Blog.JonECat.com

We have a long tradition of shooting firearms in my family. I have been shooting since I was big enough to hold up my first BB gun. Well me, my boys (Carson and Ruger), my Dad, and a few friends went out this afternoon to take in a little target practice.

Today was especially good because it was the first time Carson got to shoot a somewhat high powered rifle (other than a 12 gauge). My Dad brought out his Pre-64 Winchester 30-30 rifle for him to shoot. I apologize for not bringing a real camera of some sort for it, but all I had was my phone so that is what you will get.

Get the Flash Player to see the wordTube Media Player.

Carson on the 30-30

Another friend brought an HK G3 out. This was the first time I have ever had the opportunity to shoot one. I enjoyed it, it was much smoother than I was expecting. It felt about the same as an AR-15 to me.

Me firing the G3

My Dad on the G3

I thought I would throw a little video to test out the capabilities. It appears to work just as well as Vimeo.

Update1: You need to go to Youtube to actually watch the HD version, click here. Click on the link under the video that says “Watch in HD”

Update2: Ok, after a little research I found out that you can tweak the embed code a bit to get the HD version to display in an embedded player. I found the code here.

Cisco TelePresence is a 1080p video conferencing solution by Cisco Systems, our main partner. Our board meeting is coming up soon so I had to do some testing today for a video I created to make sure everything would work OK. Below is a crappy pic from my phone of it.

It is amazing how well it works, each one of the displays are 1080p. It truly feels as if the person you are talking to are in the same room as you. I was quite impressed. The only problem with TelePrescence is cost, my understanding is that it cost $300k per site for hardware, this does not include the monumental bandwidth you need to support it.

This setup is in our sister building 1/2 mile down the road from my office.

So the main reason I was in Germany a few weeks back was to participate and video a Think Tank for some of the people involved in the Cisco Networking Academy. Well here is the result of my trip there. Enjoy.. if you can.

Click Here to view.

I don’t know how many of you are web developers that come here, but I am really looking forward to the HTML5 standard that will be implemented in Firefox 3.1. HTML5 allows for the use of the <video> tag. This will nativley support .ogg files that are encoded in the Theora video CODEC and OGG audio CODEC. Why is this important you ask? You will not have to require Flash player or any other plugin for that matter to playback video in the browser. The browser will support it nativley.

Well Theora and OGG are a part of the Xiph project. The 2 CODECs are open source and quite good in my opinion. Theora is comparitive to DIVX or XVID CODECs, but it is completely free and open source. OGG is similar to MP3 or MP4A (AKA AAC).

The only hurdle we will have is getting all of the other browsers such as IE & Safari to support it. That may be the most difficult part of this new standard, but hopefully with time we will see this widespread.

So what do say, as soon as this hits the market lets try to make an active effort to get this video type mainstream. Ars Technica wrote a good article about this here.

Links:

Quicktime Plugin for Theora and OGG

Specs about the new <video> tag

Here is a clip I shot on a SD1000 P&S camera. On the last night we had a little going away party and they brought in some musicians. They play us some traditional Bavarian style music, it was very cool. I don’t know if I would load it up on the iPod, but interesting to experience once.

Instruments left to right:
Hammer Dulcimer, Accordion, Acoustic Guitar, Sitar (I know that is wrong but that is what they called it)

I quite often get the question “What do you do for a living?”. My usual response is “I am a Video Editor and Compositor”. Well for some that does not quite cut it, they usually don’t know what that really means. So I took it upon myself to show you one of the types of videos I do on a regular basis for the Cisco Learning Institute and what the studio looks like.

We found this dude in our office, he was a hitchhiker in one the girls laptop bags from her house. Why waste a opportunity I say. If you have a mobile phone that can view MP4’s then click here to view it.

Note: Tell me if you can view the MP4 on your phone and what phone you have. I have only tested it on my blackberry.