Tuesday, June 12, 2012
Video madness
Good news: the city of Killeen finally inches into the 21st century by offering streams of city meetings.
Bad news: It's microsoft only. For some bizarre reason which I'm sure they'll be hand-waving about for years to come, they chose to reject the many popular low-cost open solutions for a proprietary one.
This is something I can contribute to the budget process: if city Information Technology persists in using over-priced, incompatible and obsolete technology, maybe they should stop doing that.
(And yes, I'm familiar with mono Moonlight. And its limitations.)
Update: I have to back off, at least a little. As much as I oppose proprietary solutions, both because of the cost and the inconveniences they inevitably impose on users, working with video involves a lot of hard choices. Silverlight is probably the worst of the available choices in terms of lock-in and inconvenience -- I certainly would't start there -- but there might be circumstances (previous investment in hardware and software, for example) that make it a better choice than it seems on the surface.
Update, again. Nope. Completely unusable on Linux. If anyone has tried it with a Mac, please let me know. As long as all you want to do is watch from beginning to end (2.5 hours with lots of gaps for yesterday's recording) it is OK. If you try to move forward or back, it hangs.
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There are other systems being used by the city of Waco, and Austin. The Texas Veterans land board also has their meetings on the internet. So far it works on my Windows driven computers. Have not tried it yet on the iPad, or other mobile device. The campaign pledges of the elected officials only pledged to have the videos. I doubt if some of them know what you are talking about.
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