Note that its flagship station also runs on AM, not FM. Low-power FM simply isn't worth it -- too many hurdles to jump through on the regulatory level, and you'll get nailed for piracy if you try to run too big.
You can put a working studio together for fairly cheap, but it's still in the $3K and up range. And Firewire is great for desktop video, but not so good as a studio interconnect.
A friend of mine has been involved in his local public access station for some time, and recently Comcast muscled in and grabbed a big chunk of their studio space. They wound up losing a lot of their programming and had to move to the town high school to get the space back.
I think Nullsoft is trying to do a sort of broadband TV network thingy with Shoutcast, though I don't know too much about it -- among other things they're using Ogg Theora (or a variation thereof), which is a little dicey in terms of support.
What I think is really missing is the set-top box. I had this idea of using a modded Xbox running Linux -- cheap, simple mod, easily obtained with built-in HDTV support -- as the set-top box. Never got around to implementing it though, because of bandwidth issues -- the video stream would have to be around 4-6Mbps so it doesn't completely saturate the pipe, and frankly I just don't know that much about IP multicast to implement it in a bandwidth-efficient manner.
But yeah. We've got the hardware -- the Xbox is perfect for it, in terms of price, horsepower, and availability. What's missing is a workable streaming server that doesn't run up massive bandwidth bills and a codec that will allow us to cram a workable signal (not necessarily hi-def, but that'd be nice) into a fairly small pipe.
Depends on the intent of the people doing the Podcasting, I guess. I would say that if they are in fact set up for Podcasting, there's no problem with it, because they're expecting it.
I should have said that they don't make pocket transmitters for AM, though you can buy transmitters designed for stationary use in both kit and turnkey form. You could hook up your iPod and entertain most of an average-sized town with one of those, though there'd be little point in doing it in the car.
Re:broad-pod-casting!
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How to Podcast
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I think that's exactly what he had in mind, though I don't think it's a terribly practical idea on the FM band, simply because you can't broadcast to more than a couple of cars at a time. It would work a little better on AM (part 15 rules are much more lenient on the AM bands), but really there's a reason they don't do mobile broadcasting.
Of course they don't make transmitters for AM, and it's illegal to mod something like an FM transmitter because of something called type-acceptance -- in other words, the FCC gives your "pocket radio station" implicit approval because it knows what the device is supposed to be capable of. If you mod it, it's no longer legal to use because it doesn't fit the profile that the FCC has on file. (Your mileage/kilometrage may vary outside the United States.) This is the same rule that makes it illegal to mod FRS or CB gear.
My car has a total of fourteen custom-made CD mixes in it, and would have more if my burner was working. Fortunately, eastern MA isn't a total radio wasteland... we only have four ClearChannel stations in Metro Boston.
So start your own. Get an AM transmitter -- you can cover most of an average-sized town on the 100mW Part 15 AM limit, whereas FM is pretty much Fed-bait if it gets out of your backyard -- and plug it into a computer or MP3 player. It's not hard.
Actually such a thing does exist already -- check out the C. Crane Versacorder (tape) and Radio YourWay (TiVo-like MP3 recorder) from ccrane.com. They're marketed to people who buy the CCRadioPlus but they'll work with anything with a headphone jack, I believe.
(The CCRadioPlus in and of itself rocks technically, but it's limited to pretty much the same old crap programming, only from further away. It's marketed as the ultimate radio for AM talk.)
The RadioSHARK rocks. Too bad most of the good music these days is online... long live StreamRipper...
Speaking of online music, I'd like to plug my new favorite radio station, www.wxrv.com. It's a station out of northeastern Massachusetts -- I listen to it on the web because I can't get the signal on Cape Cod, but it's a great station.
It's probably not the only thing -- check out www.abfreeradio.com for one example of a well-run community affairs station. Also, at least one religious group, Calvary Chapel, has shown a tendency to abuse the LPFM process by trying to build a satellite network of LPFM stations.
I find HDTV seldom actually lives up to billing, at least from what I've seen in stores. The image tends to be weirdly patchy, and the cameramen (especially in sports events) don't quite seem to know what they're doing, so the shot framing is done in weird ways that don't quite seem appropriate.
Digital can be very good, but when it's compressed it has to be done exactly right.
Of course you do. You also lose tons of resolution when you record SDTV onto VHS -- it's nothing new. Even the best MiniDV or Betacam signal is going to look like crap on VHS compared to the original.
Try doing video production from DVD-R. The tools out there for low-to-midrange video production tend to like DV-25 signals, which are largely tape-based (MiniDV primarily, as well as DVCPRO and Digital8). I'm sure hard-drive based DV-25 units can be built trivially, but I have yet to hear of one, and given the flexibility gained from using removable media ($6 for 11GB/1hr SDTV on a MiniDV tape) I don't think I'd switch over any time soon.
