Digital Media, FrameChannel, Photos

FrameChannel shutting down — time to break out WireShark!

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And it was going to be such a nice day…

I received this rather sad message this morning:

FrameChannel Users –

Due to challenges with the economy and our company’s financial situation we’ve been forced to make a tough decision and will be shutting down the FrameChannel service this month.

We have provided a mechanism for you to download any of your photos that are hosted with us in the My Photos channel or that have been emailed to your device via the My Friend’s Photos feature.

You may log into your account at www.framechannel.com to download your photos, but the service will soon stop delivering content to your devices. To download your photos, log into your FrameChannel account, click the Download My Photos tab, and follow the instructions there.

For those of you using your devices for commercial applications, you may wish to take a look at the SignChannel service. That service is owned an operated by Scala, Inc., a worldwide leader in digital signage. For more information, please visit www.signchannel.com or email info@signchannel.com

We thank you for your support of the FrameChannel service.

-The FrameChannel Team

FrameChannel logoI’m the proud owner of a Kodak EasyShare W820 WiFi enabled digital photo frame for several years. One of it’s most compelling features was the intergration with FrameChannel. FrameChannel is (was) an online service that allows(ed) you to manage what was displayed on the photoframe. It provided several pre-packaged feeds for weather displays, stock information, news, traffic conditions, Facebook photos, Twitter and most importantly for me, Flickr integration.

My frame would automatically download the latest additions to my Flickr photostream and display them. This was a GREAT feature and very popular among my family and house guests.

It has always been a free service (albeit with the occasional ad for FrameChannel services on other platforms); I assumed that Kodak had paid them a fee per frame to operate the service. I could make a lot of guesses about the terms of such an agreement but I’ll leave that for another day.

One thing I don’t yet grasp is why I wasn’t offered the option to pay for the service? Is shutdown the only option?

I’m searching for a contact within Thinking Screen Media (operators of FrameChannel) to propose that they open-source the software that runs the service. This would allow other to build/operate replacements so that their frames will not go dark. If you, dear read, should know anyone within the company, please drop me a line.

In the meantime… Break out WireShark!
As some of you will know WireShark is a fantastic tool for analyzing network (LAN) data. It will capture and decode the data as it flies by allow one to see exactly what is going on. In this case, it is useful for determining the protocol used by the frame to communicate with FrameChannel. With this information in hand it should be possible to create a work-alike backend so that I may continue to enjoy my WiFi enabled photo frame.

I’ll post what I discover along the way.

Systems Engineering, Windows Media Center

Change Windows XP user password via command line

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I found myself needing to change the administrator’s password on my Windows XP machine today. I’ve used that account exactly twice; once to setup the machine and then to create the user account that I use every day. So no, I don’t remember the absurdly complex password I came up with 3 years ago when I built this machine.

Luckily, I’ve ignored my own advice and have granted admin privileges to my user account. Only users with admin privileges can change other users’ passwords. This method will also work to change your own password even if you don’t have admin privileges.

C:\net user administrator *
Type a password for the user: asifiwouldtellyou
Retype the password to confirm: asifiwouldtellyou
The command completed successfully.

You can also change it without being prompted (useful in scripts):

C:\net user administrator thenewpasswordgoeshere
The command completed successfully.
Digital Media, Dreamland Blues Radio

Normalizing audio levels (or, what happens when you assume…)

A long time ago... in a digital media file library far away... I was SURE that I had gone through my entire library and performed level 'normalization'.

For those that are not familiar with the term, 'normalization' refers to the process of adjusting the 'loudness' of each track to a standard level. This is actually much more difficult that it may sound (pun not intended); when done well it's much more than just measuring the levels and adjusting them up or down to reach a standard value. The human ear is a decidedly non-linear device (It's actually performs much more like an log() function but that's for a different post) that has varying sensitivity across the range of audio frequencies. The perceived effect of this is that two tones recorded at the same 'level' may not have the same 'loudness'.

The simplest form of normalization simply subtracts the highest recording level within a track from an target level. It then boosts the level of the entire track by that amount so the peaks hit the target level. All sections (and frequencies) of the track are boosted equally. This approach does nothing to compensate for wide variations within the track but it does usually prevent listeners from running to twist the volume knob for every track.

I use mp3gain to perform normalization of tracks in my library. At it's default settings mp3gain achieves a very conservative standard level of 89dB. It also does an analysis of the audio data and compensates for the perceived loudness of the track. Mp3gain does not modify the original audio data; it stores the the adjustment factor within an ID3 tag. Audio players that recognize the REPLAY_GAIN (RGAD, or perhaps RVA2 in ID3v2.4 (and the XRVA)tag for 2.3 compatibility)) ID3 tag will automatically apply the factor during playback to create a 'normalized' playback.

While listening to my Christmas playlist I noticed several tracks that were dramatically louder than the majority of the others. After a bit of sleuthing I discovered that a great many of my library tracks had not been normalized - DOH!

One of my New Year's resolutions: NORMALIZE ALL TRACKS PRIOR TO AIR!

Digital Media, Dreamland Blues Radio

Build a Live365 station using Linux – Part 2 (Song Data)

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In the first part of this series I explained how to build and configure the Music Player Daemon (MPD) for use with Live365. In this installment I’ll describe how to send the song metadata (Title, Artist, Album). This is a requirement for ‘live’ mode broadcasters; if you do not send this data your station will not be listed in the directory.

When you run a Live365 station in ‘basic’ mode they pull the song metadata directly from the ID3 tags in your MP3 files. Most MP3 streams include this info. within the stream itself so that it can be displayed by the player software. Live365 does not extract this data from the stream you feed to them. Live365 provides an API (application program interface) that allows you to feed the data to them separate from the music stream.
Continue reading Build a Live365 station using Linux – Part 2 (Song Data) →

Digital Media and whatever else flows through my head…