Build 76.7 - Personalise your player with your streams and Twitter integration!

I'm pleased to make available the first development build from the Livestation labs.

The quick read:

1.Login.
2.Download: http://www.livestation.com/downloads/
3. Search bookmarks: http://www.livestation.com/account/streams/search
4. Add/View your bookmarks: http://www.livestation.com/account/streams/

The longer read:

This has a couple of new features that you asked for and we liked quite a bit.

Main new features:

Twitter integration: (http://www.twitter.com)

New functionality in the client

Personalise the player by bookmarking and watching your favourite channels/streams
Under the Channels menu you will now find a My Channels group. From here you can select "Add/Remove Channels" to access an area of our site under your profile (My Livestation) where you will be able to bookmark your favourite streams.

Whether it's a live webcam or a stream available from your favourite website you can now easily access it and watch it in Livestation player .

Add/Remove /Search is done via the website.
You bookmark your favourite streams - so that you can have them stored against your profile for easy access also on other computers running the Livestation client - and to search other streams added by other Livestation users.

"Refresh Channels" from the same menu will update the list of your channels on the client after you have bookmarked them on the site. (If you don't choose this option, it will take up to 15 minutes for the LIvestation player to update the list under My Channels. Yes we know we have to fix that broken behaviour).

You can then select your channels/streams from the list under My Channels at any time. Your channels will also be shown in the overlay alongside our partner broadcast news channels if you use the up/down arrow or the mouse wheel to scroll through the channel list.

Twitter

The "Configure twitter" menu item allows you to set up the login to your twitter account. The Auto twitter checkbox tweets when you change channel if selected and posts a message to your Twitter profile on the lines of "John is watching Panorama on BBC World News on Livestation since x minutes ago".

"Tweet" brings up a small dialogue on screen that allows you to post a quick message to your Twitter profile without having to log in, visit the site, etc. A little balloon in the system tray will confirm a successful post.

New Web functionality

Go here:

http://www.livestation.com/account/streams/

or you can simply select Add/Remove Channel from the menu on the player under My Channels to access this new feature.

On this page you can create a new "stream bookmark" by typing or pasting the address of the stream (URI) and by adding a name for this bookmark.

Tag - you can tag the channels you've added, or channels others have added through the website. This is useful to help discovering other channels (we have a tag cloud box on the right hand side of the page). We have also put a link on the same side of the page to allow to list all of the channels that your fellow Livestation viewers have added. We have also put a search box that will become useful when the number of channels will get bigger.

Preview - the preview button allows you to preview a channel on its own preview page.

Add / Remove - add or remove a channel from your list from the search or preview pages.

Known Issues:

- buggy under low bandwidth conditions. The client can freeze if there is not enough bandwidth. Silverlight will sometimes fail if end of stream is reached, or if stream quality is poor.

- Silverlight supported codecs only - so Windows media video and audio streams (mms) only.

- channel list update is slow. We've added a "refresh my channels" menu to work around this.

- No HD support. SD format is ok. Silverlight is not hardware accelerated yet, so high bandwidth (e.g. 2 Mbps+) live video streams will require a beefy CPU.

- Navigation - we've not finished the navigation yet! So if you want to add 100 streams, then the client usability is not great. We've got plenty of ideas and know we have more work to do on this.

- Web based preview gives Silverlight errors on some streams.

- Add/remove/tag/search - all should be available via the client.

- User channels can take a long time to start. Our video has a small gap between key frames. Video with longer gaps takes much longer to play back.

Enjoy and tell us what you think! And yes, we know, it's buggy!

The Dev Team

Jari Worsley
VP Engineering
Livestation

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RE: Build 76.7 - Add your own channels. Tweet!

wow
Kool

By the way does mms streams work?

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RE: Build 76.7 - Add your own channels. Tweet!

wow
Kool

By the way does mms streams work?

yes mms streams should work ok. There are some known issues so read those first. We'll put out regular fixes as fast as we can.

Bookmark streams through the website at:

http://www.livestation.com/account/streams/ (you need to be logged in)

and then you can play them back in Livestation. If you have problems with certain streams then *please* let us know. This is still a new pre-release feature, so there will be some bugs.

regards

Jari

Jari Worsley
VP Engineering
Livestation

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RE: Build 76.7 - Add your own channels. Tweet!

OK.
So what does the "Parent" error mean ? I have tried a dozen channels which did not work, not a single channel was aggregated - I always read the -unclear- message stating that there's a problem of "Parent".
Please tell us clearly :
- if it actually works to add one's "own" streams
- if we need *.asx streams or if the bare mms:// stuff works
- and what the "parent" issue is ;)
Thx on an interesting feature, but there's some kind of dissatisfaction round here.

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RE: Build 76.7 - Add your own channels. Tweet!

OK.
So what does the "Parent" error mean ? I have tried a dozen channels which did not work, not a single channel was aggregated - I always read the -unclear- message stating that there's a problem of "Parent".
Please tell us clearly :
- if it actually works to add one's "own" streams
- if we need *.asx streams or if the bare mms:// stuff works
- and what the "parent" issue is ;)
Thx on an interesting feature, but there's some kind of dissatisfaction round here.

Ah. It should work. It worked in dev, it worked in UAT, it worked in live yesterday. And now it doesn't. This is a bug and we're looking at it now.

You can search and tag ones already added. it'll work off mms or asx. though there are bugs. We said it might be buggy as a preview... but this isn't the start we wanted.

regards

Jari

Jari Worsley
VP Engineering
Livestation

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RE: Build 76.7 - Add your own channels. Tweet!

still mms streams don't work.

try this your self:
mms://tv2.lzu.edu.cn/tv4

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RE: Build 76.7 - Add your own channels. Tweet!

Hi,

I just made some changes to the code, and managed to add the suggested stream this time.

I think the validation was a bit strong and was giving an error because of this.

Note that because Silverlight is a bit flakey connecting the MMS, you might get a Javascript error if it can't connect to the stream. Click "Yes" if you get this then retune. My net connnection is rubbish tonight and I'm having trouble connecting to anything!

Please do feed back any issues you have and thanks for being part of the developer trials.

Joe Connor
Web Services Developer, Livestation

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RE: Build 76.7 - Personalize your player with your streams and Twitter integration!

ok
now it allows me to add it but can't watch it. i get this sliver light error when trying to preview it. and when i try to watch it in the tv player, i get signal unavailable.

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RE: Build 76.7 - Personalize your player with your streams and Twitter integration!

I've been investigating this for the past hour or so with one of our UI developers but we can't quite get to the bottom of it. The MMS streams were causing some problems earlier today by locking up the UI, so some of the code got rewritten.

Maybe something broke along the way but I don't know about that at the moment. Will check with our MMS server expert tomorrow and let you know. We have had it working with all sorts of streams in the past few weeks, so we know this does work!

Will keep you posted, and sorry that it didn't work out of the box for you this time...

Joe Connor
Web Services Developer, Livestation

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RE: Build 76.7 - Personalize your player with your streams and Twitter integration!

I took another look, and tried running up an older version of the client, which wouldn't play the streams either, so it's not a bug related to the above...

It seems that Silverlight can only handle a select few types of MMS stream. I'm going to investigate further tomorrow to find out exactly which ones can and can't be handled, and find out ways to identify them. Funny, we didn't find many that didn't work in testing...

Joe Connor
Web Services Developer, Livestation

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