Check out www.coolatoola.com -- they provide a tool for doing data backups using MacOS X and a DV camcorder. I'd be very surprised if their product was the only one doing that trick, too -- with the right tools, MiniDV is one of the best bargains going for data backup capacity.
To put it in perspective, consider that a FireWire connection is capable of 400Mbps, and MiniDV data streams operate a hair under 30Mbps (25Mbps for the video stream with standard 5:1 compression, the rest a PCM audio stream). Most computers less than six or seven years old can handle that on the PCI bus, and a broadcast HDTV signal (or, if you're doing production on a JVC GR-HD1, HDV data stream) is only 2/3 as wide. And you get better color sampling to boot.
Cassette won't disappear completely as long as there's still a market for ultra-low-cost recording devices that don't need high quality. It is true that the bottom has fallen out of the recorded cassette market -- if the recording industry ever allows CDs to be as cheap as they should be, the remaining market for prerecorded cassettes will vanish almost instantly. But I think it'll remain a niche market for people who need to record lectures and the like, at least until digital recording devices (with much better quality than tape) hit the ~$30 price point. And even then tape will still be needed for some archiving purposes.
I have heard one of the problems with signed English is that it's actually rather tiring to the signer -- ASL is more streamlined in that regard.
Not being deaf myself (I have a deaf cousin, but I don't know much about his day-to-day life), I can't presume to speak, but I would think that it's best to teach both approaches -- ASL as the "native" language, with some teaching of how to communicate with the non-deaf world.
As a last note, this was an issue on an episode of ER a number of years ago -- Benton, in trying to find the best way to educate his deaf son, was considering a cochlear implant, and Dr. Weaver sent him to a doctor who was, if you will, more of a militant, who thought it would be compromising the child's identity to do that. (Benton ultimately decided to go for the implant anyway, prefering to try to fix the child's deafness rather than work around it.)
Many languages do that, actually -- look at the opposition of "ser" and "estar" in Spanish and Portuguese for the most familiar example. People who take issue with the use of Black American English (I refuse to use the idiotic term "ebonics") don't really get the nuances of dialect formation or the possibilities of grammatical influence from other languages.
You want another example, the use of "youse" and "y'all" in various dialects of English (most notably northeastern urban and southern United States, respectively). Since "you" no longer performs its traditional function of second-person plural and "thou" has largely passed out of use except in some dialects in England, the second-person plural has regenerated in those forms, simply because sometimes it's useful to make a distinction between "you" and "y'all".
How does one hook a mike up to the line in jack on a minidisc, anyway? Is it easy to buy a mike with a preamp, or do you have to do some special trick?
Lockin, I'm sure. Common sense says they should have gone with USB for the controller pads too, but they didn't even though they did put USB in the hardware.
ATSC has the feeling of something that was ratified and slammed out the door even though everyone knew it wasn't finished and contained too much junk. And I'm still not convinced the digital switchover is going to happen in '06 -- there's simply too much analog installed base, and the US is not known for straightforward technology uptake (*cough*GSM vs CDMA vs iDEN vs everything else*cough*).
I mean, maybe it can be done. But until I see ATSC broadcast tuners available at Nobody Beats the Circuit Buy for less than $100, I won't believe it.
sorta-kinda -- the Betacam formats were designed to leverage Sony's experience with Betamax tape transports, but from my understanding the fundamental recording formats are very different. Sort of like the difference between Hi8 and Digital8 -- the only thing they have in common is identical media.
DAT wasn't intended as a pro format, though -- it's just that it was so badly crippled as a consumer format that it never caught on outside music studios. Minidisc suffered nearly the same fate -- it's nearly impossible to find an MD player with a mic jack, and it's really only found any kind of success in the last five years or so as a "poor man's DAT". (I find myself wondering how MiniDV slipped past the MPAA -- broadcast quality video with PCM audio? MiniDV is some truly amazing stuff for a consumer format...)
I do agree with your central point. I think also that I should point out that laserdisc already existed -- the main problem was probably the size and expense, two factors solved in short order by DVD. With all the issues of laserdisc solved, DVD picked up with insane speed, and there you go -- price crash, studios coerced into accepting it because of market conditions, bada bing, bada bang.
And I also agree with you about DVD-A and SACD -- they really only appeal to a small minority of educated audiophiles (as opposed to the green marker tweako crowd). Surround sound is really only good for live music anyway -- most studio music isn't mixed with surround in mind, and wouldn't gain much of anything if it was. Movie soundtracks, concert hall recordings, that's where the surround formats will shine.
