The 4Big is a RAID unit with 4x1TB disks, and configured as RAID5 yields storage of 3TB. It's been reliable for a year or more, and has travelled 5000km with me on my treks.

After purchasing and attempting recovery with Diskwarrior and TechTool Pro, both failed to see the disk. My next step was a disk recovery service that knew about RAID and Mac volumes, and enquiries led to quotes up to $2500. Yikes!

But then I came across R-Studio for Mac, another piece of data recovery software.  I downloaded the demo, and hey PRESTO, it could see the disk and all the files, and a recovery test worked fine. So $79 later I'm here recovering from a near disaster.  Going to the backups for so much data would have been weeks of effort.

Hope this helps someone else out there.

The Internet Industry Association has asked me to explore how the NBN rollout is going, and how well the concept of super-fast broadband is understood around Australia. A decade ago I was the IIA Ambassador studying the digital divide and how to overcome the lack of internet connectivity across Australia. Ten years on many of the same issues exist.

I've recently visited some of the initial NBN sites in Armidale and Coffs Harbour, and now I'm in Tasmania for the CSIRO Broadband Society conference next week.  While I'm here I'll be interviewing people from all areas of Australian society starting in the NBN first-release sites of Smithton, Scottsdale and Midway Point.

I'm excited by the prospects for innovative applications, it's a breath of fresh air to be moving out of the Telstra/Govt stalemate we've endured for the last 20 years.

So it's time to follow up my ambitions by contacting my colleagues around the industry.  I've received favourable feedback from a tentative plan to become the Internet Industry Association's Ambassador again, spreading the good news about how broadband can change our society. And there seem to be some interesting roles at NBNco to investigate.

I found out recently that my 2001 Tech Trek website has been archived by the National Library here.  As Ambassador for the IIA the Tech Trek was a superb project at communicating the benefits of the then nascent broadband. It's possible a similar role may open for me on the NBN benefits.

Aussie boldly goes on hi-tech trek
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/1848625.stm>
Sunday, 3 March, 2002, 07:45 GMT

Roaming Australia aboard a wireless bus
<http://www.zdnet.com.au/roaming-australia-aboard-a-wireless-bus-120237977.htm>
 July 11th, 2001

It's great to see rigorous debate about the NBN in the press EVERY DAY!  In the past it's been terribly difficult to raise issues and have them understood by mainstream media. The problem now is that while super-fast broadband is in the news there are a multitude of mis-informed commenters swaying the debate with inaccuracies.

No home, living from day to day, going for jobs, learning, trying to go up not give up.

The RiotACT discussion after his posting has drawn lots of professional and community help toward the problem in Canberra. A great demonstration of how a simple blog can foster critical communication and action among a community.

I came across the Books For All project in Canberra. They accept donated books so the best of my recent collection (six boxes!) was enthusiastically received by Tammy and Ben at the Griffin Centre.

George
Book Fan

Audio and video recordings are now available from the NLA at Presentations from the 2010 IIF.

Mark Pesce discussing Ted Nelson's early work on hypertext.

This single-stream example uses a multicast transport stream containing MPEG-2, but could easily use a multicast or unicast stream in a different format. This example runs on Xserve and MacPro machines, it's a requirement that mediastreamsegmenter runs on OS X.

Warning: Reticulation of broadcast TV services requires the permission of the broadcaster.

Thanks to ANU for the opportunity to test this on a multicast-rich network.

Live BBC stream on iPhone via HTTP at 750Kbps

The Result

One live MPEG-2 transport stream transcoded to be visible on the iPhone. VLC (and x264) transcode the stream to the required format for mediastreamsegmenter, which then saves the stream on disk under the webserver. It continually updates the index file so viewers can keep up. Depending on the content, the bitrate of the stream can be 500-900Kbps.

Web page on iPhone with text links to .m3u8 index file

Viewing the stream in the iPhone simulator

Screen shot of iPhone movieplayer without controls overlaid

A mid-range server can transcode three standard-definition 720×576 MPEG-2 services.

Required Parts

• A live MPEG-2 TV service
• The VLC application from www.videolan.org
• The mediastreamsegmenter program, free from Apple's Developer Connect

Documentation

mediastreamsegmenter Man Page

Apple's HTTP Live Streaming Documentation

IETF Standard Submission

VLC Command Line Help

Installation

The Apache webserver is running above a directory that will contain the media.
( /Volumes/mydisk/www/abc/ in this example).

The webserver is available to the outside
(http://mywebserver.edu/abc/  in this example)

Apache mime types to be added:
AddType application/x-mpegURL m3u8
AddType video/MP2T ts

VLC is expected to be at /Applications/VLC.app/

mediastreamsegmenter gets installed to /usr/bin/mediastreamsegmenter

Your source stream is playable in VLC.
( udp://@239.224.0.2:1234 in this example)

The Script

Save the script below to a text file, say abcstreamer.sh - ensure there are no carriage returns in the command lines. Customise the bold items in the command lines to suit your environment.

#!/bin/sh

rm -rf /Volumes/mydisk/www/abc/*

/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC udp://@239.224.0.2:1234 –intf=dummy –sout-transcode-audio-sync –sout='#transcode{vcodec=h264,venc=x264{aud,profile=baseline,level=30,keyint=30,bframes=0,ref=1,nocabac},acodec=mp4a,ab=56,deinterlace}:duplicate{dst=std{access=file,mux=ts,dst=-}}' | mediastreamsegmenter -O -b http://mywebserver.edu/abc/ -f /Volumes/mydisk/www/abc/ -t 10 -s 4 -D  

The Stream

Watch the directory in the Finder to see the segments arrive.  After a while the index file will be written, so you can now get the stream from your iPhone.

Serve It Up

<html lang="en">

<head>

<title>iPhoneTV</title>

</head>

<body>




iPhone TV<P>

<HR>

<H1><a href="./abc/prog_index.m3u8">ABC</H1>

<HR>

<H1><a href="./bbc/prog_index.m3u8">BBC</H1>

 

<!-- <video width="320" height="240">

<source src="./bbc/prog_index.m3u8" />

</video>

 -->




</body>

</html>

Stats

 

Peaks are starting a new stream.

 

 

 

Tips

• These are by no means optimal settings, please post improvements in the comments.
• Reset VLC's preferences to be sure you don't have any clashing settings.
• Use mediastreamvalidator to debug the transport stream.
• Consider DVBlast or Multicat as additional tools for streaming and routing. 

Updates

• Added stats

 

 

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