CamTwist is very clever free software for the Mac that lets you switch between different video sources on your computer, including webcams, movie files and also your computer's desktop. You can add a range of video effects, titles and other useful overlays, in multiple layers - such as news tickers (powered by RSS), logos and graphics, and then output the result as... another video source on your computer.

What this means is that you can use this program to intercept the video going into other programs that lets you choose a video source - think video editing programs, video chat programs (eg Skype) and flash-based online video services such as Ustream, JustinTV, Stickam and WorldTV.

Another way of looking at it is that the program lets you create your own software-based live video mixing studio that sits well with almost all other video programs, including streaming web video services.

You can take the video from your webcam, pimp it up broadcast style, and then send it onwards to a video chat session, recording or online video streaming session. Amaze your friends in Skype, do highly professional stuff online - possibly you'll do both.

The intercept approach is genius because of its flexibility, and it explains why leading web broadcasters like Chris Pirillo and Rhett & Link are using the software, made by an enthusiast, and supported through generosity of donations.

CamTwist is highly powerful (see demo video below), and you only have to see the results of that on the two sites I've just mentioned - both Chris Pirillo and Rhett & Link use the software for all of their live video mixing and compositing.

While CamTwist excels is in its depth and flexibility, it suffers a little in ease-of-use at this time. This should not put you off as it is well worth the investment, and the interface will improve as the software develops. It's still early days.

You can learn the interface in about 30 mins and once you've got the hang of it you'll quickly come to appreciate the power that it provides you, and most probably love the developer who made it. In short it is highly empowering software that has nothing else like it.

If you want a little more convincing before making the leap, I highly recommend reading Michael Pick's excellent coverage of the software.

Introductory Guide to CamTwist

There are two distinct parts to the application - the older legacy part of the application - the main window, which lets you set up sources and effects, which effectively become buttons for the main Studio window where you do the live switching. Basically you do all your experimenting and configuring in the first window, and the live switching in the second.

I recommend reading and watching the two Quick Start video guides on the site wiki - the first is for the main (legacy) window of the application, and the second is for the new Studio window. It's important to understand that the main, older window represents where the project is coming from, and the Studio window where it is going. Any quirks of use can be understood much better if you keep this in mind.

Another important point is that the program does not control or switch audio. The audio circuits of a Mac are separate from the video and this can actually provide you with much greater control. It's not yet been a problem for me, but I may revisit this subject later if it becomes so.

For an alternative viewpoint of how it can be used, Chris Pirillo's fascinating explanation of how he produces his online TV show is well worth a look.

This article is a stub - I intend to add to it over time.

Posted by Alx Klive 9:37PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you are trying to install Qik software (or any other software for that matter) on your Nokia mobile phone and are getting "Certificate error - contact application provider", there's an easy fix. Here's how to do it...

Go to Tools -> Settings -> Applications -> App Manager

Change the setting for Software Installation from 'Signed only' to 'All'. This should do the trick, but you can also change the setting for Online Certificate Check to 'Off' as an added measure. If you are looking for a great tool for Qik videos, be sure to check out WorldTV's integration with Qik which is very cool.

I have tested this on both the Nokia N95 and Nokia E51 and it works great. The Nokia E51 (with camera) is a good more economical substitute for the N95 incidentally if you want to use Qik's service.

Posted by Alx Klive 4:22PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I really can't complain. Running a startup with such a great crew of people, and with real signs of positivity and traction is a dream come true.

I stood on the rickety balcony tonight overlooking our Eastern European appartment block with my friend and lead developer Eugene, and we wondered aloud on how far we'd come in three years of working together. A year ago even I wouldn't have thought it possible we'd be here now, working our socks off, living, breathing and eating/drinking together, all staying in the same building along with his family, relatives and in-laws - four studio appartments strong and counting. Forgive the romantic excursion but it's been a real rollercoaster of a day...

We got to work this morning, we were 5 steps into our building and Eugene exclaims "Oh shit" (only it sounded more like "Orh Zhit"). The power was out, which explained the two hardy looking men we'd passed on the way in, who were removing huge metal breakers, the size and shape of axe-heads - by hand - from a rusty metal box on the outside of the building. Each of those goliaths must have been designed in some early 20th century soviet metalworks for carrying the entire power of a city - only right now they weren't working one bit.

The power came back on within an hour, no doubt to the efforts of those wizened men, but then our ISP called us to let us know that the Internet would be going off in half an hour. They called us to let us know the broadband was going off. Even here, in a decaying faded former USSR city on the outreaches of a broken empire, the broadband provider calls you to let you know the Internet is going down... before it happens.

