2009 May | tech/personal/whatever blog

Archive for May, 2009

Using a Zune Pass outside of USA

Just to set the tone, I don’t really own a Zune MP3 player but I do own a couple of iPods. Got me an iPod shuffle (2nd gen) and an iPod Mini (either 1st or 2nd) a long time ago and they’re still working. My mini is more than five years old and I just use it as a storage disk because the battery dies after a couple of hours. Five years ago I used the iTunes that came with it and it was a so-so for me. I didn’t really enjoy the UI, quite confusing setting it up and the inability to transfer files from one pc to another made me revert to good old Winamp with it’s useful plugins. Haven’t been using any other music player since then (A collegue laughed when she saw me using Winamp). Apparently I’ve been living under a rock for not trying out other players out there.

Come 2009 a friend gave me a Zune Pass and asked me to try it out. That Zune Pass commercial also got me curious. Being the law abiding citizen that I am (*wink* *wink*) it was quite fun being able to have unlimited music for a month and getting to keep 10. I know that iTunes has changed in those five years and I know its UI has definitely changed according to Apple standards but damn…. the Zune UI looks great. Ok I got you confused now didn’t I? (or not) There’s Zune MP3 player and then there’s Zune their media player.

Red Zune

Black Zune

Zune

Minimalist white is the theme of the entire player with a hint of mixart, your album arts made into a mosaic, here and there. I just love the simple UI and how easy it is to figure out where everything is. The best part is when you get yourself a Zune pass, you can search for a multitude of songs and stream or download (with DRM of course) as many times as you want for a whole month. Within that month you can then choose ten songs that you want to keep for yourself.

Tried the search function with one of my favorite artists, Imogen Heap. I don’t have a copy of her first album I, Megaphone and I wanted to hear how much she has changed, so a quick search will get you all of her albums plus extra info on her. Surprise, surprise it also gave me one of her unheard of single (for me at least).

The Immy lover in me just says that Not Now But Soon is worth buying the Zune pass then and there. =)

My recent love for the The Cure got me excited. I knew they were old but I never realized that they have so many albums. Unlimited songs here I come!

Oh yea! I love Pictures of You!

Check out the other pictures below.

and when you’re playing/sleeping it shows you cool pictures of the band and some info.

And the best part of it all is mixart!

OK OK I didn’t deceive you with the title. Apparently, Microsoft only sells the Zune in the US but that’s not going to stop you from getting one right? So, few things you have to do to get the Zune Marketplace to work in your location and how to get the Zune player itself

Change your locale to United States (Control Panel -> Change country or region -> Current Location: United States)
Go to Zune.net then download the Zune 3.0 software
Register and remember to choose United States all the way

Now the Zune Pass itself is quite difficult to get and my friends say you can only buy it in the US. too bad You can always use your credit card to buy but having the physical Zune Pass card is just cool.

Now having one card won’t make me blog about it now would I? Thanks to Aimee for giving me a bunch! haha If you get a chance to go to the US or a friend is coming back, ask if he or she can buy you one at WalMart or one of those stores. Try it out and don’t be hatin.

ping back to yizhe http://cloudfex.com/cs/blogs/cloud/archive/2009/05/17/using-a-zune-pass-outside-of-usa.aspx Apparently it was a double pass as he was the one who went to US and bought the cards for Aimee. Thanks man!

IIS7 Live Smooth Streaming using Inlet Spinnaker 7000 with Silverlight

I was lucky to enough to work with this uber cutting edge technology that was used for the Youtube March Madness broadcast. Will post soon on how we were able to make this behemoth work.

After one month of stagnation it’s high time to finally put down the real guide about the Spinnaker 7000.

IIS.Net pretty much covered a lot of the steps that would get you started on Live Smooth Streaming but unfortunately they didn’t cover using a Spinnaker from Inlet. Last I checked, Inlet doesn’t have one as well. (Package does contain a manual but not as ‘friendly’ as it can potentially be)

This will give you a lowdown on what you would be needing on IIS side and it is essential reading.

Remember that the goal of Live Smooth Streaming is to be able to serve different ’streams’ of the same live video depending on your bandwidth. This means you need to setup a number of ’streams’ coming from the same source (I believe this can also come from different sources)

Hardware Setup

The Spinnaker 7000 being designed for high end cameras doesn’t necessarily cater for your normal video cam. If you want to use low end consumer cameras a visit to an electronics shop is required.

The usual two audio, one video is good enough for this prototype. Spent less than 10USD for the converters.

Spinnaker Setup Page

Spinnaker requires that you are on the same network as the web server. I simplified everything by giving the machines a static IP. It also works with DHCP if you have that setup.

Quite a cumbersome way to setup the appliance. You only have to worry about it once though as you would be using the web console next time.

IMPT: Firmware upgrade!

The Spinnaker 7000 is a Windows XP Embedded Appliance. As with devices like this rule of thumb is to always check for firmware upgrades. Also, the interface of Spinnaker is not really award winning. Be sure to start and stop the encoder when changing any values.

You got the firmware and the camera, next is to get the camera to show within Spinnaker.

Check with your camera manual on the output that it has (PAL, NTSC) but as usual, nothing is stopping you from trial and error

You can double check if your video already works by going to the summary page. It has a small preview window at the bottom of the page.

The sample from IIS.Net contains a video that has configurations for different streams. This would be valuable as we setup our own streams.

Setup below shows bit rate croppings and resizing. These were the variables we found on the sample files (bunny video) We tried tweaking the values with common numbers (known common resolution numbers ex. 800 x 600, 1240 x 720 and such) to no avail. The best alternative is to follow the settings of the bunny video. Change the variables depending on the stream and you’ll essentially produce the same results as the bunny video.

Be sure to save your work. No point in doing it all over again because of a single mistake.

Connecting with IIS7

This would be very much similar to the sample files. Except that the bunny video is using a command line push encoder while you will be using an appliance type.

You have to download and install this module. If you’ve been reading the links to IIS.net you would have done so by now.

You’ll see the Live Smooth Streaming Module after installation. On the sites you can then specify the publishing points.

Once you have the above complete, you’ll need to point Spinnaker to the your web server. Of course, you would need to start the publishing point to receive data from the encoder.

If you notice we setup two publishing points. One from the Spinnaker and one from the bunny vid. The publishing points are quite sensitive to starting and stopping and we had to follow the sequence quite rigorously.

Once those are up you need to configure your Silverlight app to point to the right publishing point. (codes for this are on the sample file). We also used the Silverlight player from the bunny vid as this contains several interfaces that really highlight the capabilities of Live Smooth Streaming. (Bit rate, FPS, Bit Rate Graph)

Notice the similar player? Take it from the sample code and you’ll get the same powerful player for yourself.

That’s pretty much it for this guide. Hopefully you’ll find it useful. The are almost no guides like this probably because of the cost of the Spinnaker, but just in case one falls into your lap and you need to set it up fast, the IIS.net guides and this blog post entry would be heaven sent. =)