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!

There’s been a lot of change in Livestation over the last few months. I’d like to explain where that came from, and a little of what you can expect in the future.

In the beginning

Many months ago now, at the Livestation engineering den (the Bakery),
we looked at whether Livestation was something we used on a daily basis. The answer was clear, not enough of us were using it. If we weren’t using it, then why should anyone else?

Insight

About the same time I remembered this great blog, Creating Passionate Users and in particular this great post. We needed more of the woman’s reaction, not the man’s.

Since that time our new goal been to create an application that we use on a daily basis. It sounds so simple but it really is easy to get carried away with building technology and forgetting that solutions don’t mean anything if people are not using them.

Ringing the changes

Many of the changes in recents months have been created and added because of this new philosophy: User added streams, channel alerts and What’s Hot are just some of these new features. User added streams was a total paradigm shift for the whole product and without “What’s Hot” we would never have discovered the great films on Thriller TV USA or been able to use the Amazon River Fishes as our screensaver.

Loads more to come.

So, based on this new philosophy, what are plans for the future? I’ll do a proper “roadmap” post soon, but for now, highlights for me are:

- the Live Spider – we’re checking the User added channels to make sure they work, and avoid dead channels. The screen grabs are pretty good to see what the content is on the channel, old school, singing, rockets! (Good for usability, but still not that cool).

- Multi-screen – :) Watch 2,3,4 channels at the same time. The player already does this if you know the right tricks… but it’s not ready for release yet. (Ok, this is cooler)

Multiscreen in development:

Last, but not least

- Mobile Livestation… We’re quite close to getting Livestation on a certain highly popular, aesthetically pleasing, normally black, not made by Microsoft or Google handset… (now this is totally f£$king cool: ).

Jari