CrunchGear |  |
- Hangglider surfing with the Nikon D300s
- How to use RSS to automatically download anything from Usenet
- What “on-demand” media really means and why your cable company should be scared
| Hangglider surfing with the Nikon D300s Posted: 17 Oct 2009 04:02 PM PDT Professional photographer (and Nikon ambassador) Mark Watson heard about an interesting phenomena. In a certain area of Australia, there is a rare cloud formation know as the “Morning Glory“. Mark shot video and still pictures of these clouds for the Red Bull Glorious Days project. It’s a cloud formation that rolls across the salt flat region during certain times of the year, the “Morning Glory” is up to 600 miles long, and moves up the 35 mph. Apparently, if you’re insane, it’s possible to ’surf’ the cloud wave in a hang glider. I don’t know about surfing, but the images are absolutely spectacular. And the photographer took the video and stills with a Nikon D300s. Thanks to Mike for the tip.
|
| How to use RSS to automatically download anything from Usenet Posted: 17 Oct 2009 12:30 PM PDT
As a corollary to Biggs’ "cable companies are doomed" article from earlier today, I thought I’d demonstrate how easy it is to accomplish what he was threatening. That is, live a happy and successful life without having to pay $100+ a month to Comcast, Time Warner, DirecTV, or whomever. (Note: I’m neither happy nor successful, so this advice is spurious at best.) Here, I’ll teach you a pretty basic method of automatically downloading things like TV shows, and movies, and whatnot from Usenet. Yes, this breaks the first rule of Usenet; sorry.
What? Today we’ll be setting up our Usenet software to look at an RSS feed. (You can also accomplish pretty much the same thing using BitTorrent, but BitTorrent is so plebeian.) This RSS feed will carry NZB files that, magically, point your Usenet software to the actual files you’ll be viewing in VLC or MPlayer or whatever. In English, that means when you come home from work or class you’ll have the latest episode of The Ultimate Fighter all ready to be watched. You’ll need: • A Usenet provider. The big ones, off the top of my head, are Giganews, Newsdemon, Astraweb, and Supernews. You’ll be spending around $10-$20 a month for access, but that gives you access to all the riches that Usenet provides. In my experience all these services are more or less the same, so feel free to shop around. I have no favorites. • Usenet software. The easiest to use for our purposes here today, once you’ve set it up, is SABnzbd+. It’s free as in freedom and free as in beer. • An NZB site that provides an RSS feed. I’ll be using Newzleech.com as my example, but pretty much every NZB site out there should do this. Maybe, I don’t know. • No qualms with any of this. Yeah, Americans can go to Hulu to watch some shows, but my overseas friends aren’t so lucky. Maybe if Hollywood got its act together we wouldn’t have to resort to this. (Incidentally, I’m right now removing the copy protection of a bunch of DVDs I bought in the UK this past week. All I want to do is see Top Gear! Is that a crime?) OK! 1. With your Usenet account in hand, go ahead and download and set up SABnzbd+. It’s not hard, but I’m not about to hold your hand here. It basically involves launching the application, putting in your Usenet account info, then pointing the application to a few folders. If you can’t figure this out then the rest is probably too much for you to handle anyway. 2. Set up the RSS feed! I’ll be using the TV show The Ultimate Fighter as an example. For newzleech.com, the RSS feed you make looks like this:
That’s your RSS feed. What that does is comb the Usenet group alt.binaries.multimedia (that’s the "g" in the URL) for the last 50 posts (that’s the "n") containing the phrase "the ultimate fighter s10" (for season 10 episodes; that’s the "s"). The RSS feed is updated every 20 minutes.
3. Go to SABnzbd+’s settings (Config:RSS) and input that URL. Then set the RSS checking interval (Config:RSS checking interval) to something reasonable, like once every 60 minutes. Under no circumstances should you set it for anything more frequent than every 20 minutes, since that’s considered uncouth, and your IP address is likely to be banned by Newzleech. You don’t want that. That’s pretty much it. Now what you’d do, I guess, is launch SABnzbd+ Wednesday morning before you leave your house. If it’s set up like we set it up here, SABnzbd+ will check alt.binaries.multimedia for news posts containing the phrase "the ultimate fighter s10" via the Newzleech RSS feed. When SABnzbd+ finds the new posts, it’ll download the appropriate NZB file, then start doing its magic. In other words, as soon as the latest episode hits Usenet, it’ll automatically be downloaded to your computer, Internet connection speed notwithstanding. Of course, you can add as many RSS feeds as you want, with whatever parameters you want. Maybe you like 30 Rock, or want to see Louis CK on Parks and Recreation? Or maybe you like Curb Your Enthusiasm? To quote that Nas song, the world is yours. The purpose of this here article was strictly educational blah blah. Now I’m off to rip the copy protection off a DVD I BOUGHT FROM HMV WITH MY OWN MONEY! What a pain.