For the rest of the day we were on and off the phone with them as they provided frequent updates of what was going on and when we could use the Internet, for how long - 20 mins here, 40 mins there. Our Internet flickered on and off all day, but with predictability. It was frustrating that it had to happen at all, especially with everything else that was going on all day, but given that it did, it could not have been a more pleasant experience.

We had a real lift during the afternoon with the news that the Guardian newspaper had run a major article on us and that it was complimentary. Some hurried calls back home to get people to pick up copies were followed by the realization that we had a critical *bug* with the main subject of the article - our live mobile phone video integration. As we like to say round here... something from the 'bad news department'.

Working with Michael and Bhaskar from Qik we got to the bottom of it within 4 hours and solved it - but boy was it a rollercoaster ride of a day!

Posted by Alx Klive 11:35PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Have just arrived at our 'Eastern' office and contemplating the last 24 hours.

The journey from London to Kharkov is not particularly far, but a little wearing. A 3am wakeup to get to Heathrow for the first flight out for Vienna, and then on to Kharkov with Austrian Airlines - who are the only western airline to fly to the Ukraine's second largest city. Arriving at Kharkov is like a step back in time, broken planes by the runway and a terminal that is straight out of World War 2.

I've done the journey a few times and it's always a 'roll-of-the-dice' - the connection at Vienna is tight (so luggage not making it is a real possibility), customs/passport control in Kharkov can be interesting to say the least. We had a brief scare when the customs found the Mac Mini that we were bringing in, but the language barrier worked in our favour this time and the guy couldn't be bothered it seemed to try and tax us (or bribe us). We were in.

We took two cars to the appartment for reasons I've not quite established. Cars here don't generally have seat belts in the back and the roads themselves are treacherous. Massive potholes everywhere and drivers swerve to avoid them with no hope of any warning. We saw one accident on the short drive and I've seen many others.

Our first order of business was to stock up on food and.... er... vodka! Four grown men heading round the supermarket each with their own trolley was a sight to behold. We got so much 'food' in the end that only two people could fit in Dmitry's rather diminutive car. Toby and Eugene walked home, I pulled rank.

We spent the evening settling in to our rented appartment, visiting our neighbours downstairs and generally catching up with our host and old friend Eugene.

This morning we woke up to... no hot water! I had a sneaky feeling this might be an issue. When in Rome...

Took the bus and subway into central Kharkov this morning. The bus cost 15p (30 cents) and the subway 7p. We worked out that the bus is 7 times more expensive in London and the tube is 60 times more expensive!

A short walk from the metro and we were at our new rented office. It's from here that we'll spend the next two weeks planning the next few months worth of development for WorldTV.

As mentioned in my previous post you can follow all these shenanigans on Twitter - my tweets are here, Toby's here and official WorldTV tweets here. I'm also doing live mobile phone videos using Qik and there's an archive of all the videos so far.

Am probably not going to do tons of blog posts since the above options are way easier. Funny how Twitter really is lowering the incentive to blog. Much less friction.

Incidentally, I still can't make up my mind about Qik's Twitter notification feature. At the moment I've got it on but it would be nice to set a custom default message instead of the 'I'm streaming live right now come chat'. I always forget to control it from the phone (which is possible).

Posted by Alx Klive 9:27AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's 4.55am and my colleague Toby and I are off on our way to the Eastern front for two weeks of hard labour development time.

I'll be blogging the trip through a combination of Twitter updates, live mobile phone videos and occasional blog posts. Hopefully the next one will be when I am slightly more awake.

UPDATE: To see archived videos from the trip, go here.

Posted by Alx Klive 4:54AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Anyone who knows me knows I'm a bit of a hoarder... three storage units and counting, I really need to find time to go through some of that stuff.

Well this little clearout won't make much of a dent in that but the very fact I've managed to drag myself to throw anything away is a step in the right direction.

Have decided I really do no longer have any need for a 33.3 modem card for a PC, a 1990's Mac SCSI adaptor and a broken PC video card. Oh yeah, I haven't lived permanently in North America for 7 years so some of my US power cables get the chop too.

Tech cathartism!

Posted by Alx Klive 5:48PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

One of the questions I frequently find myself pondering is why Google doesn't offer high grade web hosting, either traditional web hosting or in-the-cloud hosting like Amazon S3.

