blaster media » ustream

ugh, back to Ustream

blaster — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 18:48:39 +0000

Due to the fact that Livestream has a huge memory leak in their web broadcaster and the Procaster desktop application, I have switched back to the Ustream broadcaster. It’s unfortunate that Livestream has not answered any forum posts to even acknowledge it. I hope they get this fixed in the near future as, as you all know, I just can’t stand Ustream, but their broadcaster is much more stable.

UGH!!

The fresh new UstreamTV

blaster — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 01:58:46 +0000

Apparently, the “fresh new ustream” isn’t all that fresh. It smells like a big pile of shit that any competent developer would be embarrassed to implement. I mean really, what were those people thinking?

About the only thing that was done correctly was cleaning up the front page. But the lack of testing and a resource for any documentation for the “new look” is abysmal. The release of this mess was not thought out AT ALL. Merely tossing it up on the web for all to scoff at seems to be the order of the day. Remember the Facebook remodel? I thought you did. But the devs at ustream didn’t.

The comments on the blog post are overwhelmingly against the “fresh new”. The forum posts are similar.

Since the shit was shoved down the throats of the Ustream users, there has not been a peep from anyone of consequence. I can only hope that they have taken the comments to heart and are working to reverse this trend of releasing untested and unwanted web crapplications to the public.

I’m not going into what’s broken because the list is too long. Please sign the petition to get Ustream to back out of this silliness.

Get the message UstreamTV, you fucked up.

Note: The API is broken. LOLOLOLOL MORONS!!!!

Flash Media Encoder

blaster — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 19:08:54 +0000

For those of us the broadcast on Ustream TV, we now have the option to use Adobe’s Flash Media Encoder. I’m using version 2.5 at the moment. It gives the broadcaster more fine tune control of the stream than the Ustream broadcast console. My biggest tweak about it is that the stream must be stopped to make any changes to the settings. Other than that, it works nicely.

I did have some trouble with the “Timecode” option when I was messing around with it. In the docs it says you can’t enable it unless the video source has timecode abilities. This was not the case. As I was able to select the Timecode option. After that, I could not remove the option and the encoder would stop with an error. I tried reinstalling FME, to no avail. I finally remove the setup.xml file after removing FME and the next installation reset it back to the original configuration.

It would be helpful to at least be able to adjust the audio volume on the fly. Because, when using FME, all of the options are grayed out on the Ustream broadcast console. I did see that I can control my TV tuner card from within the FME, a pleasant surprise, as the Asus My Cinema hardly works outside it’s own software suite.

FME can also record in .flv locally, a nice touch when Ustream takes a shit. I see that version 3.0 is coming soon. I must give it a whirl when it’s available.

Update:

The FME really lags my TV tuner horribly, and it’s kind of unstable as it disconnects constantly, although it’s probably a Ustream problem. So, unless I’m recording, I’m not using it.