Get your Livestation 2.3 while it’s hot off the printing press… (1)

Release Notes
New features and bug fixes are as below.

• Added chat notification icon on overlay.

• Added Video and Audio device preferences.
• Disabled screensaver with Livestation running in fullscreen mode.
• Improvements to Chat, including option to ignore users.
• Improvements to What’s Hot.
• Improved support for mms streams.
• Channel screen grabs used as logos for the user channels.
• Option to remove partner channels.
• Channel name displayed when highlighting a channel logo on the carousel.
• Implemented Live panel.
• Fixed stacking of alerts.

Favourite new features?

Easy, the option to remove partner channels (I don’t speak German or Italian), the Live panel, and the channel screen grabs.

How do we do the screen grabs?

(Warning: some light tech follows. You have been warned.)

Channel screen grabs are worth talking about a bit more. They don’t just magically appear. They are a nice consequence of writing our own player. Behind the scenes, and just so YOU can have an image instead of another dull icon… we built the “Live Spider”.

We take a GUI-less version of our client, some control code (in C and Qt), a sprinkling of Web Services (all in Ruby, naturally), and mix all together. The spiders get stream profile information for us, and upload key frames from the live stream to use in the website.

This is how you get the channel grabs. We’ll make use of the stream profile info in a later website build. It’ll be good to search for all the high bandwidth streams you’ve added, and the live spider means we can build this feature. It also means we can start pruning off streams that aren’t working any more. Lastly, because we built the spider with the same code as the player, if it plays in the spider, it should play in the player. So we get a full regression test against all streams with every run. Neat eh?

Jari

(1) not that Gutenberg would recognize much of his original inventions in this electronic world!