I was having trouble getting my video uploaded to the new Google Video beta service. Lo and behold I discovered the problem had to do with case sensitivity!

Eventually the idea is that those who submit their own original videos and are approved will show up on the Google Video service (pictured below):

Description of problem
When I used ‘tdavid’ at gmail.com the Google Video Upload client was accepting that and my password just fine and sending off my files to a locaton that was not syncronized with my Google account which is actually at TDavid at gmail.com. Note the first two letters in my name are capitalized.

I have notified Google of this issue already, but in the meantime anybody else that is uploading videos and not seeing them in the Google Video area, make sure your login information between Google Video Upload client and your online Google account matches CaSE seNsitiveLy. Unix (which Google Video is using on the backend) is case sensitive, Windows doesn’t seem to care. If these two don’t match up, however, your uploaded videos will appear to work just fine on the uploader end, but never show up in the Google video account area.

Case SenSitivITy alert!

Went to see Fever Pitch tonight with SNL alumni Jimmy Fallon and ET friend turned Charlie’s Angel, Drew Barrymore. Man, I must say, Barrymore is getting hotter and hotter. Fallon plays an obsessed Red Sox fan and erstwhile school teacher who catches the fever for Barrymore, a mathematician? Somehow Barrymore doesn’t seem like a brainiac, but her part still somehow works. Sorta.

It’s Fallon who’s unhealthy Sox fever is the unlikely antagonist in this girl meets boy, boy falls for girl, baseball season starts, Red Sox lose, Red Sox win story. Not your typical sappy love story comedy, but nothing that will be up for any awards either. Sort of reminded me of Mr. Destiny — not from the storyline, but as far as likeability. I’ll give Barrymore an B+ and Fallon a C-. The pitch comes down the plate and it’s just a bit off the corner. Wait for it on the DVD cycle unless you are desperate for a makeout movie. Grade: C+

Reuters is reporting that Amazon approached Blockbuster and Netflix about a possible partnership deal as opposed to launching their own competing service.

I haven’t tried any of these online DVD rental services, I guess, because I’m too impatient to appreciate snail mail to deliver the movies, though from what I’ve read these services are pretty fast. I won’t do any business with Blockbuster ever again (bad customer experiences) but I might be willing to try Netflix someday.

If any readers use these online DVD rental services, what are the pros and cons? Is this a good market for Amazon to move into? What do you think?

Just got back from taking the whole family to see Hostage starring Bruce Willis who plays a hardened SWAT negotiator. The opening title credits were clever: the names of the actors on fences and buildings. I was sort of hoping for some Diehard-like action from Bruce Willis, but it was more like he was playing the role of the Twinkie-eating cop in Diehard. Sure, there was some action. This movie was about 30-45 minutes too long and never really created any sort of compassion for the victims. Money spent for five attending? $41. Popcorn/snacks? $16. Total spent: $57. Actually worth? About the price of the DVD and some Microwave popcorn. Wait for it to rent. Grade: C-

Those who give up easily on new sites might have already passed by ourmedia which makes very attractive promises:

We provide free storage and free bandwidth for your videos, audio files, photos, text or software. Forever. No catches.

Update: Actually, there are a few catches.

For those who are be able to register and/or login via archive.org user/pass to the new ourmedia.org site, the payoff could be well worth it. Alas, I am not the only one who had difficulty getting through the gate apparently:

The Our Media experience was a bit rough. Had to get two sets of passports. Kim Cameron, please save us and give us an identity system that everyone will trust and use!

Yeah, no doubt. I tried my archive user/pass (which shows me logged in just fine there) and that didn’t work at ourmedia. So then I tried registering anew — three times — and the first time it returned the vexing error message pictured at the top of this post and did not send the email it said it sent. The second time I registered it told me the username chosen was already taken. The third time I got the same message as the first try, including the part about their being an error with the username and password but that the “email has been sent successfully.” Huh? I checked my email, though, and this third time I did receive an email with a password and I was able to login successfully with that information.

