Slashdot Mirror
Beyond The Cell -- Journalists' Video Phone
dimitri_k writes: "This article from poynter.org gives some information about the video phone that has become standard in reporting recently. It uses H.263 for compression, and a satellite phone to call into ISDN lines. Maybe people on Slashdot can brainstorm ways to increase the bandwidth of these things in the short term (i.e. cost-ineffective combination of lines) so that the cable news networks can turn the grainy, live, night-vision shots in Afghanistan clear." This setup looks a little chunky, but when you consider the capability to beam video information from anywhere in the world, it's very impressive.
Despite the technological limitations on these things, the ability to broadcast from anywhere definately shouldn't be overlooked. There aren't exactly a lot of broadcast stations or internet connections in the mountains of Northern Afghanistan, and without this clunky-yet-working technology, we wouldn't be seeing much of anything from the front lines right now.
I've been impressed with the pics they are sending out, but the rate of refresh leaves something to be desired - jerky images and long delays for audio. but it is very impressive that the images are as clear as they are, and the audio doesn't seem to break up at all - I presume they give prioirty to audio, or since it is a *phone* after all perhaps the voice part is already taken care of.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
It seems that alot of criticism is being directed at the choppy video feeds. There will always be a trade-off of quality and compression that is limited by bandwidth. I really don't see the bandwidth problem being solved in the near future. But, who says that these feeds really need to be in real-time? Yes, there are certain instances where having a real-time feed is useful, but it would also be good if they could capture some high quality feeds then "squirt" them to the receving stations. It wouldn't be instantaneous, but you could get a better quality feed.
Where the wind blows, the tumbleweed goes.
Is the above comment some kind of joke? There are companies with R&D teams working on this for quite a bit of time and this fellow think all we need is a brainstorming session on Slashdot.
Hey, buddy, get a grip...
Perhaps I missed something, but why don't they just use their satellite uplinks??? Why use these crappy videophones that look worse than streaming video on a 56k modem?
I'd much rather be watching 30 minute old footage, then grainy 'live' (2 minute delayed) 'images'. Why don't they just record them with a standard handheld camera, send the tape to a nearby satellite uplink site, and beam it back to CNN???
and besides, I have seen CNN rewind 'LIVE' events before my eyes... When they put the little 'LIVE' Icon on the screen that don't mean crap... Just watch CNN for a few hours and watch them do it... Pausing/Rewinding of LIVE feeds happens way too often...
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
This might be brute force, but how about add the capability to transfer data over two or more phone lines simultaneously, in parallel, if they exist at a location?
First off, a 3 minute delay is still "live". So, you can live with that... you just can't interview the reported with the video synced. Second, if they do this with three systems, they get the video streaming. Third, if they are using three systems, then why not just link the streams? (interleave the frames, preferably, so if one drops, you just loose one out of every three frames). You then get near realtime (a chunk of a second lost in the bounce for an uncomfortable pause), and have a nice fallback.
Of course, if it were this easy, they would presumably be doing it. Or this may be very first gen, throw it together and hope it works style tech, and in six months we'll see all the good obvious ideas we post here are used as standards.
Or (donning my conspiracy hat), the obvious ideas are all held up by patents.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Yeah, so it's relatively new tech in Backwoods, Earth. It'll improve. I suppose you also aren't impressed with the pictures and video of WWI, because they are "grainy," not to mention black and white. Just because the pictures aren't of high quality doesn't mean they aren't worth seeing. What do you really want? Full color, 30fps?
IIRC, range and bandwith are determined by 2 general factors (ingnoring frequncy, etc.) a useful abstraction is that the range and bandwidth depend on 1)Power & Efficiency of transmitting antenna, and 2) Area & efficiency of recieving antenna. this means that you have two approaches: bigger, more powerfull transmitters, or bigger, more sensitive recievers. To get really good bandwidth from a small, low-power sat-phone, you need a BIG, sensitive recieving antenna in orbit. in short, maybe the telecom industry should concentrate on the sattelite end, rather than the phone, since any practical hand-held has size and weight constraints, whereas a sattelite (ignoring cost) can be as large as needed.
"Theory is when you know everything but nothing works. Practice is when everything works but no one knows why. In our