Kevin Rose Leaving G4 to start Internet Only Show

Quantum Jim writes "Kevin Rose, one of the famous contributors and co-hosts of The Screen Savers, is leaving this week to concentrate on a new technology howto show called Systm. The Systm will be an internet-only show distributed free (as in beer AND speech) in a number of formats: Theora, Xvid, WMV, H.264, and PSP (what's that?). There will be bittorrent trackers available too! If only I had broadband..."

Comments

PSP

[Verrou]

PSP = Play Station Portable - which uses it's own video format.

Re:PSP

[IANAAC]

It's not the video format that's messing you up. It's the naming format. Just change the name to whatever.mp4 and you should be able to play it on any other portable, etc.

Will he

[Anonymous Coward]

Only make 3 episodes before giving up, like his last attempt, The Broken?

Re:Will he

[MoonBuggy]

To be honest I'd forgotten about The Broken until a newsletter dropped into my inbox from their site about half an hour ago. Looks like it's not as dead as we thought:

When is thebroken episode 4 coming out?

After several weeks of lawyer negotations with G4 (my 9-5 job), they have agreed to release me from my contract. Friday May 27th 2005 marks my last day on the G4 network. That means we are focusing on thebroken / Systm FULL TIME! We are starting to plan the next episode of thebroken now, and we'll send out another update as we get closer to the release! Now that this is our full-time job, expect to see many more video releases coming your way!

Screensavers podcast

[slapout]

Fans of the old TechTV show "The ScreenSavers" might want to check out Leo Laporte's podcasts. He makes his radio show available. He has also gotten together with some people from the old show and they do a podcast called This Week in Tech.

http://www.leoville.com/
http://thisweekintech.com/

also see Dan Huard's take on TechTV:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/01/172523 0&tid=129

Re:Screensavers podcast

[slapout]

Here's a copy of his 'take':

Life as a TechTV/G4 Employee

A lot of people ask, "what was it like to work at TechTV and ultimately at G4?" I have to say, for the most part, the experiences were amazing at both places. They each had their positives and negatives. So, I've decided to shed a little light on what exactly I did at TechTV and G4. Basically, this post will explain what my typical work day was like.

As an intern, I worked very typical intern jobs at a television studio. I got in before anyone did at TechTV, which was generally between 7:00 and 7:30am. Most of my work was for Megan Morrone. I did a lot of screen captures from websites, CDs, DVDs, etc. I remember one screen capture she asked me to do regarding something about NPR and September 11th. I remember this pretty well because I was so stupid. This was during the time TSS was using the CFH set while the new set was being built. She wanted me to capture some video of the sounds of 9/11. I totally misinterpreted what she wanted and captured all of the horrible, heart wrenching sounds as the trade centers fell, people screaming, etc. She was looking for more G-rated material like songs dedicated to all the victims, etc. It was just a stupid intern mistake. I also want to mention that Megan is one of the nicest people I've ever met. She was always good to me and very patient as I made those 'stupid intern mistakes.'

I was also behind the scenes teleprompting. Let me tell you how difficult it was to scroll a prompter for Leo and Patrick. They rarely read it, especially the news section. There's definitely a script for them to read but they're so good and comfortable in front of a camera they don't even bother. Truthfully, the only bits they'd read were the teases. Teases are when a segment ends and the talent says something like "coming up after the break..." It was necessary they read the teases explicitly because we would have specific video or images that corresponded with the read.

I did tons of odd jobs as well. One time, I remember traveling to Berkeley with ex-TSS Series Producer, Ken Marquis. We went to pick up a huge telestrator TV. I'm sure all you TSS fans remember that giant TV Leo and Pat would use during "The Real Deal." Ken and I picked up a U-Haul truck and ventured over to the place to pick it up. There were a couple problems. First, it was heavy and second, it was just Ken and I. Needless to say, Ken threw out his back but we got it in. Third, the TV was not secure in the truck. So, like a good starving intern I volunteered to jump in there with the TV. This is completely illegal, but I insisted. I was trying everything I possibly could to get a job. To Ken's credit, he said no and it wouldn't affect my chances for a job. I did it anyways. There was barely any air in there except for a few holes and it was hot as hell. So I took my shirt off climbed near the very small air holes so I could breathe. Luckily, it all went well except for Ken's back. I'm sure its fine now.

