So what was the big talking point in the office corridors this week? The unfolding story of the next Bulgarian commissioner? The pros and cons of body scanners in airports? The plans of the newly re-elected EU ombudsman? Get outta here! No, it was the iPad, variously the overgrown iPhone or semi-dismantled MacBook, unleashed on a far-from-unsuspecting world by geek-prophet-cum-style-guru Steve Jobs on Wednesday evening, Brussels time.

I can offer no punditry or insight here on the iPad, nor do I need to, given the unbelievable amount of hype and comment this week over this (seen the cover of the Economist this week, anyone?). However, I can offer a glimpse of WebCom collective psychology. The drooling was underway in real time on Facebook, and by the following morning there was a fully-fledged business plan to equip all web-editors with WiFi and 3G equipped iPads, along with keyboard docks of course, to allow them to ply their trade from committee meeting rooms, the train to Strasbourg and from the Starbucks on Place du Luxembourg (the main obstacle to the latter being – inexplicably – that there isn’t one yet).

Let them dream…

Listening to all this, the Director gave us his usual wry smile. He’s heard it all before. They’re flighty in their product affections, these WebCommers, but very brand loyal. There was once an absolute need to dispatch all editors to far-flung locations with MacBook Airs (that’s the ultra-skinny one), and later a painfully obvious requirement to hand out iPhones to anyone who might ever twitter on behalf on the European Parliament. He well knows you have to let the WebCommers dream of being cool Californian web-dudes now and then. It’s part of the self-image…

…And then you send them back to their five year-old desktop PCs. They’ll get on with the job, with maybe just the odd wistful glance at www.apple.com between articles.

I’ve known for a long time that our video streams don’t comply with Macs. It’s a subject we discuss about almost every two months since I started working here. But today, I wanted to understand why. So, like Magnum P.I., I investigated. In order to explain the situation, I’ll have to enter the technical world, hence the caveats below.

CAVEAT: I don’t understand half of what I am writing below. I am NOT an IT guy. Please, please, please don’t write me to bash me on mistakes: better propose a correction in the comments area, that’d be nice.

CAVEAT #02 : The following has been proofread and corrected by one of the genius geek downstairs who prefers to remain anonymous to avoid spam from the other geeks around him (they live in a kind of tribe or something). Still, if something sounds wrong, blame me, not him.

I’ll use the Toyota Five Why method, it sounds cool.

1°- Why Mac users can’t play the hearings’ video streams properly?

Well, they can but they’ll get all audio streams at once. It sounds like the Tower of Babel after its fall. The reason is our video streams are encoded in Windows Media Video format (.wmv) while Macs better work with MPEG4 format. In order to correctly select the video with their language of choice, all users (including PC users) need the latest version of Explorer or Firefox and the latest version of Windows Media Player.

That’s right: to play a video on Internet, you need two things. A browser (Safari, Explorer etc.) and a player (Quicktime, Flash player, Windows Media…). Macs can play .wmv files all right (which is why Macs users can still benefit from our Hearings Video on demands) but they are less efficient in coping with .wmv live streams which include multiple audio files.

I am telling you it works on my PC

2°- Why don’t we encode in MPEG4?

In order to turn an event into a digital movie, you need hell of a lot of stuff (cameras, micros, robotic cameras etc.). To produce the actual file you want to stream, you need video encoding cards. All our audiovisual gear encode live streams in .wmv. We encode the Video on Demand files of the Plenary session in both: in .wmv and in .mpeg4. We don’t have the technical capacity to encode the live streams in both formats at the same time because we don’t have enough encoding video cards. The choice has been made to encode live streams in .wmv.

3°- Why did we chose to encode in .wmv in the first place ?

When we started to broadcast the Plenary session live in video, the .wmv format was the only format that allowed multilanguage url. Multilanguage url allows you to associate one video stream with different audio streams. You don’t have to duplicate the video file, you associate it with a selected audio stream from many available. MPEG4, I am told, was not good at that but it became better lately. At that time, PC users were the vast majority. They still are. Except for all those creative people and journalists who insist on following the Hearings, dammit ;-)

Linux people are extremely good at finding things out by themselves. They know how to play any kind of video streams. They’re super-geeks, you know

4°- Why don’t you use a Flash player like YouTube and all p0rn websites?