Talk about mixed messages. First they are down for a week because of server problems and then they get the site up and make it difficult to register and login. Not trying to look a gift horse in the mouth here, but perhaps this one should have stayed in the lab a little bit longer … maybe?

The email you receive once successfully registering will tell you the following:

You now have a free personal blog and may post comments and participate in our Forums. If you wish to publish media — which almost all Ourmedia members do — you also need to take 15 seconds to register at the Internet Archive…

So apparently you can’t use the archive.org user/pass to login, you do need separate registration for ourmedia? I did a little more digging around and found on this page an explanation:

We require dual registration because the Internet Archive stores all the media files on Ourmedia and merging our registration systems will require some effort.

So, hopefully to save others some grief, these are the steps to be able to post free audio and video files:

1) register at ourmedia.org
2) regster at archive.org, if you aren’t already registered
3) once you receive the email from ourmedia, then login and go to the EDIT screen and change to the email address and username to whatever you used at archive.org. If they are the same, no change is required. Scroll down to the place to add your archive.org password.
4) In the “My Controls” section along the left hand menu in ourmedia choose “publish my media”
5) From the next menu choose whichever applies: video, audio, images or text (during my testing, Interactive and Mixed were not linked yet)
6) Fill out the form completely, hit preview to check things over and then “Submit” when you are ready to publish.

Happy publishing to you!

One of the wizards behind the cult hit “Blair Witch Project” has launched a new Webisode called “The Strand” today on the internet. One of its stars is Katherine Helmond who played Jessica Tate in the hit TV show (and one of my personal favorites of all time): Soap.

The first episode of The Strand is available as a bittorent download and you can get a free guest pass through Bitpass. Exciting, huh?

Well, it had potential.

Hands down this has been the worst DRM situation I’ve ever faced, but more on that in a moment. First the article from CNN:

A lot has changed since unexpected blockbuster “Blair Witch” introduced the mainstream entertainment industry to the term “viral marketing.” “The Strand” is designed for independent online distribution, an approach that wasn’t possible in 1999.

For a moment let me slightly disagree with CNN that this approach “wasn’t possible” in 1999. Online content serials for a fee have been available for longer than 1999 on the web. Bitpass and Bittorent possibly weren’t around, but the general method of distribution on a pay-per-fee model via the web isn’t anything revolutionary or new. And, as I’m about to lay down, I’m almost completely convinced it’s greatly inferior to traditional methods of distribution (Theater to DVDs). Many may dislike the greedy MPAA, but that model of distribution is a no brainer for Joe Consumer.

Here are the steps I went through to simply try and watch today’s debut webisode of The Strand, and please keep in mind that I’m a fairly geeky guy, this isn’t my first computer and/or day on the internet:

1. I received an email notification to go download my ‘free gift’ along with some instructions. Let’s take a look at the “easy” six step process to watch this movie:

2. Seems pretty straightforward and I’ve bought a movie via Bitpass in the past (another independent film called: Nothing So Strange). The first thing I noticed was that this used bittorent, and I use the Azureus bittorent client. Fortunately, I’d already gone through the firewall configuration for that program, but for those who haven’t and are sitting behind a firewall (or multiple firewalls) this could be issue #1 that stops the process from being smooth.

One thing I don’t like about bittorrent is it is slower than a traditional download. Even if you are a fast seeder, it’s still slower than a traditional click and download from a faster server using a cable connection. The 618MB download took nearly three hours to finish whereas through a traditional download it would have been about half that time. In the meantime I’m uploading parts of the same movie to other leeches.

People don’t want to wait three hours for anything they are paying for (which is the plan after the first webisode) and at the estimated 99 cents per episode charge this could be a significant hurdle that “Blair Witch” never had to deal with. It’s not the money, it’s the time. Just give me the DVD for $5 with some cool extras and four or five episodes at a time.

Once the bittorent file finished downloading I clicked on the link and it took me to the puzzling white screen from Internet Explorer. Thank you, Microsoft, for all that information! (heavy sarcasm) Not shown in the screencap was a gray popup box (the alert box) which told me that I needed to have Windows Media Player installed.