|
| What “on-demand” media really means and why your cable company should be scared Posted: 17 Oct 2009 09:00 AM PDT
I’ve been angling to get rid of my TiVo and cable for some time now and I believe I’ve finally figured out a solution that works best for me. It involves a lots scripting, Sabnzbd, and HandbrakeCLI and I’ll tell you what I ultimately did next week once it’s stable but it seems to be working as well as can be expected for these sorts of hacks. I posit that the TV industry is about to face the same threat dealt the music and movie industries but they still have a chance to make things better for themselves when the world changes around them. First, let’s rehash the old arguments. What I’m doing is downloading TV shows and sending them to a media player near my TV. I’m doing this because there exist two separate infrastructures that interface imperceptibly at one key point – the official cable and online distribution networks and the shady underworld of pirate distributors. Right now that interface is a trickle, but it will soon be, pardon the pun, a torrent. The first infrastructure is the studio system. While I’m talking specifically about TV here, we can also extrapolate to talk about movies and music. This infrastructure is based on the advertising or distribution model in that they make all their money placing advertisements around their content or by placing their content onto physical media. But what is important to note is that the TV industry is in a completely different business from the music and movie industry. They’re not “selling” a product. They’re selling the space around a product. They they commission artists to make that product better in hopes of raising the price of the space around that product. They sell DVDs, sure, but that’s a sideline. TiVo, to continue the analogy, created a way to sell jarred oyster sauce. The device contained the content, sure, but it tried to keep some of the advertising intact. However, what I’m attempting to do buffets into an entirely new infrastructure, one none of us wholly understand. It consists of two disparate parts. The first is a shady underground that can offer these shows, stripped of commercials, a few minutes after they’ve aired. How they do it is a topic for another story, but needless to say popular shows are available in less than ten minutes after they air on the Eastern Seaboard. It is a testament to the dedication of a few TV lovers that these shows are available, for free, as they happen. Then we have the web arms of the major TV studios as well as the clips cable stations post on their sites. These are, to a lesser extent, a re-canning of those same oysters in the hopes that the shorter advertisements wrapped around them will maintain the revenue offered by TV broadcasts. So what’s my point? First, I believe some media will survive the move to the web better than others. Book publishing, for example, may change formats but the inherent problems of pirating a physical book make them weak targets for piracy. I also believe that the medium of television is also not conducive to large scale piracy because there is so much of it. I can shuck all the oysters I want but there will still be 24-hour news channels, old movie networks, and sitcoms that someone out there will watch even if the pirates are uninterested in recording and distributing them. Now, back to that interface between the two worlds. Because pirates can’t steal everything at once there is no impetus to stop up this hole. The highly regimented and very well organized system of content capture that is going on exists as a labor of love and not as a money making venture. It allows guys like me, guys who no longer want to be beholden to a wonky TiVo, for example, to get HD content quickly and easily. However, there are more guys like me every day. To say that television as we know it won’t exist in a decade is quite far fetched but it is a possibility. How, then, should a TV broadcaster react? First, I think TV broadcasters need to take a page from the pirates playbook and make their hit shows available online in downloadable form sooner than later – and not on iTunes for $2.99 an episode. The process I went through was relatively painless but decidedly nerdy. The next generation, however, will find new and better ways of doing the same thing, thereby stripping out the content with reckless abandon. TV studios still have some time to save their skins, just like the book industry, but it won’t be long before something comes along and ruins the party. They need to do what the music industry didn’t do – make getting sanction, high quality content convenient. It took me a week to set up my little Rube Goldberg DVR but there’s no telling how long it could take someone with a little more savvy. Why not, for example, offer TV subscriptions to individual series. The era of channel surfing is almost near its end and discovery of new content through mere chance will soon be gone. This would allow for absoltute control over a series and reward popular series month after month. Sadly, cable companies just won’t do this. As Doug noted in our chat room “Cable companies keep saying a la carte wouldn’t work but in reality they’re saying it wouldn’t work for them because its too much work.” Second, television needs to play to its strengths. As Harry McCracken pointed out during the balloon-boy debacle, the first on the scene wasn’t some blogger with a Flip but the television news crews with their trucks, helicopters, and satellite dishes. But even in the vacuum created by the death of local newspapers it seems that local TV stations aren’t able to appreciate their value. For example, I was in Columbus, Ohio a few months ago and I saw the same reporter on two different channels reporting on essentially the same thing. This sort of cost-cutting is detrimental to the brand and is cheapening TV journalism. We all laugh at the 24-hour news channels and their bloviating blowhards, but those are the news networks of choice for millions of people daily. There is value there. TV studios need to give us this content in a way that makes it a win-win for all parties involved. If not, it will be a lose-lose as their content is stripped and stolen and their revenues tank over the next few years.
|
| You are subscribed to email updates from CrunchGear To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |
No comments:
Post a Comment