Hear Ye! Hear Ye! The DoorBots are coming! I was pleasantly surprised to see Jamie Siminoff, Chief Inventor of Edison Jr, in a video posed to their Facebook page. Jamie is announcing the fact that DoorBot is actually shipping, which…
Credit is due to Tsahi Levent-Levi of Amdocs, not only is he a leading voice in the evolution of WebRTC, but he’s eating that very dog food himself. It’s so great to see people walk-the-walk while giving-the-talk. That is in fact what he’s planning to do.
In a blog post today he put out a call for suggestion of WebRTC-based services to highlight in giving a presentation to a conference. His plans include giving the presentation remotely via a WebRTC connection. That’s awesome.
CNET’s “The Next Big Thing” is a brand new show. They recently did an interesting segment on the coming wave of 4K/Ultra-HDTV and OLED display technologies. Even though I don’t entirely agree with some of their conclusions it’s not a bad primer on the subjects. It’s well worth the few minutes that it takes to give it a look.
I’ve long held that OLED in particular holds great potential. The picture quality offered by OLED can be outstanding. So much so that Sony has offered a line of professional OLED displays, even winning a Technical EMMY in 2012.
Priced at a whopping $26K, the BVME250A is the 25” model at the top of Sony’s present Trimaster EL lineup. In 2011 it won the Hollywood Post Alliance Engineering Excellence Award.
A couple of weeks back Lifesize announced the availability of an experimental WebRTC gateway service. They made the announcement during a webinar on WebRTC. Of course, I went to try the service shortly thereafter. While I could make the test call to the address offered, I couldn’t reach anything else, nor was it exactly obvious how that should be done.
A couple of days later Emily G. from LifeSize PR responded to my inquiry about this. She offered to be the other end of a an initial test call, giving me her H.323 dialing string as a calling target.
At the appointed time I visited the the WebRTC test page using Chrome on my laptop and entered her H.323 address, which was just an IP address. The WebRTC gateway immediately connected us. We chatted briefly. She was able to explain how the gateway should accept typical H.323 dialing strings or a SIP URI.
The gateway worked reasonably well for this short call. The call quality was limited by my use of a laptop with it’s questionable built-in camera. Also by the fact that the laptop was online over my local Wifi. Wifi and high-bandwidth streaming media are not always a happy pair.
This series is about my efforts to make more ideal use of video calling and video conferencing from my home office. It describes how the existing mix of natural and artificial light was not appropriate for video calling, and my…
Several times over the past few weeks I’ve had to create screencasts or asked to advise how they are best created. There are a variety of approaches to this task, but I’ve found that my preferred technique is perhaps uncommon, and worth sharing.
Over the years there have been many times when screencasts were the most appropriate method for conducting user training or addressing specific support issues. At different times I’ve used various software tools in these pursuits. Techsmith’s Camtasia Studio was the most common solution in years past, although Adobe Captivate was also notable.
More recently I’ve sought a lower-cost solutions and settled upon the freeware CamStudio as a passable solution. CamStudio is apparently the open source progenitor of Camtasia Studio.
There are also a myriad of free, online services that do their magic by way of a browser downloadable applet. I have little experience of these as I prefer another approach entirely.
As in other matters, I’ve long held the belief that a more hardware-centric approach can hold a distinct advantage. This has become increasingly true as common PC screen resolutions have come into alignment with frame sizes common in HD video production. A screencast that looks as good a broadcast TV is likely going to be more than adequate.