Allen Day’s Weblog

I just found Chris Garrett’s excellent article on bookmarking via copyblogger.  I’m consistently surprised by how many people I know are on Facebook and MySpace, but not on Del.icio.us, the best social site of them all.  As discussed in the article, Del.icio.us also consistently trumps Digg, Reddit, and the rest with top-notch content on the “popular” and “network” pages.

Of course I Del.icio.us bookmarked the bookmarking article.  Self-referential, meta-fun!

Robert Swain’s FFmpeg / h.264 encoding tips saved me a ton of time getting an optimal set of h.264 encoding parameters.  Even as an advanced user and occassional hacker on the FFmpeg codebase I haven’t seen some of the tricks used here!  He even has some iPod and PSP specific pages.  Thanks Rob!

I just installed the Mowser Wordpress Plugin from Mike Rowehl. It’s a good solution for making the blog viewable for mobiles, and I like it a lot better than the mobile template in use on the TinyTube blog, which was a hack to get working anyway.

Need to figure out if this Mowser thing has mobile-compatible CAPTCHA support, that was an even bigger hack IIRC.

I’m going to refer to the iPod Touch as the iTouch when I write, it’s easier.

Anyway, I bought an iTouch earlier today, or rather TinyTube bought one b/c there are a lot of Apple mobile user-agents showing up over there. We want to be able to test for the Apple devices, but there are no good iPhone emulators available that I’m aware of.

I figured out earlier how to stream video to the iPhone, and it turns out that the iTouch works the same way. Easy. Basically it uses the Range: HTTP header to buffer chunks of the file for playback. It’s progressive streaming the video. Audio files work the same way. I’ve been able to get this to work with MP3 files, but not (yet) AAC files. Great, so we can stream audio files off our server to the iTouch.

But what about MP3 net radio, does it work? Nope. I tried surfing over to Shoutcast on the iTouch and using the .pls files there to stream. No go. Looks like the iTouch doesn’t understand how to parse .pls or .m3u files. I then tried ripping an Icecast URL directly out of a .pls file. Again, no go. Looks like the iTouch doesn’t understand Icecast protocol either.

Hmm… but it is able to stream static audio files okay. So, is there a way to trick iTouch into treating the Icecast stream as a static file? Of course the answer is yes, and my next technical post will cover some of the details on how to make it happen.

For now you can just listen to the result, it’s serving up the “Groove Salad” station I found on Shoutcast. Hit this on your thing: http://sparkle.wooly.org/cgi-bin/iStream.

Giving blogging another go.