They certainly have the know-how, they would seemingly have the resources, you would think they could offer the lowest bandwidth prices with their size and scale. They also offer several web hosting-like services such as Google Web Applications and Blogger. For a video startup such as ours, we'd certainly like to have Google as an option for our hosting needs.

The answer is simple... they are having a very challenging time keeping up with their own internal demands for hosting, hardware and bandwidth, and the massive demands coming from the likes of YouTube and GMail. I postulate this from two separate conversations I've had with Google employees.

It makes sense - we are all used to the instant access availability and reliability that is manifested by all Google services. How many times have you not been able to reach Google's homepage or YouTube?

Only Google knows the true extent of this challenge and we can only ponder on the idea that... behind closed doors... Google is in a never ending fight to keep up with all the demand. One employee told me that there is often conflict internally over where to assign resources, and which services to promote (on the Google homepage). For some reason you just don't think this could be an issue.

So the next time you think... why doesn't Google do this? or that? The answer may just be... they need to build another data centre!

Posted by Alx Klive 2:04PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Wikipedia has a detailed and long post on the subject of profanity. Reading through it I came across this classic section...

"A profane word in one language often sounds like an ordinary word in another; such words are called false friends. Fuck sounds like the French words for "seal" (phoque) and jib (foc), the Spanish words for "seal" (foca) and lightbulb (foco) or the Irish word for "words" (focail), as well as the Latin and Romanian words for "do" ("I do" can be facio in Latin or fac eu in Romanian, which sounds a lot like the English "fuck you"). Arabic for "think" sounds just like "you fucker". Also, the Croatian word fakat sounds similar to the English "fuck at" when it actually means "factually". "Fuck" also sounds like the Latin imperative singular form of "do" or "make" (fac) and the Swedish word for "union" (fack); shit sounds somewhat like the Russian for "shield" (щит). The Cantonese words for "flower" and "bridge", when said together ("fa kyu"), sound vaguely similar to "fuck you". Also, the Latin singular imperative of "say" (dic) and the Dutch word for "fat" (dik) are pronounced like the English "dick". The German word for "fat" is both spelled and pronounced as the word dick in English. And the Dutch word for "cook" or "chef" (kok) sounds exactly like cock. Several European translations of the English word "bassoon" sound very similar to the American English slur faggot; an example is the Albanian "fagot". Even names in one language may appear as vulgar words in another linguistic community, which causes many immigrants to change their names (common Vietnamese personal names include Phuc and Bich; a fairly common Thai name is Porn. In Bengali, Fukeer is a personal name. In Latin, cum means "with", but it can be a profane word for "ejaculation" in English. Both cum and precum are prepositions in Romanian but can have profane, explicitly sexual meanings in English."

Posted by Alx Klive 12:20AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Using SunSpider, a webpage that puts the latest browsers through their paces, I came out with the following results on a current MacBook Pro.

The time represents how long it takes each browser to complete a complex set of tasks.

• Firefox 2.0 (current release version)- 16.26 secs
• Safari 3.0 (current release version) - 14.47 secs

Safari slightly edges out Firefox, but not by much. Moving to the very latest, bleeding edge versions of these browsers, you can see just how much we have to look forward to in terms of speed increases in the weeks/months ahead. The differences are startling.

• Firefox 3.04 (latest nightly build Feb 29th 2008) - 4.14 secs
• Safari 3.0 (latest nightly build Feb 29th 2008) - 3.50 secs

These improvements come from dramatic increases in the speed for executing javascript code, which forms the basis for many Web 2.0 sites.

These releases are pretty stable, and if you want to try them out, you can find downloads for the latest nightly builds of Firefox here, and Safari here. You can install both without overwriting or affecting your existing version.

(Thanks to @fredericl on Twitter for providing the inspiration for this article)

Posted by Alx Klive 12:40AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We all suffer from it - email overload. It just keeps coming and coming...

I thought I'd delve into this and find out just how much time I spend dealing with the never ending digital flow... These are my stats for 2007*

• E-mails received... 64,632
• Percentage that were junk... 41%
• Average non-junk e-mails per day... 104
• E-mails sent... 3,787
• Sent e-mails per day... 10.4
• Time spent answering e-mail... 445 hours

So in other words, I spent 11 weeks out of my year dealing with 100 incoming messages a day, and writing 10 emails. This probably doesn't include the time spent thinking about a response or whatever.

I think we really need to have a global nom@il day. And soon please!

If you'd like to send me an e-mail about this...

*Figures derived from Eudora

Posted by Alx Klive 4:36PM | Permalink | Comments (2)