Some very tragic news made the headlines this week in Buenos Aires.  Uruguayan model Eliana Ramos, 18, was found dead on Tuesday of an apparent heart attack.

Sadly, this tragedy has all the makings of a story that sensationalist journalism will stick to.  Just six months earlier, her older sister Luisel, 22, died as she stepped off the catwalk of a fashion show in Montevideo.  Additionally, the local press has been whipped into an anorexia frenzy recently after the death of Brazilian model Ana Carolina Reston last November and the controversy surrounding Madrid Fashion Week's decision to bar underweight models.  While no official medical report has been released yet, the local press has speculated that an eating disorder may have contributed to Elle's early demise.

While the mariposaHD team never actually knew Elle, our cameras did capture her smiles at several recent local fashion shows.  We wish to offer our condolences to her family and friends for this tragic loss.  But as usual, rather than commenting extensively on this sad story, we prefer to let our images do the talking.  Here are links to some of our recent shots of Elle on the catwalk, hopefully the way she'd wish to be remembered:

dotto :: IMG_3323
dotto :: IMG_3251
ftv urban look :: IMG_6787
ftv urban look :: IMG_6860
fashion buenos aires :: IMG_5472

Yes, for those of you who follow the Gregorian calendar, it has officially been one Gregorian year since Motamorfosis Productions publicly launched our first episode of mariposaHD.  So, happy birthday mariposaHD!

Of course, around here we strictly adhere to the Mayan calendar.  The positive energy associated with this is one of the secrets to the success of mariposaHD.

For us, it has been 12 full moons, many energetic days, and one "out of time day" since we launched our first episode of mariposaHD.  On December 7, 2005 we became the world's first original HDTV show to be distributed on the Internet (according to any calendar).

In our first Gregorian year of "netcasting", thousands of people from all over the earth downloaded episodes of mariposaHD.  From places we can easily count, viewers downloaded 92,761 episodes of mariposaHD using the BitTorrent protocol.  An additional 39,952 episodes of our iPod version were downloaded directly from Apple's iTunes music store.  Many thousands more downloaded episodes directly from bittorrent.com, the ed2k/eMule P2P network, or from USENET news feeds (which we can't count so easily).  We have also welcomed more than half a million unique visitors to the mariposaHD.tv web site this year.

From our BitTorrent tracker alone we tracked more than 84 TERABYTES of data transfers this year.  This project must stand as one of the most stunning endorsements of using Peer-to-Peer technology to transfer large data files around the world.

Many thousands of people had their first ever experience seeing High-definition video by watching mariposaHD (as HDTV is not yet broadcast in most parts of the world).  mariposaHD has also been seen in trade shows, expositions, and HDTV demonstrations in several countries.  This project is also a stunning endorsement of the Creative Commons licensing model and the idea of free and open digital exchange of artistic work.

For 365 sunrises now the mariposaHD team has brought you free HD videos and a huge online high definition photo gallery.  You've enjoyed the beauty, style, adventure, great music, and gorgeous mariposa girls that define mariposaHD.  We send little bits and bits of pleasure to your perceptions (using the latest technology out there).

But, there is more yet to come!  We are going to continue to surprise you in the coming year.  We have been traveling around the world to bring you more of the first free HDTV show for the Internet.  Remember, we're always on, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and available from anywhere in the world.  It's free and legal to download, watch, keep, copy, and share; always and forever.  Someday, maybe all HDTV will work this way ...

 

At this time, we would like to extend two very special Happy Birthday thank-you's to:

1. all the people who contribute to the many open-source software projects such as BitTorrent, Drupal, Gallery, Red Hat Linux, Apache, mySQL, Azureus, and BNBT.  Without you this project would not be possible!
   
   
2. the folks at Server Matrix / The Planet which is where our web server and BitTorrent tracker are hosted.  We had an absolutely perfect 100% uptime in our first year of netcasting.  Our server has never actually rebooted in a year of serving videos and several months of development work:
   
   02:49:18 up 437 days, 10:33, 1 user, load average: 2.95, 1.60, 1.30
145 processes: 135 sleeping, 7 running, 2 zombie, 1 stopped

   This could not have happened without the help of the solid team there at our hosting company.

Thanks to everyone who helped make our first year of transmissions a reality and to you for watching!

Remember, there is always someone in the universe watching mariposaHD ... always.

Enjoy it,

mike, jeff, dominic, and tamir
Motamorfosis Productions

It was announced today that BitTorrent has merged with (bought) µTorrent:

This is Bram Cohen, the creator of the BitTorrent protocol, and Ludvig (Ludde) Strigeus, the writer of µTorrent.

Together, we are pleased to announce that BitTorrent, Inc. and µTorrent AB have decided to join forces. BitTorrent has acquired µTorrent as it recognized the merits of µTorrent's exceptionally well-written codebase and robust user community. Bringing together µTorrent's efficient implementation and compelling UI with BitTorrent's expertise in networking protocols will significantly benefit the community with what we envision will be the best BitTorrent client.

Full announcement here

In our opinion, µTorrent is the best BitTorrent client for Windows out there (including BitTorrent's own client, which isn't so great) so we see this as a very positive development for both parties involved.  We have been using µTorrent around here since v1.0 and it is certainly one of the finest pieces of free software ever written.  Congratulations on joining forces to both parties involved and we hope this leads to further development of one of the best new technologies of the 21st century.

mariposaHD would not be here without you!

I saw this on digg today and it got me excited:

Several leading consumer electronics companies are expected to announce Tuesday that they are working together to develop a new standard for transmitting high-definition audio and video signals wirelessly.