Hello, I had WMP 10 installed. And as for familiarity with DRM? I was a paying Napster customer online for almost a year and have done lots of DRM license backups and transfers on this very machine –so there shouldn’t have been any problem with WMP being installed on the system.

Next I did some searching through Google to see if I could figure out what this problem might be and it led me to this page from Microsoft explaining how to backup to a different directory the DRM licenses, reinstall WMP and then try again. I did this and it required a reboot. When I rebooted I had a new problem:

WTF? Code has been redeemed? By who? I hadn’t gotten it to work the first time! I figurred, uh oh, three plus hours down the drain and now I am going to have to pay the .99 cent fee, so I reinstalled WMP 10 again and rebooted again hoping that something would change.

Thankfully, it did:

Now I had a license on the system that I could access and I was home free watching The Strand, right?

Wrong:

Apparently I was missing an audio codec for Windows Media Player 9. Why do I need a codec for WMP 9.0 when I’m using WMP 10? There is no explanation but I go to the download page anyway and download the codec. I install once and then try to load The Strand movie. It buffers up to 100% and then I get the same audio codec error message. I wonder if maybe I have to reboot, so I reboot a third time. Now when I try to connect I’m seeing something like this:

So is the traffic so busy for everybody watching The Strand that it’s just not getting through? I go and download and then install the codecs again from the page below which, again, is providing very little actual help or explanation to what the problem really is about. Scoble, who writes these pages?

This is where I am currently stuck and it’s a good five plus hours later and still no ability to watch The Strand. Good thing I got some other work done while this was happening.

With the Blair Witch my wife and I just walked into the theater, paid for our tickets, got popcorn and watched the movie. Distribution on the web via Bitpass and bittorent and using the WMP DRM? I’m not sure how many people will go to this much trouble — especially with a for-pay serialized online story. I hope the story is that good, I still haven’t been able to access it. Good luck to those taking the plunge!

Source: PC Magazine March 22, 2005.

I’ve been fascinated by holographic storage for awhile and keep reading that it’s on its way … so when do we stop adding to our DVD collection? If it will create cards that hold 1 TB of info, that’s going to radically change things.

Unsurprisingly, Cryptographers aren’t behind DRM because of the nature of the content being legitimately available and ripe for misuse.

Speaking on the RSA conference panel Hollywood’s Last Chance - Getting it Right on Digital Piracy, Carter Laren, security architect at Cryptographic Research, noted that cryptography is “good at some problems, such as transmitting data so it can’t be eavesdropped or even authentication, but it can’t solve the content protection problem. If people have legitimate access to content, then you can’t stop them misusing it.

Who wants to wager that Hollywood and the RIAA still won’t get it? DRM is broken in the sense that customers do not like being jailed; they want freedom for the music and movies that they purchase. Some are saying that it’s just a matter of time before some teenage hacker cracks the current DRM schemes and then the cat and mouse game will begin anew. Solutions?

For entertainment value, the Oscars pales to the Razzies.

Nominations for the 25th annual Razzies, which honor the worst films of the year, were announced on Monday with “Catwoman,” the Halle Berry box office bomb, besting “Alexander,” Oliver Stone’s much maligned tale of the bleached blond conqueror, by seven nominations to six.

Has Oliver Stone lost his luster?

This phenomenon is creeping into DVDs too. Perhaps on the rental circuit this makes some sense, but not when you buy a DVD. Throw in the disc and be subjected to several previews of other movies. Yeah, sure, there’s a workaround, but why don’t they just leave the previews as a separate DVD track, why the forced load to preview option? Yeah, yeah, I know why, it’s the same reason TiVo wants to mess around with ads during fast forward.

The number of advertisements that show before a movie begins has been growing over time. People joke about how the actual movie doesn’t start until half an hour after the official time — leading some people to simply show up late, knowing they won’t actually be missing anything

We’ve been late to our last few movie experiences. Used to want to always be there on time, but not any more. If it wasn’t for movie popcorn and the outside entertainment aspect (as a family or couple), we probably would never go to the theater any more.