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.

Tibo commented in the last post on editorial aspects of all this, so I’ll just stick to the nuts and bolts. What are we offering?

I was recently asked to sum it up in an email. Here’s what I wrote:

QUOTE

First we have a special hearings website, where we will be referring everyone for the coverage. All stories and press releases on the hearings will be flagged for automatic publishing there, and all hearings will be streamed live.  After the hearings, recorded video-on-demand will be available via the pages devoted to each candidate.

Heads of EU indeed

The site also contains all general infomation (e.g. on the procedure) and all documentation (e.g. CVs, questionnaires, responses, etc.) anyone could reasonably want.

On the Headlines page we have published a “why you should be interested” article, followed by a “how to follow the hearings” piece as a guide to our online offerings. Today, a little “in numbers” article has been added ahead of the meat of the content on the hearings themselves. There is also be a top page banner linking to the hearings site.

Every day during the hearings we will publish an announcement of the hearings scheduled for the day, with all the necessary links. We will also publish a daily roundup of the previous day’s hearings

The Press Service will prepare press releases on each hearing, to be published asap after the hearing.  Each hearing will itself be followed by a press point with the candidate. These will also be webstreamed.

As I said, all relevant material will be published on the hearings website as well as on the usual Headlines and Press Service pages of Europarl.

EuroparlTV will produce a daily news bulletin on the hearings. This will be online in the original language each evening with all other languages added during the night and during the following morning. We will embed these videos in our roundup stories too.

Meanwhile, EuroparlTV has already produced a range of introductory videos on the hearings:

On Facebook, we have an “event” for the hearings, and publish regular status updates through the hearings process. We have set up a “discussion topic” where we will invite Facebook fans to comment on the hearings throughout the process. We will link to this from all our editorial material on the site

On Flickr, we will publish a stream of photos from all the hearings.

On Twitter, though it is sadly not feasible to twitter the whole thing live (!), we will keep up a steady stream of tweets pointing to the latest news, new publications, etc.

On our YouTube channel, we will publish the EuropartTV bulletins in English asap each day.

UNQUOTE

Give people the access and information they need in a good usable form and they’ll come and get it.

Now you know. But – at least here – it’s not really my intention to market what we are doing (though please feel free to follow the links above), but to provide an illustration of where we are now – our current possibilities and limits. This might help the discussion we’re having at the moment about the future of Parliament’s online presence.

I just checked. The early stats are showing a lot of traffic to the hearings website. Some consolation for Tibo, sometimes just give people the access and information they need in a good usable form and, if they’re interested, they’ll come and get it.

One of the positive aspects in our line of work, though, is our ability to dig our own hole – or to build our own hell. Once we daily achieve our publishing-news-for-my-Latvian-grandmother mission, our team is usually left free to come up with ideas, projects, crazy scripts to fulfill the same mission only in different forms.

2009 was the year of a main big challenge while 2010 will propose many different ones, not all of them being small. Here are my perspectives.

I want a following not an end.

Keeping the team spirit up and raising.

Our team is demanding – you have no idea. They always want more challenges, more fun, more projects. Some of them have been with us for more than three years and they start to wonder if there would not be greener grass over the fence. Some have left and will be replaced soon. Others just want to stay as long as possible without getting bored in the process. In 2010, we’ll have to take care of them, with the little management possibilities (trainings, events, crazy projects) available in the institutional world. More than ever, it will be “management with a smile” but the smile should never become a grim. We’ll work on our processes and workflows. Synopsis and schedule will stay, since they do work as reliable and efficient tools, but we always look for better way to do things. This means team-workshops, trials and errors.

Amongst the things I’d like us to improve:

• shorter synopses (and, therefore, shorter articles)
• better posts on this blog
• better spreading of all the material we produce
• better coverage of the Plenary sessions.

Food for thought, as they say.

On a more personal quest, I’d love to integrate, in a way or another, Google Wave in our daily workflow. Like the whole Internet, I am yet to be convinced on the usability of the tool. But I am convinced this unusual live cooperative stuff can fit with our unusual 22 language team. Unfortunately, we can’t set it up on our current PC configurations. Maybe a good excuse to decree a new era of working from home?

Improving the current website

The end of the Elections Communication campaign took us back two years with the (scheduled from the beginning) closure of the Elections section. No more comments, debates, polls. The flagship website is like a supertanker: powerful and reliable, with a huge capacity, but slow to move. We already expressed our needs to the tech team. They laughed a lot, at first, and when they understood we were dead serious, they started to worry. Now, they are coding, and developing and we will work with them to add some features to the European Parliament’s website in the months to come. Yes: months. This is the frustrating part – those things take damned too long.

And there are also all the back office aspects that our dear readers and users don’t see. It’s amazing the amount of things we do manually – just because when we decided it would be a good idea to propose them online, the DIY way was the fastest. But as features accumulate, the time to call for automation has come. We’d like to be able to aggregate different products on a specific subject (say, stories and videos and slideshows and press releases) in a same place in one click for all 22 languages. We’d like to make life easier for our editors, so they write more and edit less.

We’ll try to report on our doubts, insights, creativity flashes and best intuitions on this blog. Don’t expect any concrete outcomes before at least two full years.

Designing a new website

While the current European Parliament website is still trendy and doesn’t look too “made in 1996″, it is actually an old website by the Internet standards, as it is older than six months. We’ve been instructed to conceive a full new website, based on the best forecasts and trends of how and what the Internet medium will evolve and become. Not an easy one. 2010 will be dedicated to meetings with external experts, workshops with internal users and, even if we don’t exactly know how yet, to getting some feedback from actual visitors and users of the website. We’ll try to report on our doubts, insights, creativity flashes and best intuitions on this blog. Don’t expect any concrete outcomes before at least two full years.

Staying alive online

We’ve created many profiles and platforms outside the main website. I remember some bets were taken, few months ago, on our intention to keep them alive after the Elections. Well, they’re all are (and some of our readers owe us some drinks…). We’ll keep them alive, but we still have to find our own personal and unique way to do so. More food for thoughts and more debates to come on those online social media.

I’ll stop here. I don’t want to scare our editors any more, the huge majority having already left for holidays somewhere in the EU or beyond (and possibly being currently stuck in a train blocked by the snow or in an airport full of delayed planes). I’ll take my chance with the train soon to visit my French family in the Alps. On a personal note, 2010 promises me what we call an “heureux événement” in French. I wish you all as many good surprises, challenges and “bouleversements” as the many ones that, I’ve been told, await me on the way.

Joyeux Noël et Bonne Année à toutes et à tous.

See you on this blog in January 2010.