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Digital Windows – DIY Passive Telepresence At Home
Long distances apart can make it tough to keep up friendships, and while the Internet has helped with this through the advent of e-mail, instant messaging and video conferencing like Skype none of these mediums can accurately duplicate the experience of being able to quickly ask and see “What’s going on?” to a friend or colleague across great distance.
E-mail is a bit too asynchronous. Instant messaging suffers the same problem, along with the lack of visual feedback and a frequently too small text window. Skype calls go the other direction, they’re slightly too synchronous: it’s not possible to automate them, and they use more bandwidth than something more laid back really needs to be successful. What’s missing is a passive solution to let people passively – and pervasively – interact with others with video feedback.
Enter the “Digital Window”. Originally conceived a year or two ago, the idea is simple: a panel mounted in a visible location connected to a camera which shows a passive viewing portal into another space via a similar device located elsewhere. Glance out the window into a previously authenticated friend or colleague’s space and see what they’re up to, and start a conversation if it’s interesting. Time not spent in front of the computer is often when some of the most interesting projects take place and if nobody knows they’re happening, it’s impossible to collaborate and seek feedback.
The idea became reality with some minor revisions when a software developer friend recently got married – what better gift than writing a video conferencing appliance on dedicated hardware using nothing but off-the-shelf components? I collaborated with another member of our group across the country to make the system a reality, and we bootstrapped it from the ground up using it to help continue its own development once some basics were in place.
The wedding gift, our implementation of the digital window, consists of the client-side appliances: two Asus netbooks running Windows XP, configured to automatically begin broadcasting via their internal webcams using Windows Media Encoder 9, and load the Viewer application in a web browser. The viewer application itself is a web page hosted on the streaming server itself, a simple automatically-refreshing container loading a set of borderless Windows Media Player controls to display the streams. The viewer code is self-refreshing and requires no maintenance.
Windows Media Encoder 9 was somewhat difficult to find as it’s no longer officially supported, but it’s still available from Softpedia. Its replacement is the Windows Expressions Encoder, a commercial product with a free version, but it’s a heavier package and the Asus netbooks don’t need to waste cycles running a bigger application than necessary.
When the system first launches, it automatically launches a Visual Basic script via a shortcut in the Startup folder. Through some trial and error, we learned we needed to set the shortcut to launch the script minimized to avoid popping up a command prompt window over the output. The script then sets up an Internet Explorer window, the Viewer application, and launches Windows Media Encoder. The script can be found below, with some identifying information removed for security reasons – you’ll need to fill in your own URLs to use this code if you’re going to clone our setup yourself.
On Error Resume next
Set WshShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
Set objIE = CreateObject("InternetExplorer.Application")
Set sHTMLTitle = "Viewer Application"
Return = WshShell.Run("Custom.wme") 'Set this to the location of the .WME profile you created in Windows Media Encoder
WSCript.Sleep(60000) 'Sleep to let the encoder load - it does a lot of stuff on start-up.
objIE.StatusBar = 1
objIE.Toolbar = 1
objIE.Width = 1024
objIE.Height = 600
objIE.Left = 0
objIE.Top = 0
objIE.Visible = 1
objIE.Navigate "Viewer Application URL"
' Wait for IE to finish loading before continuing.
Do While objIE.Busy: Loop
Do While objIE.ReadyState <> 4: Loop
WScript.Sleep(5000)
Set EncoderAgent = CreateObject("WMEncAgt.WMEncoderAgent", "127.0.0.1") ' Grab the running encoder via the WMEncoderAgent.
Set Encoder = EncoderAgent.GetEncoder(EncoderAgent.EncoderNamesCollection.Item(0))
Encoder.Start ' Begin Streaming
WshShell.AppActivate("Viewer Application") 'Activate different possible titles of the window.
WshShell.AppActivate("Internet Explorer") 'Depends on the local system's configuration what IE is titled...covers possibilities.
WshShell.AppActivate("Windows Internet Explorer")
While 1=1 'Watchdog
Select Case Encoder.RunState
Case 5 '"STOPPED" State
WScript.Sleep 2500
Encoder.Start
WScript.Sleep 2500
WshShell.AppActivate("Viewer Application")
WshShell.AppActivate("Internet Explorer")
WshShell.AppActivate("Windows Internet Explorer")
WshShell.AppActivate("Site URL Goes Here in Titlebar")
WshShell.AppActivate("Site URL Goes Here in Titlebar - Viewer Application")
WScript.Sleep 100
End Select
Err.Clear
WScript.Sleep 1000
Wend
The script isn’t incredibly complicated. We’ve settled on using AppActivate commands because the programmatic pressing of the “Start Encoding” button in the watchdog loop causes Windows Media Encoder to pop to the foreground over the viewer, blocking the window – not what we want to happen. The AppActivate pops the viewer back to the foreground where it belongs
To make the system more robust and appliance-like, the system checks to see whether the encoder is active and if it’s not (due to a network drop or other connection error) to reconnect. The Asus netbooks have a webcam driver that likes to act up after a few days running, so we’ve configured them to reboot automatically at around 3AM every day. They’re configured to come online fully automatically, so this restart is seamless.