This is a good one. Flash video player have become extremely popular on Internet lately and they can work with all video streams source (.wmv or .mpeg4). Users just need the latest version of Flash on their computers and everyone is happy. Flash players are used by europarltv (except for the live streaming).

But. In order to stream a video, you need a transport protocol. We use the protocol rtsp. This protocol doesnt go well in Flash player, mind you, since Adobe (the owner of Flash technology) prefers one uses the rtmp protocol, which belongs to them. If we would move to rtmp protocol, we’d have to buy a lot of licenses. The solution is currently scrutinized. Also, we would use a closed transport protocol, “closed” opposing here the “open source” philosophy.

5- Why don’t you adress Linux users?

My internal IT experts said: “Linux people are extremely good at finding things out by themselves. They know how to play any kind of video streams. They’re super-geeks, you know”. But, to be fair, he also said: “Non-geek Linux users would be lost if we were to chose complicated to set up players, codex, plud-ins and so on.” Hence his taste for a Flash+MPEG4 solution.

Bonus question: will you adress this problem before the next century?

Yes, we will. So far, four solutions are possible.

- We invest in more machines and encoding video cards so we can simultaneously encode our live events in as many video formats as possible, or abandon the .wmv. In all cases, we should be able to propose MPEG4 for live streamings and video on demand. MPEG4 is a pre-condition for almost all possible solutions. Of course, the best amongst you will suggest we use SilverLight (Flash à la Microsoft) which can use a .wmv stream in a SilverLight player. But few have tried. It would cost a lot in research and analysis. And it would be also a proprietary format.

- We buy enough rtmp licenses and we develop Flash players embedded on our website ;

- We develop Flash players embedded on our website able to read directly our MPEG-4 stream via rtsp protocol ;

- We all move to html 5 wich proposes a new “player video” tag which transfers the video playing’s responsibility to the the user browser and not to the video player anymore.

I hope the last sentence is correct because you lost me somewhere around the protocol of transport thing.

The different EP IT teams are working on it. And we will certainly impose easy live streaming for all as a pre-condition of our future new website.

EDIT: Samples of asked questions and received answers
Which color would you prefer the walls of your kitchen to be?
PC: 27% more likely to choose beige
MAC: 27% more likely to choose orange

Definetely my kitchen walls' colour of choice

Do you prefer jobs and tasks which are:
PC: 41% more likely to say “Well-defined and structured so I know what’s expected of me”
MAC: 21% more likely to say “Fluid and flexible so I can take on new challenges”

When it comes to authority, do you tend to:
PC: 43% more likely to say “Accept what is asked, even if it’s not how I’d do things”
MAC: 16% more likely to say “Push back when I know things could be done a better way”

Oh my, this will lead to soooo good arguments ;-)

Just lately, chance has dictated that I find myself moving in rapid succession from one webby/communications/social media conference to another (and another). My job is to surprise people with the fact that the European Parliament is actually rather ahead in terms of its institutional peer group in this kind of thing. It works well in the more parliamentary conferences, where a fair proportion of the gathering is often still quite wide-eyed about the possibilities offered by Facebook et al, maybe less so in the more web/communication events where half the participants start twittering the event before boarding their planes to the venue. I jest not. (At such events, every move you make is inevitably filmed and uploaded to YouTube before you’re home. Dangggg! Did I say that?)

One thing 99% of these events have in common though is the business of the powerpoint presentation.

How it's done. Would he send you his slides?

No, this is not going to be a whinge about those presentations where slides full of dense type illegibly reproduce the text read out too fast (or way too slowly) by the presenter. Nor do I intend to complain about complex tables and slightly askew pdf scans projected incomprehensibly behind the talking head responsible. (Inevitably a seated and immobile talking head in such cases.) I am not even going to moan about 200-slide shows or dodgy animations – you know the sort – featuring wandering ovals and mid 1990s text art splurging improbably onto the screen to make some not-very-interesting point surrealistically not-very-interesting.