My typical work day as a Production Assistant (PA) changed dramatically from the intern position. Now, I was in charge of all the computers on the set for TSS. I had to maintain and upgrade them on a regular basis. Anytime you heard audio from a computer I had to run audio lines to the control room. Also, whenever you saw a full screen of a computer, it was my job to run the video (scan lines) to the control room. I was in charge of the daily tech setup, as well. This meant I'd have to acquire info from each of the segment producers to see what they technically needed for the show. It was never really difficult; there was just a lot to do. My jobs ranged from getting Megan's Downloads of the Day set up to setting up Linux boxes for demonstrations.

Another job I was given were the bumps. I'm sure you all remember these. They were little Windows, Mac, and Web tips that Megan, Morgan, Sarah, or Jessica would do. They used to be pre-produced with Megan's voice over (which Morgan

Re:Screensavers podcast

[CySurflex]

Thats not Kevin Rose's take, this post is taken from a blog entry by Dan Huard, who was the guy that answered phones. I just love all the misinformation on Slashdot.

Re:Of course he is leaving...

[thiefius]

They've already gotten together as of recently to do the podcast, "This Week in Tech." http://thisweekintech.com/

Re:The important question is . . .

[HABITcky]

I'd hit it.

Kevin Rose a TWIT

[mbrewthx]

Kevin is also doing a pod cast along Leo and some of the other guys from the old TEchTV.
You can get it at www.thisweekintech.com
they call it TWIT, very good. Looking forward the relase of Systm tonight. systm.org

Re:Of course he is leaving...

[nuggetman]

If only he could call up Leo and Patrick and have them help out...that would be excellent.

Leo, Patrick, Kevin, and occasionally Roger, Yoshi, and some others have been doing a weekly Podcast called This Week in Tech... TWiT site

Leo Laporte

[Teja]

I liked Kevin quite a bit, but Leo used to be my favorite. You can download quite a few of Call For Help episodes via bittorent over here. I'm off to download. :)

Re:Its about time!

[Rber0]

I do believe he plans on selling advertising space within the program. That's what he announced on the TWIT podcast (This Week In Tech)

Re:G4 must suck behind the scenes too

[LostCluster]

Actually, Kevin said in today's This Week in Tech podcast that the "Dark Tipper" character wasn't one he created for himself, it was an image created by Paul Block, the at-the-time executive producer of TSS. He'd rather be the producer setting up the segments Leo and Patrick did...

Re:Termination of Contract

[LostCluster]

Although the exact terms weren't released, it seems to be implied that Kevin actually had to "buy his way out" of his contract, as he refers to needing lawyers involved to get the contract terminated.

Re:Best of luck to him...

[mattkinabrewmindspri]

That's not what he said on this week's TWIT.

Re:he forgot this...!

[labratuk]

why on Earth would anybody want to choose a format like Fluendo that is hardly known?

Fluendo is not a codec. Fluendo is a company that builds products using gstreamer. One of their products is an implementation of the theora and vorbis decoders in java. So people can watch live streams without installing anything. If they really want to. The streams themselves are usually just theora streams.

You've both rather misunderstood what this java player is about.

IRC Channel

[MHobbit]

Now that the site's apparently back up for the time being, at 8:00PM PST, the first episode of Systm will be released... the IRC channel that you may want to join is located on the irc.dslextreme.com server, in the #systm channel.