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Note that its flagship station also runs on AM, not FM. Low-power FM simply isn't worth it -- too many hurdles to jump through on the regulatory level, and you'll get nailed for piracy if you try to run too big.
How much per studio?!
You can put a working studio together for fairly cheap, but it's still in the $3K and up range. And Firewire is great for desktop video, but not so good as a studio interconnect.
A friend of mine has been involved in his local public access station for some time, and recently Comcast muscled in and grabbed a big chunk of their studio space. They wound up losing a lot of their programming and had to move to the town high school to get the space back.
Actually, if you've ever seen your local public access station, at least a third of the programming is religious in nature.
I think Nullsoft is trying to do a sort of broadband TV network thingy with Shoutcast, though I don't know too much about it -- among other things they're using Ogg Theora (or a variation thereof), which is a little dicey in terms of support.
What I think is really missing is the set-top box. I had this idea of using a modded Xbox running Linux -- cheap, simple mod, easily obtained with built-in HDTV support -- as the set-top box. Never got around to implementing it though, because of bandwidth issues -- the video stream would have to be around 4-6Mbps so it doesn't completely saturate the pipe, and frankly I just don't know that much about IP multicast to implement it in a bandwidth-efficient manner.
But yeah. We've got the hardware -- the Xbox is perfect for it, in terms of price, horsepower, and availability. What's missing is a workable streaming server that doesn't run up massive bandwidth bills and a codec that will allow us to cram a workable signal (not necessarily hi-def, but that'd be nice) into a fairly small pipe.
Depends on the intent of the people doing the Podcasting, I guess. I would say that if they are in fact set up for Podcasting, there's no problem with it, because they're expecting it.
I should have said that they don't make pocket transmitters for AM, though you can buy transmitters designed for stationary use in both kit and turnkey form. You could hook up your iPod and entertain most of an average-sized town with one of those, though there'd be little point in doing it in the car.
I think that's exactly what he had in mind, though I don't think it's a terribly practical idea on the FM band, simply because you can't broadcast to more than a couple of cars at a time. It would work a little better on AM (part 15 rules are much more lenient on the AM bands), but really there's a reason they don't do mobile broadcasting.
Of course they don't make transmitters for AM, and it's illegal to mod something like an FM transmitter because of something called type-acceptance -- in other words, the FCC gives your "pocket radio station" implicit approval because it knows what the device is supposed to be capable of. If you mod it, it's no longer legal to use because it doesn't fit the profile that the FCC has on file. (Your mileage/kilometrage may vary outside the United States.) This is the same rule that makes it illegal to mod FRS or CB gear.
My car has a total of fourteen custom-made CD mixes in it, and would have more if my burner was working. Fortunately, eastern MA isn't a total radio wasteland... we only have four ClearChannel stations in Metro Boston.
So start your own. Get an AM transmitter -- you can cover most of an average-sized town on the 100mW Part 15 AM limit, whereas FM is pretty much Fed-bait if it gets out of your backyard -- and plug it into a computer or MP3 player. It's not hard.
(The CCRadioPlus in and of itself rocks technically, but it's limited to pretty much the same old crap programming, only from further away. It's marketed as the ultimate radio for AM talk.)
Or, put differently...
The RadioSHARK rocks. Too bad most of the good music these days is online... long live StreamRipper...
Speaking of online music, I'd like to plug my new favorite radio station, www.wxrv.com. It's a station out of northeastern Massachusetts -- I listen to it on the web because I can't get the signal on Cape Cod, but it's a great station.
It's probably not the only thing -- check out www.abfreeradio.com for one example of a well-run community affairs station. Also, at least one religious group, Calvary Chapel, has shown a tendency to abuse the LPFM process by trying to build a satellite network of LPFM stations.
I find HDTV seldom actually lives up to billing, at least from what I've seen in stores. The image tends to be weirdly patchy, and the cameramen (especially in sports events) don't quite seem to know what they're doing, so the shot framing is done in weird ways that don't quite seem appropriate.
Digital can be very good, but when it's compressed it has to be done exactly right.
Of course you do. You also lose tons of resolution when you record SDTV onto VHS -- it's nothing new. Even the best MiniDV or Betacam signal is going to look like crap on VHS compared to the original.
Try doing video production from DVD-R. The tools out there for low-to-midrange video production tend to like DV-25 signals, which are largely tape-based (MiniDV primarily, as well as DVCPRO and Digital8). I'm sure hard-drive based DV-25 units can be built trivially, but I have yet to hear of one, and given the flexibility gained from using removable media ($6 for 11GB/1hr SDTV on a MiniDV tape) I don't think I'd switch over any time soon.
