VRlog :: photographic Virtual Reality, wilderness, exploration

 










Click here to send an email to the editor of this weblog.

 
 

Friday, September 6, 2002

Recently I ran across a new multimedia search engine I had hadn't heard of before: singingfish.com This search engine scours the web hourly looking for streaming feeds as well as regular QuickTime and other multimedia files. They claim to have over 8 million streaming feeds in their index, surely a remarkable number.

The spider seems to be able to parse qualities of the stream or multimedia file and display them in the search results. For instance, one of my Wrinkle in Time panos used sound and it displayed a speaker next to that entry. To the right of the search result there are icons showing the format, and a stream bitrate (or filesize if it is not a stream).

After typing in VirtualParks into the search field, I noticed that clicking on a movie from VirtualParks brought up the movie all by itself, stripped of all HTML EMBED commands and textual context. Would this make it easier for pirates to find stuff to steal? Perhaps, but it clearly makes it easier to find streaming programs (which are much harder to digitally duplicate than your average standalone .mov file).

Oddly, every single item has a "Shop now" button which takes you to Amazon's site and does a search on the keyword, even if the item in question has no commercial product available. Perhaps this is a defense against the argument that they are facilitating piracy (of MP3 files which is usually unapproved copies).

The advanced search allows you to narrow the results to only QuickTime, Real, MP3, or WMP. Their site says they offer a service where you can add a multimedia search field to your site, no doubt for a fee. singingfish is owned by Thomson Multimedia.
10:28:12 PM    


Microsoft launches Windows Media Player 9. The Register article mentions new features such as fast streaming, improved codecs, and built-in support for PressPlay.
10:17:17 PM    

From MacCentral: Apple says Windows Media Player shows anti-standards behavior. The story mentioned some areas where WMP is playing catch-up to QuickTime v6. Not mentioned in the article, but apparently WMP still doesn't play VR content.
10:12:00 PM    

© Copyright 2006 erik goetze.



Click here to visit the Radio UserLand website.
 


September 2002
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
8 9 10 11 12 13 14
15 16 17 18 19 20 21
22 23 24 25 26 27 28
29 30          
Aug   Oct

Purpose
VRlog provides news, developments and analysis of the virtual reality (VR) world from a nature photographer's perspective. Since I am not connected to or funded by any VR vendor, I intend to objectively appraise what's going on, and the direction VR is headed in. -- erik goetze
Latest versions
3D Vista Stitcher: v2.0
Cubic Converter: v2.05
iPIX Interactive Studio: v1.2
Panorama Factory: v3.3
Panorama Tools: v2.6
PhotoVista Panorama: v3.0
QTVRAS: v1.01
Realviz Stitcher: v4.02
VR Worx: v2.5
Sites of interest
IAPP
IQTVRA
NVTA
vr.refocus
VRmag
Judy and Robert
QT Bridge (Fr)
Wild360
Panoguide
Friends of Time
Syndicate VRlog
The items on this site are available in an RSS newsfeed, an XML file format.

Click to see the XML version of this web page.