Re:IRC Channel

[OZLORD]

down again as of 8:08PM

Mailing list post

[FlyingBlind13]

Just got this mail from Systm:

--------------------
thebroken newsletter
--------------------

Systm release tonight!
From the creators of thebroken comes a new downloadable tech show: "Systm" (pronounced system). While Systm is a general interest HOW-TO show, thebroken will continue to have 40'z and hacking ;)

Episode #1 will be released tonight at 8:00PM PST! To celebrate, we will be throwing a house party starting at 6:00PM. We'll fire up our live webcam of the festivities along with an IRC chat room. Chat with Kevin, Dan, Keith and Ron (systm/thebroken crew) along with other TechTV staffers (Leo, Pat, Yoshi, Martin, Alex, and others (Ramzi) have all been invited).

Visit the website now: http://systm.org/

---

When is thebroken episode 4 coming out?

After several weeks of lawyer negotations with G4 (my 9-5 job), they have agreed to release me from my contract. Friday May 27th 2005 marks my last day on the G4 network. That means we are focusing on thebroken / Systm FULL TIME! We are starting to plan the next episode of thebroken now, and we'll send out another update as we get closer to the release! Now that this is our full-time job, expect to see many more video releases coming your way!

More info:
http://www.kevinrose.com/
http://systm.org/

- thebroken crew

Systm Torrents

[FlyingBlind13]

Here are the torrents for the videos:

http://www.prolexic.com/systm/systm--0001--warspyi ngbox--large.xvid.avi.torrent

http://www.prolexic.com/systm/systm--0001--warspyi ngbox--large.wmv.torrent

Re:Systm Torrents

[Anonymous Coward]

The torrents are finally starting to pick up speed now. I already watched the episode, it's a little piece on building your own warspying kit. It's basically like a single segment on the old TSS with the 'bonus web footage.'

the file size on the movie is unnecisarily large, for a 10 minute clip it's taking 156 MB, it's pretty clear that the video was put through a couple passes of mpeg encoding prior to being xvid encoded, which caused video degredation, and the inflated file size. If they were using a DV cav to record the clips, they should have directly converted them, and manually tuned the xvid settings, they should have been able to get that quality feed out of a 70 MB xvid.. I know anime works a little better with xvid, but I've got full looks as good as DVD quality anime xvid/divx that use 1/2 the bits per frame, mathematically over this show.. which has below broadcast quality compression artifacting..

The way the fansub groups get quality that high, with those low of bitrates is by manually tweaking, and AVOIDING transcoding whenever possible. the DV format iteslf is a lossy format, so I would reccommend working on the video in a huffyuv or similar lossless codec.. Yeah huffyuv is larger than DV but i seriously think they first changed the dv to mpeg-2 to make the file sizes smaller (and thus easier for lame software to edit them) and then performed multiple edits on the mpeg-2, changing mpeg-2 into mpeg-2, adding several generations of loss into the video before finally shrinking it down with 'default' settings for xvid..

My personal reccomendation for a suitable video editing box would be a dual processor system, with 8-16GB of system ram, and a RAID array consisting of 4, 400 GB hds.
Of course, it's not a perfect world, so you can always work on a system with 2GB of ram, as long as you keep the clips about 1 GB in size, and then splice them all together with a video joiner. (joiners just strip/modify the headers, and put the video data seemleslly together without modifying the data, so filesystem IO is going to be the bottleneck on a joiner)

Direct Video Links

[LogicX]

For those of you not wanting to deal with torrents, Here's some links from a handful of dedicated boxes, each can push 100Mbit/sec:

http://fpux.com/systm/systm--0001--warspyingbox--l arge.xvid.avi

http://mirror.fpux.com/systm/systm--0001--warspyin gbox--large.xvid.avi

http://mirror2.fpux.com/systm/systm--0001--warspyi ngbox--large.xvid.avi

http://mirror3.fpux.com/systm/systm--0001--warspyi ngbox--large.xvid.avi

In case I have to update these URLs, see the post on my blog: http://fpux.com/