Lifecasting - continued (The Technical Side)

Finally… The Technical Side

The video picture is good quality generally if the foreground is lighted well and nothing in the scene is moving. However, when something in the picture frame is moving quickly or the camera is moving so everything in the picture is moving fast, objects are a blur because of low frame rates required to keep the video bandwidth at a minimum for wireless and Internet streaming.

At times the picture becomes very pixilated due to bandwidth restrictions. If this happens often you will loose the picture entirely because the video in the buffer runs out and it has to fill the buffer again before refreshing the image.

These problems with the video are common in this type of setup. The entire process of pumping live steaming audio and video through a computer with a wireless connection to the Internet is all very bandwidth limited. In addition to buffering the video, it is highly compressed to reduce the bandwidth of the signal even more.

The way compression works, it relies on passing only the data that changes from frame to frame. If the camera is moving too many pixels (picture elements) change and the data rate climbs rapidly under this situation. However, as the bandwidth provided by the infrastructure of an ISP increase over time, you will begin to see the transmission quality rise as a result and less of these frustrating artifacts.

Technical improvements are available now that could improve the lifecasting experience. If you take your mobile rig into a bar, low light levels and high background noise limits its value in those circumstances. The audio in general is very problematic when mobile.

This could improve vastly with current technology such as digital audio processing that could compress the audio so the dynamic range is not so sever and filter out unwanted background nose and clutter, but that would be too expensive for the average lifecasters to afford. There are other ways to improve both audio and video quality with currently technology, but this medium has yet to have a financial model to support such improvements.

The worst part about taking lifecasting mobile is the rig in tow, a webcam with microphone and a very large purse or bag for laptop, batteries and cables (see Let’s Have Coffee). It is a bit too bulky and could probably be much smaller and lighter with better equipment that is now available no, although very expensive for commercial enterprises or us civilians.

I know for certain that the US military is currently spending huge amounts of our tax dollars on research for mobile video streaming and compression technology development. It is very important to the military to develop this technology to a high degree of performance so it can used to send small airplanes (very small) and robots into harms way before soldiers have to enter a territory that will lower the risk to our soldiers. Both are planned to have lethal weapons on some that can be fired at will by a controller anywhere in the world, so the quality must be superb. See.. Lisa is not far off with her domestic bot experimentation.

Military technology always and eventually filters down for civilian and commercial entities, even the lifecaster community eventually. Maybe one day, Justin, Justine, Lisa, WebDog and other lifecasters will have a wireless camera hid in a small hair clip with the transmitter and processor attached to their keychain... just a thought.

© 2007 George Wilkinson, george@atssupport.com