It’s taken me a week to recover from our week in New York for Open Video Conference and FOMS, but it was so worth it. We had a great time meeting with old friends, some of whom we only see online or once a year at conventions, as well as networking with a ton of terrific new people.

Huge appreciation goes to Ben Moskowitz for organizing an inspiring and well run conference. We were happy to help sponsor Open Video Conference, and look forward to returning. This year the conference was bigger, more diverse, and reflected the evolving world of open video to not only software developers, but end users, film makers, and non-profit groups. It’s an exciting time to be working in this kind of technology.

The first day we ran demos of the Entropy Wave E1000 Live Encoder, streaming up to HD quality video from the E1000 to several devices to show the versatility of the box.

Here’s one of the streams (HD Ogg/Theora/Vorbis over RTP) on a Linux-based laptop

Another of the streams (Ogg/Theora/Vorbis) being played on a stock Nokia N900.

And a third stream (MPEG-TS/H.264/AAC) being played on an Apple iPhone demonstrating H.264, AAC, MPG-TS, and Apple HTTP Live Streaming.

The next day David Schleef moderated a panel discussion on Licensing, Patent Issues, and Standardization of codecs, participants included Laura DeNardis (Executive Director at Yale Isp), Mike Flathers (CTO Sorenson Media), Rob Glidden (Open Video/Digital TV standards advocate), and Timothy Terriberry (codec developer currently with Mozilla). Among the five of them, they represented enough knowledge on the legal and logistical side of open codecs that an entire conference could have been filled with just that discussion. Unfortunately, they only had an hour, but a ton of useful knowledge was shared and an extremely lively discussion ensued.

After that, we ran to David’s next talk, discussing video compression trade-offs, geared towards end users like editors and workflow managers. Again, with only an hour it’s impossible to really cover most of the issues involved, but he and Jon Dahl of Zencoder gave a very decent overview of the encoder options, and in Jon’s case, a discussion of cloud encoding.

The next day was the start of Foundations of Open Media Software, which was well organized and kept on task by Silvia Pfeiffer. In the two days of discussion, a ton was covered. Check out the write-up of day one, general discussion about the advantages and disadvantages of adaptive HTTP streaming, and day two, discussing the creation of a solution for Ogg and WebM.  Sylvia has a great write up on her blog about some of this as well.

We actually did manage to get out and enjoy a bit of the city after the conferences. David and I took in the Metropolitan Museum with some fellow developers, it was nice to get out from behind the laptops and the Met is astounding!