No, I am not going to mention any of that. My gripe is a different one and concerns the moment when the conference organisers ask for an advance copy of your “slides”.

There is a variant, whereby they ask for a copy afterwards “so we can put it on the website”. This is also problematic, but at least avoids some of my deeply-felt objections to these practices, which are as follows:

First, requests to send in the slides presume the slides are ready, and, if they are not, put you under pressure to finalise your presentation early. Now that might work for some, but I suspect that that is not the way the creative process works for many people. OK, I may be finding rationalisations for my chaotic and last-minute working habits, but, hey, this is me and you asked me to do the presentation, right?

My presentation weighs in at a meaty 150 MB. So how am I supposed to send it? Chopped up into small bits? Or even in a special “lite” version? Ugh! Alas, my art…

Second, practical issue no. 1. You want my presentation. You want it by email. But because I have slaved over a magnificent graphical presentation, full of wonderful hi-res photography and maybe even some cool video footage, my presentation weighs in at a meaty 150 MB. So how am I supposed to send it? Chopped up into small bits? Or even in a special “lite” version? Ugh! Alas, my art…

Third, practical issue no. 2. Yes, the curse of the evil monopolist. People ALWAYS say: “could you send us your powerpoint?” But what if my presentation is NOT powerpoint? Now I know there’s a kind of snobbery about these insufferable Mac-using types who think that they are superior to mere mortals, but the problem is that not they, but the presentation software they use IS actually superior to yer bog-standard powerpoint show. So the moment always comes when the conference organisers need to be appraised of the fact that the file in question is a Keynote presentation designed to be shown from a Mac (which, by the way, I intend to plug into your beamer in the conference hall – no problem there, I trust?), and therefore will be of little use to them anyway. Conference organisers rarely enthuse at this news, though the presenter may secretly rejoice at the infallible excuse to hold back his creation. (“Insufferable Mac-user” is probably right, actually.) I have to mention one way out of this impasse which is truly horrific: to export the Keynote file to a Powerpoint file. This is possible, but I am convinced that Apple engineers have deviously written the code to ensure that, though the outcome is recognisable and usable, it is also truly horrible to behold, full of inferior graphics and clunky transitions. Ha! Take that.

Fourth, and here we get more philosophical, what is a presentation for? Surely it is to illustrate my talk. Hopefully it will have nice pictures, delighting the senses, stimulating associations and assisting the memory. It will pick out key words, key figures, add value, provide an extra dimension. But if it just says what I say, why did I bother turning up at all? If it is a self-standing document comprehensible in its own right, I may as well have saved the fare…

Why should I hand out the fruit of my creative juices copyright-free to any Tom, Dick or Harry? You wanna see it, you show at the conference. So there!

Fifth, …and that goes for the audience too! Somehow it doesn’t seem right. If your slideshow lives independently of your actual presentation, what is the point of anyone being there? Conference organisers have an interest in grasping this point. The point of a conference is to be there, to hear the presenter speak, to be inspired, bored, enlightened or annoyed by what is said… Do you imagine that all those starry-eyed fans who pack the Moscone Center in San Francisco to hear Steve Jobs show them a new iPod would be just as happy if he “sent over his powerpoint”? Now, boy, I ain’t no Steve Jobs, but there is a point here somewhere about, ahem, art, isn’t there? Why should I hand out the fruit of my creative juices copyright-free to any Tom, Dick or Harry? You wanna see it, you show at the conference. So there!

I can hear the mob of social webbers howling at my gate already – it’s all about sharing! How dare you withhold your presentation from us? But stop guys, we have the internet now. We can post stuff that’s suitable for sharing, stuff that is useful when viewed at home or in the office, stuff you can post to Facebook, YouTube, whatever you like. But how about we agree to protect that rare flower – the moment, just being there?

Disclaimer: if any conference organisers, those nice people who have asked me for my slides, read this, please don’t take it too hard. I know you just want the conference to go smoothly and meet the expectations of all those eager participants. I know, because yes, I’ve done it myself – asked for the slides…