The result came out better than expected: by simply monitoring the encoder’s state and disabling popup error messages, the system is robust enough to overcome non-critical driver errors, client-side network drops, and even reconnect automatically if the server is taken offline due to connectivity or maintenance. It’s expandable, too: viewer can be transparently updated with new features (as it’s a web browser, after all) and new clients can be added limited only by your screen’s area. It’s also possible to create different viewer interfaces depending on the device – a flat panel monitor, a large TV or a netbook. The initial startup page could become a landing page, redirecting the viewer clients to pages based on their HTTP request, User-Agent, IP, or another mechanism.
The first time the system is configured, you must create a new Session in Windows Media Encoder and save it to a file on your hard drive. The Session contains the source, destination, security and formatting information for the stream. We’re streaming video only right now, although audio streaming may come in a later version. Unfortunately, a profile must be created for each system manually, as it contains information about the specific driver and device that will be used.
The Encoder session is configured in Push mode – connecting to the server directly, instead of the server connecting to the encoder. This allows the appliance to work from behind nearly all firewalls, and is an additional security feature as the encoder controlling the camera cannot be accessed from outside the network, so it’s not possible for an unauthorized party to tap into the video feed. Additional security (authentication and IP range) is provided on the server.
Finally, we’re streaming 320×240 at 4 FPS, ~100Kb/s. CBR was chosen due to its simplicity, as it’s less taxing on the Celeron and Atom CPUs in the netbooks – and although being labeled as constant, when the camera is pointed at an unchanging scene without much color the bandwidth really does drop down, for example if the camera is pointed at a wall, it’s shutter is closed, etc. This might seem low, but it’s designed to be highly portable and we had to keep screen resolution concerns in mind. The quality is quite acceptable for casual use as we’ve designed it.
We started off with four windows: one for each of us designers, one for the new couple to keep, and one for them to give away to someone else they’d like to bring into our shared sphere of passive video collaboration. More can be added limited only by bandwidth. The viewer application is quite simple, just some HTML and JavaScript to glue it all together. It’s based loosely on the reference code for an embedded Media Player provided by the server:
<html><head>
<META HTTP-EQUIV="PRAGMA" CONTENT="NO-CACHE">
<META HTTP-EQUIV="content-type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
<title>Viewer Application</title>
<style> BODY {
font-size : medium;
font-family : Tahoma, Arial, Sans Serif;
font-weight : normal;
font-style : normal;
color : #FFFFFF;
background-color : #000000;
border-style : none; }
A {
color : #66CCFF;
font-weight : bold; }
</style>
<script type="text/javascript">
function refresh() {
location.reload(true)
}
window.setInterval("refresh()",600000);
</script>
</head>
<body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" topmargin="0" leftmargin="0">
<table border="0" width="100%" height="80%" align="center">
<tr>
<td width="100%">
<P ALIGN="center">
<OBJECT CLASSID="clsid:6BF52A52-394A-11D3-B153-00C04F79FAA6" ID="WMP" WIDTH="320" HEIGHT="240" >
<PARAM NAME="Name" VALUE="WMP1">
<PARAM NAME="uiMode" VALUE="none">
<PARAM NAME="URL" VALUE="REDACTED1">
</OBJECT>
<OBJECT CLASSID="clsid:6BF52A52-394A-11D3-B153-00C04F79FAA6" ID="WMP" WIDTH="320" HEIGHT="240">
<PARAM NAME="Name" VALUE="WMP2">
<PARAM NAME="uiMode" VALUE="none">
<PARAM NAME="URL" VALUE="REDACTED2">
</OBJECT>
<P>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width="100%">
<P ALIGN="center">
<OBJECT CLASSID="clsid:6BF52A52-394A-11D3-B153-00C04F79FAA6" ID="WMP" WIDTH="320" HEIGHT="240">
<PARAM NAME="Name" VALUE="WMP3">
<PARAM NAME="uiMode" VALUE="none">
<PARAM NAME="URL" VALUE="REDACTED3">
</OBJECT>
<OBJECT CLASSID="clsid:6BF52A52-394A-11D3-B153-00C04F79FAA6" ID="WMP" WIDTH="320" HEIGHT="240">
<PARAM NAME="Name" VALUE="WMP4">
<PARAM NAME="uiMode" VALUE="none">
<PARAM NAME="URL" VALUE="REDACTED4">
</OBJECT>
</P>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width="100%">
<P align="center">
<A HREF="Viewer.html">Refresh</A> (10 Minute Auto)
</p>
</TD>
</TR>
</table>
</body>
</html>
It’s pretty simple and can be expanded or modified as needed.
On the server side, the viewer code and stream brokering is handled by Streaming Media Services running on Windows Server 2008 R2. The streaming is hosted on a business-class connection with a 5Mb/s upstream, which is more than sufficient for current and future applications: the incoming bandwidth scales linearly with the number of clients, and while the outgoing bandwidth scales as the square of the connected clients this issue is mitigated by controlling the encoder settings to use only approximately 100Kb/s per stream. Our four-encoder system uses only 400Kb/s downstream bandwidth and 1.6Mb/s upstream – it will scale transparently to around 12 clients before becoming bottlenecked on the connection, or around 8 clients with higher resolution and audio.
