Ok, just an update with stuff and why I have been off the grid so to speak. I have been reviewing the huge amount of archive footage that we have and reviewing a ton of footage lately for the new web site. To give you an idea about how much video were talking about, it is in the three terabyte range. It’s a lot of stuff…
And video, with the “LIVE CHASE VIDEO” fad hitting the chaser scene over the last year, I have looked into it but right now, unless your doing something for a TV News station and being paid to stream video, it’s still a major pain in the ass from what I have experienced.
As a chaser, yes you can stream but the video for the most part is not all that good. When I started streaming years ago with a webcam, I did it with a system that would put up a new low rez JPG image every 2 seconds. The image quality was good but it was not ASAP fast video. Now with the latest video coming on line, they all kind of suck. There, I said it, not holding out on any of the streams, some of who are friends of mine, yes all the setups kind of suck.
Looking at the Flash Video setup which is being used by two of the three streamer groups, the feeds look good if they are in a parking lot. But the second they start rolling done the road, forget it, it looks like crap. Motion blur on the flash is just plain bad from what I have seen. Then there is the Windows media setup from the other company who has a decent setup but they also have a major server issue as in it was down for a chunk of the day. They are for sure going to catch hell about that from the chaser community but who knows, maybe they just maxed out their viewers or something. But it was down and that’s going to give them a P.R. issue. Anyways, the feeds when they did work did look better then the blurry flash video from the other two sources. But all three of the sources had issues they could not help, that was crap in, crap out, crap content.
Yes, the feeds looked like crap, as in there was nothing worth watching in the first place. Some had dark skies but blurred video while others were under blue sky busts. I finally ended up just going over to watch the live feeds on KOCO which was pretty damn good for the most part. KFOR had some decent chopper cam footage as well of the tornado that hit north of OKC in the Edmond area.
Now the coverage from KFOR and KOCO has been pretty entertaining for the most part. I can really feel the HYPE of the situation from some of the news reports when I was just watching the weather channel. It feels like they are going into “RED ALERT STORM MODE” and looking for death and destruction and there just getting some destruction as they would from any storm but no MAJOR destruction or people being killed. In other words, an average spring chase day in Oklahoma.
In other news, the stimulus bill passed today and America is pretty much on the path to Socialism. I heard parts of Obama’s town hall meeting today where people where asking for their free stuff. There is no such thing as a free lunch and people are expecting free stuff. Sorry, but I bust may ass and risk my life to do what I do for a living and the pay is not that great. Why should I pay for someone else who makes mistakes and failed? Let people fail and then maybe people will LEARN from their mistakes and we will all be better and smarter in the long run.