MeBeam

Red5 is red hot

In the world of online video, specifically flash based video, there are very few choices when it comes to serving. On one hand you have the Adobe Flash Media Server with a pricing model which makes you think "yeah, whatever" , then we have the Wowza Media Server which still relatively new has a better pricing model, but still far too expensive in todays age of free and open source software. Finally you have the Red5 Media Server which is completely free.

Generally I stay away from open source products, only because I usually find them buggy, and there are so many people working on it, its hard to maintain a stable version.. For MeBeam the majority of our network is built on proprietary technology, consisting of several types of servers, working together..

For my friends who know me, I am first an assembler programmer and then C; so I'm very much into pushing the speed limits of what the technology of a given day can do - this is the curse of guys who had their start in development, making games in the day of the commodore 64 - never being satisfied, forever tweaking code, trying to squeeze every last possible cycle from their processors..

I've always considered, Java a toy - a proto-typing language at best - but recently, some people who I have been working with, especially Steven Gong who is one of the guys from the Red5 development team, has really impressed me, with what they are achieving using Java.

Red5 is an open-source alternative to the Flash Media Server, and can do pretty much was FMS can do, but it's completely free.. Recently the guys from Red5, have been working on clustering technology, which is a fancy word for joining several servers together to act as one super server..

If you are a developer, and interested in getting into online video, I give the Red5 boys, two thumbs up;

What's cooking in my lab ?

More than likely, I'm going to regret posting this, because, without a doubt, I'm going to get some emails, saying there are bugs.

I'm experimenting with a different way of transmitting video to the MeBeam network, and I have setup a page, where you can see its progress.

I am hopeful and fairly confident, that I can boost MeBeam up to 16 video windows, and still maintain the same bandwidth and processing requirements.

So, please treat this link as a pre-alpha test ( in other words, purely experimental ), and likely to be nothing more than a waste of your time..

apologies in advance.

Numero Uno

Version 1.0 is coming along nicely, and it will have some very interesting features, some of which you would have never seen before. The main reason for this post, is to make notice, that the Ajax chat feature which I mentioned in my previous post, has been taken out, because it just didn't work the way I expected.

There is one feature which will be available in version one, which I am most excited about, and that is the ability to have a contact list, but with a very important twist. Unlike other contact lists that you may use skype, msn etc , MeBeam's contact list also works without requiring you to register or have a username...

The first thing you probably are thinking is, 'how can you have a contact list, and how can you add people, if there is no way to identify a user'.. Aha, that's the interesting part.. Face recognition maybe ? Maybe something more exotic ? .

You won't need to wait too much longer to see how it works.

Ajax chat rooms

A small feature will be added to MeBeam tonight, to help people find others to chat with. If you create a MeBeam video room, with the last character of it's name being a dollar sign (the $ key which is used in money) the room will be made public.

e.g BensRoom$ is a public chat room.

The list of public chat rooms can be found by clicking the chat rooms link which
is located on the MeBeam site.

The list of rooms will be updated every few seconds, and because it's based on
Ajax technology, there will be no need to refresh the page..

Get a job Sha na na na

JobX, the brain child of Simon Robinson and Richard Mare, is a new Australian job board, which has just been launched, is going to make the other job boards such as Monster, Seek, Career one, sit up and take notice.

I know that's a pretty bold statement to make, considering how huge these other job boards are, but JobX has a secret weapon - that secret weapon is Monique. Monique which is the code name for the corporate version of MeBeam, has been designed from the ground up to be a platform for all things video. Imagine, submitting your CV as a video post, and having employers browsing potential candiates by these video CV's, and then conducting the job interview by video conference, with the ability to record these video conferences and play them back at any time.

JobX is live, with the ability to post, manage and watch video CV's right now; multi-party video interviews and interview recording will be available when the Monique platform is launched in the next couple of months. The Monique platform, will include an in built API, so that anyone can build services that will satisfy all their communications needs. I guess if worse comes to worse, and MeBeam is a flop, I'll probably get preferential treatment at JobX when applying for my next job at pizza hut.