Audio/Video

Live Stream Your Pets with Linux and YouTube!

Anyone who reads Linux Journal knows about my fascination with birdwatching. I've created my own weatherproof video cameras with a Raspberry Pi. I've posted instructions on how to create your own automatically updating camera image page with JavaScript. Heck, I even learned CSS so I could make a mobile-friendly version of BirdCam that filled the screen in landscape mode.

YouTube on the Big Screen

For years I've been jealous of folks with iOS devices who could just send their phone screens to their Apple TV devices. It seems like the Android screen-mirroring protocols never work right for me. My Sony Xperia has multiple types of screen mirroring, and none of them seem to work on my smart TVs or Roku devices.

Nativ Vita

The motto "open to anything" underpins Nativ's development philosophy on all of its audio solutions, including its new Nativ Vita, "the world's first High-Resolution Music Player" and touchscreen control center that is designed to function as the central access point for one's entire music collection.

The Post-TV Age?

The most basic cable package from Charter (Spectrum?) costs me more than $70 per month, and that's without any equipment other than a single cable card. It's very clear why people have been cutting the cord with cable TV companies. But, what options exist? Do the alternatives actually cost less? Are the alternatives as good?

Analyzing Videos for Fun and Profit

People's phones and all of the various sensors that may be built in to them is a source of scientific data logging that almost everyone carries around. Although the selection of sensors varies from phone to phone, they almost all have a camera. In this article, I take a look at a piece of software called Tracker that can be used to analyze videos you take of experiments.

Android Candy: the Verbification of Video Chat

People who study the history of languages probably will look back at our current time and scratch their heads. We keep inventing verbs! First, Google became the verb we use for searching. Then, "Facebooking" someone became a viable way to contact them. Heck, I forgot about "texting" someone. It seems we just keep taking perfectly good nouns and making them verbs.

Listen to Me Cheaply

I listen to a lot of books. A lot. And honestly, although I've written about the "Listen" app for audiobooks, I tend to use Audible more than anything else anymore. Part of the reason is the Android app finally has more fine-grained speed settings. (I prefer around 1.4x speed.) iPhone people don't have that seemingly simple feature. Just saying.

Listen with Your Skull!

I listen to a lot of audiobooks. They're not the sort of thing you blast from your car speakers, because invariably when you pull up to a drive-thru window, it's at an awkward part of the book. Thankfully I don't read many books with sex scenes, but it's a bit embarrassing when it's a super-cheesy-sounding part of the book that plays while you're paying. But, I digress.

Non-Linux FOSS: Control Web-Based Music!

I like Pandora. I like it because it doesn't require me to know anything other than whether I like the current song. I'm sure other music services offer more features or a larger catalog, but Pandora is simple. So am I.

Radio Free Linux

You would have a difficult time today finding a radio station that was all-live and did not have some kind of computerized, automated means of storing and playing audio.

DVEO's Jitter Box IP/IP

Telco TV/OTT and IPTV operators must deal with the fact that many IP transport streams are asynchronous. This makes the streams prone to poor video quality due to jitter if they are sent to Program Clock Reference (PCR)-compliant devices.

When BirdCam Goes Mainstream

If you read my articles on when I originally set up BirdCam a few years ago, you'll remember I did it with compatibility in mind. At the time of this writing, BirdCam is simply an HTML page with the JavaScript language to refresh the images constantly, in order to create a low-fps video stream of sorts.

Nativ Disc

Although most music lovers stream or download music today, the stubborn pre-millennials among us have legacy CD collections at home. This demographic is the perfect target group for Nativ Disc, a bit-perfect CD Ripper that allows users to import up to 12,000 CDs—in lossless FLAC, uncompressed WAV or lossy MP3 format—into their Nativ Vita high-resolution music player.

Dear Kodi, Where's My Surround?!?!

I love Kodi. (This is just an evolution of my love for XBMC, since it's the same thing with a new name.) In fact, although I've expressed my love for Plex over and over (and over) the past few years, I still use Kodi as my main interface for the televisions in my house.

Non-Linux FOSS: Airsonos

I love Sonos. There probably are some audiophiles reading this who rolled their eyes at my lack of auditory prowess, but honestly, the speakers sound wonderful to my 1980s-damaged eardrums. Granted, the Wi-Fi-enabled speakers are very expensive, thus limiting my supply.