.  But in truth, I was feeling a little dejected about some of our projects and how I didn't see enough of the platform facilities being exploited by those projects.   At this point, I feel a little like Don Quixote - slaying windmills.  In spite of the lack of take up of some of the services that I've implemented I remain convinced the services truly are valuable for delivering rich media.

So...I decided to be my own test project.

In particular, I became interested in the problem of delivering multi-media content to different mobile devices.  At one point I pushed strongly for MMS to crack this nut.  Alas, the implementation of MMS in the networks in Canada leaves much to be desired.  Video transcoding appears to be non-existent.  Still image reformatting seems to be implemented as image cropping rather than reformatting.  As for SMIL content: forget it completely.  So I began to think of a service that could adapt multi-media content to every device.  Figure out it's display resolution, colour depth, audio/video codecs, bit rates, frame rates.  Then adapt any arbitrary multi-media to that device on a particular carrier - and do all that in real time.

Well, it turns out much of this is very possible so I became a little obsessed with the idea.  Once I felt the basic framework was in place, I looked for a way to demonstrate it's capabilities.  And that's where I thought of Youtube.

I thought it would be a pretty cool idea if I could take any arbitrary video available on Youtube and download it to any aribitrary mobile phone on any arbitrary wireless network.  Further, I had always claimed that using these services should be trivial for both user and developer alike.

So that got me wondering about how to download videos from Youtube to my mobile phone.  Well that took me off on some tangents as I educated myself on browser addons and javascript.  After much study and experimentation, I finally pulled together a preciously small amount of code that allows me to download any Youtube video to any mobile device.  From a user perspective, all you really need to do is click a button and enter a phone number.  From a developer's perspective, it's a trivial amount of javascript code (less than a single page).  Behind the scenes magic occurs and with a few unsolicited clicks of a menu key on your mobile phone - voila!  The Youtube world is yours!

I felt pretty proud about it and then decided to adapt it to still images - specifically Flickr.  With again a preciously small amount of javascript code, at the click of a button, it becomes trivial to download any image from Flickr to any mobile phone.

I'm still playing around with this code as we speak.  In particular, I'm playing around with options to either deliver the content my way, or use MMS.  Some VERY interesting results!

Not satisfied, I then began to play around not with downloading content, but streaming content.  This is a whole other game that I'm learning a ton about and plan to write about in upcoming blogs.  For now I'll say this:  streaming is pretty much a dog's breakfast when it comes to implementation on handsets out there.

So I haven't been particularly overworked in the past few weeks.  However, I have been particularly consumed by the possibilities these small tidbits of javascript have provided for me.

In short, I'd like to encourage everyone to try out some of these services available on the Mobile MUSE developers site.  Simply create an account for yourself, subscribe to some services, then try out some of these facilities.  Download the Youtube javascript code and try it for yourself.

During my prolonged absence from blogging, I've learned all sorts of things in the mobile world that I previously only had academic experience with.  In the coming weeks I plan to share that knowledge with all of you.

Stay tuned!