BRUSCA

The Internet TV Revolution

Posted by Brusca under Apple, Film making, Hosting, Internet TV, Movies, TwendyTV, Video, iPhone

With the revolution of Internet TV, you can now carry your favorite shows with you and watch them at your convenience! Just hook up your laptop or a high-end mobile phone (Android or iPhone I might recommend) to the Internet and play the program you want to watch. Or, you can simply download the program to your computer and watch later. Read on for more.

365 Days – April

Posted by Brusca under 365 Days of 2010, Apple, Photography, Social Networking, flickr, iPhone

I have decided to take a photo for each day of 2010 with my iPhone. They can be self portraits or anything that takes my fancy or wherever I am at at the time. All photos are edited directly on the iPhone and mostly edited with the Best Camera App, developed by Chase Jarvis. At the end of the year I will hopefully put a book together, perhaps produced in Aperture. Here are my April photos.

For more details on these photos visit my Flickr Collection, 365 Days of 2010. http://www.flickr.com/photos/brusca/collections/72157623604227238/

My Favourite iPhone photo for April is

HTML5 Video Playback…

Posted by Brusca under Adobe, Apple, Design, Dreamweaver, Flash, Video, iPhone

I just finished up watching the latest Diggnation and was quite surprised to hear Alex Albrecht and Kevin Rose claim there was no reason to use the flash video playback anymore. As you can imagine I was astounded at this notion. Video playback through the Flash player on the web has been a major part of my focus for more than 5 years now and the next best options are not even close.

I for one have not yet delved into building HTML5 pages yet, so I thought I would do a quick test. As a quick test I spent 5 minutes adding a video tag to an HTML page and linked a video to it, excellent! Fast and easy, what everybody likes. So I tested this on Safari first, knowing this browser seems to support HTML5 the best, and no worries there. Next Firefox 3.6, see the resulting screen shot below. Turns out FF supports the video tag but not the H.264 codec. So because of this you cannot use alternative content, like say the flash plugin just in case your browser does not support that specific tag. You just get a big grey box. Check out how the video presents in your browser http://www.brucelevick.com/html5.html.

So without even getting to the most commonly used browser on the market there is already a big issue of the different codecs supported in different browsers (Flash plays the same codecs no matter what the  browser), with no control that I can see if one of these codecs is not supported. As for IE, the most commonly used browser, no support whatsoever for the video tag. Yes I certainly should ditch my Flash video playback (sarcasm if you didn’t pick up on it.) . I will say one thing that at least with browsers that have no support you can implement alternative content. Until IE supports some other codec the others don’t, then HTML5 video playback is going to be a nightmare to manage.

Check out how your browser measures up. http://html5test.com/

Also check out the “limited” attributes the HTML5 video tag has. http://www.w3schools.com/html5/tag_video.asp. Don’t even get me started on the comparisons to the Flash video functions.

Sorry for the rant, I just find this very frustrating to hear industry geeks make ridiculously uninformed statements, and that the (video playback) wheel is being reinvented so to speak. Lets not go back 10 years and go through that same teeth pulling revolution we went through 10 years ago. I can’t go through that client heartache implementing elements working on one browser and not the other, not again. HTML5 video playback… not for a while.

365 Days – February

Posted by Brusca under 365 Days of 2010, Apple, Photography, flickr, iPhone

I have decided to take a photo for each day of 2010 with my iPhone. They can be self portraits or anything that takes my fancy or wherever I am at at the time. All photos are edited directly on the iPhone and mostly edited with the Best Camera App, developed by Chase Jarvis. At the end of the year I will hopefully put a book together, perhaps produced in Aperture. Here are my February photos. You can check out January here.

For more details on these photos visit my Flickr Collection, 365 Days of 2010. http://www.flickr.com/photos/brusca/collections/72157623604227238/

My Favourite iPhone photo for February is

365 Days – January

Posted by Brusca under 365 Days of 2010, Apple, Photography, flickr, iPhone

I have decided to take a photo for each day of 2010 with my iPhone. They can be self portraits or anything that takes my fancy or wherever I am at at the time. At the end of the year I will hopefully put a book together, perhaps produced in Aperture. Here are my January photos.

For more details on these photos visit my Flickr account. http://www.flickr.com/photos/brusca/sets/72157623118835992/

Tripit Online Travel Itinerary

Posted by Brusca under Apple, Software, Tanzania

Tripit is a very impressive website for adding your travel itineraries to and share trips with friends and family. You can manage your itineraries on Tripit or simply send in a booking confirmation number and it is all done automatically. A great compliment to this website is the iPhone App (FREE) to download your trip details and have in your pocket without the worry of loads of paperwork. Add images, notes, maps etc to your Tripit itinerary. Brilliant!

My Full Tanzania Itinerary is here

Vodcasts are the New TV

Posted by Brusca under Apple

As the wide world of online video continues to rise in the form of vodcasts and webisodes, so does the switch from regular viewing TV to online viewing on the big screen. It’s no news that this shift has been happening for some time, but the more it progresses the more the big broadcasters have to stand up and take notice.

I have to say Australian TV does not have a lot to offer even though the ratings season has just started, I’m not all that impressed. So it makes life easier to have such a wide variety of content available online. 90% of my viewing this week has been online content, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. This has been helped along with the advent of certain hardware and software such as Apple TV and other online media centers allowing easier access to regularly updated video content, such as FREE vodcasts and renting DVD’s and TV shows online.

In any case broadcasters are now embracing vodcasts more than ever with the release of some TV episodes online only 24 hours after airing. This could be seen as somewhat of an attempt to fight the illegal download of shows and a way for the big corporates to say “we can’t beat you, so we’re going to join you” in order to please the growing audiences craving Video On Demand. A perfect example of this is The Gruen Transfer aired on ABC. I actually don’t watch this when it normally airs on TV and subscribe to the podcast to watch when I find the time.

There is a plethora of content to subscribe to, with vodcasts covering a wide variety of topics that sit within many genres. The ease of which vodcasts can be produced makes it very accessible for anyone to produce one nowadays and they don’t need to be at the standards of a TV broadcast but can be equally entertaining.

A handful of my choices for online viewing are:

http://bestadsontv.com/
http://www.bestofyoutube.com/
http://totallyradshow.com/
http://revision3.com/diggnation/
http://revision3.com/diggreel/
http://www.screencastsonline.com/
http://digitalmedia.oreilly.com/aperture/
http://www.mydamnchannel.com/
The Official Lost Podcast

Kevin Rose iPhone App Review

Posted by Brusca under Apple

Kevin Rose reviews the iPhone application ‘Topple’. Looks like a fun download.

I have been wracking my brain for some good and unique ideas for new iPhone apps. Not easy as there are thousands of Apps on the App Store now. Will keep thinking and wondering what market there is left. Any thoughts?