Check out www.coolatoola.com -- they provide a tool for doing data backups using MacOS X and a DV camcorder. I'd be very surprised if their product was the only one doing that trick, too -- with the right tools, MiniDV is one of the best bargains going for data backup capacity.
To put it in perspective, consider that a FireWire connection is capable of 400Mbps, and MiniDV data streams operate a hair under 30Mbps (25Mbps for the video stream with standard 5:1 compression, the rest a PCM audio stream). Most computers less than six or seven years old can handle that on the PCI bus, and a broadcast HDTV signal (or, if you're doing production on a JVC GR-HD1, HDV data stream) is only 2/3 as wide. And you get better color sampling to boot.
Cassette won't disappear completely as long as there's still a market for ultra-low-cost recording devices that don't need high quality. It is true that the bottom has fallen out of the recorded cassette market -- if the recording industry ever allows CDs to be as cheap as they should be, the remaining market for prerecorded cassettes will vanish almost instantly. But I think it'll remain a niche market for people who need to record lectures and the like, at least until digital recording devices (with much better quality than tape) hit the ~$30 price point. And even then tape will still be needed for some archiving purposes.
I have heard one of the problems with signed English is that it's actually rather tiring to the signer -- ASL is more streamlined in that regard.
Not being deaf myself (I have a deaf cousin, but I don't know much about his day-to-day life), I can't presume to speak, but I would think that it's best to teach both approaches -- ASL as the "native" language, with some teaching of how to communicate with the non-deaf world.
As a last note, this was an issue on an episode of ER a number of years ago -- Benton, in trying to find the best way to educate his deaf son, was considering a cochlear implant, and Dr. Weaver sent him to a doctor who was, if you will, more of a militant, who thought it would be compromising the child's identity to do that. (Benton ultimately decided to go for the implant anyway, prefering to try to fix the child's deafness rather than work around it.)
Many languages do that, actually -- look at the opposition of "ser" and "estar" in Spanish and Portuguese for the most familiar example. People who take issue with the use of Black American English (I refuse to use the idiotic term "ebonics") don't really get the nuances of dialect formation or the possibilities of grammatical influence from other languages.
You want another example, the use of "youse" and "y'all" in various dialects of English (most notably northeastern urban and southern United States, respectively). Since "you" no longer performs its traditional function of second-person plural and "thou" has largely passed out of use except in some dialects in England, the second-person plural has regenerated in those forms, simply because sometimes it's useful to make a distinction between "you" and "y'all".
How does one hook a mike up to the line in jack on a minidisc, anyway? Is it easy to buy a mike with a preamp, or do you have to do some special trick?
Lockin, I'm sure. Common sense says they should have gone with USB for the controller pads too, but they didn't even though they did put USB in the hardware.
ATSC has the feeling of something that was ratified and slammed out the door even though everyone knew it wasn't finished and contained too much junk. And I'm still not convinced the digital switchover is going to happen in '06 -- there's simply too much analog installed base, and the US is not known for straightforward technology uptake (*cough*GSM vs CDMA vs iDEN vs everything else*cough*).
I mean, maybe it can be done. But until I see ATSC broadcast tuners available at Nobody Beats the Circuit Buy for less than $100, I won't believe it.
sorta-kinda -- the Betacam formats were designed to leverage Sony's experience with Betamax tape transports, but from my understanding the fundamental recording formats are very different. Sort of like the difference between Hi8 and Digital8 -- the only thing they have in common is identical media.
DAT wasn't intended as a pro format, though -- it's just that it was so badly crippled as a consumer format that it never caught on outside music studios. Minidisc suffered nearly the same fate -- it's nearly impossible to find an MD player with a mic jack, and it's really only found any kind of success in the last five years or so as a "poor man's DAT". (I find myself wondering how MiniDV slipped past the MPAA -- broadcast quality video with PCM audio? MiniDV is some truly amazing stuff for a consumer format...)
I do agree with your central point. I think also that I should point out that laserdisc already existed -- the main problem was probably the size and expense, two factors solved in short order by DVD. With all the issues of laserdisc solved, DVD picked up with insane speed, and there you go -- price crash, studios coerced into accepting it because of market conditions, bada bing, bada bang.
And I also agree with you about DVD-A and SACD -- they really only appeal to a small minority of educated audiophiles (as opposed to the green marker tweako crowd). Surround sound is really only good for live music anyway -- most studio music isn't mixed with surround in mind, and wouldn't gain much of anything if it was. Movie soundtracks, concert hall recordings, that's where the surround formats will shine.