Netflix Needs More Content
There’s a lot of uproar about the Netflix price increases lately. I ditched my Cable TV subscription about 6 months ago and haven’t looked back, relying on Netflix, Hulu, YouTube and television network sites to watch the shows over the Internet. Personally, I don’t care all that much as I’m not on a DVD plan – but I’m starting to think about cancelling my streaming-only service. It’s easy to use and has good video quality…but never has the content I’m looking for.
I jumped on their search for a quick check of what I could come up with. I searched for programs I’ve thought about/heard about/read about/talked about/remembered in the last week or two. The results?
- Babylon 5 (1994-1998) – Nope
- Futurama (1999-)- Partial (Stops at 2009)
- Harry Potter – Nope (Not a single one)
- Independence Day (1996) - Nope
- It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (2005-2009) – Nope
- Lord of the Rings (2001-2003) - Partial (only part 1/3)
- Shrek Anything - Nope (and I shudder to realize there are in fact 8 Shrek movies)
- The Walking Dead (2010) – Nope
- V (1980s or 2010) – Nope
That’s a set of largely mainstream programming spanning several genres and market segments but they’re all long-running well rated television shows and several critically acclaimed high-performing feature films. And they’re not available. That doesn’t leave me with a lot of options for getting the content – I can buy it on DVD, but for something I’m only interested in watching once every few years, spending $50 on a DVD Box Set isn’t a good bet. (Not to mention, who uses physical media anymore?) It’s not available anywhere else for legitimate streaming, either. This leaves me with two options: don’t consume that content or download it from a file-sharing site. I find BitTorrent annoying for many reasons, so end up not doing anything followed by writing about it on the Internet.
Netflix really does need to do something, though. I haven’t actually used my subscription in the last 3 months because nothing I wanted to watch was available. It’s not going to make much sense to keep paying for something I “might” use for much longer. Netflix may end up losing another customer – not because of the price hikes, but because the news about the price hikes has made me really evaluate how much value I’m actually getting from the service. The answer seems to be “not much” – and since the monthly fee is about equal to two cups of morning coffee, that’s really not a very glowing endorsement.
Windows DNLA support, and some thoughts for the future.
Microsoft recently announced that a new crop of high-end audio receivers, specifically the Onkyo TX-NR3008 and TX-NR5008 are Windows 7 Certified with DNLA.
The Onkyo TX-NR5008 receiver, costing $2700.
The Windows Blog talks about the exciting new possibilities this opens with the Play To technology:
In the case of the receivers, you can easily play music from your PC to these devices with just the right-click of your mouse. If you haven’t used Play To before, just open Windows Media Player or Windows Explorer. Right click on your audio track and select “Play to.” The Play To session will open and you’ll be enjoying your favorite media on your Onkyo receiver. You can also select the “Play to” button above the now playing list in Windows Media Player.
They’re so close to having a killer app that would make the Windows 7 PC the center of any multimedia system, single or multi-room by leveraging the power of the local network, but this implementation is too far off the mark to be worthwhile. A receiver should be a universal sink for audio, not just a receptacle for certain authorized actions and content types. Here’s what I propose that would make it better:
1. Ability to redirect the sound mixer’s final output to the receiver over the network. Ideally, this would result in the receiver appearing as an audio output device in the mixer through its network connection. All audio from the computer could then be directed through the receiver, without actually having to hook them up together except through a network connection. (Bonus points for Wireless-N support.)
2. Revisions to the Windows sound model to actually allow for multiple outputs. I suspect this is disabled for reasons relating to DRM, but I picture something like a visual mixer that lets me make many-to-many mappings between audio producing applications and audio output devices, graphically. I’ve made a mock-up of what I think this could look like, showing multiple sources and multiple applications.
I picture being able to drag and drop applications between the sections to move them; perhaps right-click and drag to clone an application’s audio output stream so it can be sent to multiple devices. Clicking the “X” button would remove the audio source from that output if the option is available.
Just think about it: a Windows 7 PC could become the entire center of a multi-room networked entertainment system. Drag and drop to send audio from your MP3 collection out to the networked receiver in the garage or your kids room…set every stereo in the house to the same music by cloning an output stream multiple times and sending it to every device simultaneously…and the possibilities grow further if it’s expanded to video.
This is what I’d like to see Windows do for audio. As it stands now, I just hook my receiver up to the computer directly because no network audio solution has worked well enough for me. It’s mainly because the network audio applications are too focused on media files and not audio streams. Networks are getting faster and more ubiquitous, it’s time to shift the focus back to the network from the media itself to really enable some innovation.
The Amazing Shrinking Netflix Catalog
Following up on my complaint about Netflix streaming not having enough content, I’ve discovered something even more annoying: apparently content that’s previously been there is rotated or otherwise phased out.
I’d been working on translating the Greek text from the Japanese TV show via Netflix Streaming, but got sidetracked and didn’t get through the entire thing. When I went to go through a few more episodes today, I was helpfully greeted with this:
Not only is there a limited selection, apparently it’s not even consistent.
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