Supported by LG, Matsushita (Panasonic), NEC, Samsung, Sony, Toshiba and semiconductor maker SiBeam, the digital interface WirelessHD would enable high-speed streaming of audio and video content between consumer electronics devices like televisions, DVD players, game consoles and other portable devices without using cords. The group plans to release the specification in spring 2007.

Full article

While on the one hand we're big fans of Japanese (and Korean) electronics companies, so it's great to see them coming out with this important and exciting technology, on the other hand we are Americans and it would be nice to actually see an American company working on something like this for once.  Hopefully the Japanese will keep gobbling up all the blue jeans and Paris Hilton handbags we're sending them in exchange for all these nice HDTV gadgets they're sending us.

First of all, for those that already have Skype, nice work!  If not why not get with the program and download Skype!

Skype is one of those wonderful inventions that the general public is unfortunately slow to acknowledge or get.  Like ReplayTV and then Tivo and then the iPod and then HDTV and then the potential of the Sony HDV Cameras...aaaah the burden of an early adopter to help the masses out.  But I digress...

Skype has allowed the founders and countless contributors to the creation of mariposaHD to stay in touch with friends and each other in our separate travels covering a total of 6 continents.  We have even held a team video conference which took place in 4 different countries by 5 different folks.

All for free?  Yes, Skype can be all for free.  It is still cheap even if your friends don't have Skype.  We're also assuming one's laptop can steal wireless.  Headphones and a webcam may come in handy.

If you don't have a cam, I'd suggest ponying up and buying something useful at the end of this year.  Yes, for the time of year that most of you lie to your children I suggest buying them one of these cameras.  Why not get Sony's entry-level, high quality, super maneuverable and incognito new HDV camcorder.  You can use it as a webcam for Skype videoconferencing or to record your own videos in 1080p HDTV.  It also serves as an excellent still camera.

Also, why not kill the lie that is santaclaus?

We're happy to announce that episodes of mariposaHD are now available on Dovetail in full 720p HD resolution.

Dovetail is a browser-based media distribution platform that utilizes peer-to-peer transfers and streaming video previews.  Dovetail is now the fourth independent media platform (along with iTunes, Instant Media, and Democracy) to distribute episodes of mariposaHD and the second to do so at full 720p High Definition resolution.

After subscribing to mariposaHD's showcase be sure to checkout Dovetail's rapidly growing collection of independent films, TV shows, and music videos.

The future of Internet video is looking brighter every day!

mariposa moto fashion is coming soon as mariposa girls will soon sport some of the latest designs from madif industries.  madif is one of the largest manufacturers of motorcycle apparel in the world.  Arlenn Ness and Berik, their feature lines, have a global appeal within the motoracing community.  But you don't need to be a biker to look good in a nice leather jacket.  Fortunately there are distributors in several parts of the world.  Also coming soon, mariposa moto world coverage begins as we will be tracking select events alongside madif racing.

We are checking our calendars and the motocross schedule to find the perfect destination.  Stay tuned!

With thousands of new videos now being uploaded to YouTube every day, there must be tons of people who go thru what I just did: upload a video to YouTube for the first time.  Despite one or two user forums, a quick Google search reveals that relatively little has been written about this process.  So here are a few of our thoughts on uploading video to YouTube:

1. the worst part about it is how long you have to wait after the upload is finished for YouTube to process your video.  We waited more than a day and half for our little 3 minute promo clip to finish processing and be ready to share.  I have a hard time believing that all these thousands of people uploading videos everyday are going to have the patience to wait around a few days for their videos to show up.  It certainly hurts the idea that user generated Internet video can cover any type of current events situation.  By the time the video is ready to share it's already a few days later!  I realize that YouTube is attempting to transcode thousands of new video clips a day to their own Flash format for streaming (which can't be an easy thing to do at that scale) but at some point they're going to have to figure out a better way do it or dedicate more resources to do the processing.  Waiting days for your video to show up stinks.
   
   
2. why does YouTube recommend that the optimal format for upload is 320x200 video when they seem to be transcoding the video to fit in the 425 pixel-wide standard viewing window?  They should suggest that directors encode video to a 425 pixel-wide (or higher) format video because whenever you transcode video from a lower resolution format to a higher one, you loose video quality.  Perhaps they have a good reason for telling you to use a lower resolution format than their viewer window, but I can't  figure it out.
   
   
3. it seems their transcoding process screws up the audio/video synchronization somewhat.  I noticed this before even uploading videos by watching other people's Steven Colbert clips captured from broadcast television.  I noticed the sound is usually a little off in them but I just assumed that it was the person capturing it that screwed it up.  Now that I've uploaded my own video, I can see that it's YouTube's transcoding process that's messing it up.  The original clip sound is perfect when played back locally on my PC but the sound synch is slightly off in the YouTube streaming version.  (I uploaded a few different videos to be sure.)
   
   
4. Their transcoding is stripping off the last few moments of the video.  We include a Creative Commons banner at the very end of all our videos (including the promo I uploaded to YouTube) and their processing step seems to have stripped it off.
   
   
5. It looks like by default YouTube takes a frame exactly in the middle of the video to use as the still screen shot icon that they display to represent the video.  It would be nice if there was some way to manually select another frame to use as the frame exactly in the middle of the video may not necessarily best represent what the video is actually about.
   

Besides that, the video and sound quality appear to be okay (for streaming video).  Hopefully you're not in a third-world country somewhere so your Internet connection is solid enough that it plays back in real-time without skipping.

As I alluded to on the front page, there are lots of cool things about streaming Internet video (especially what YouTube/MySpace/Google Video are doing) but video quality and playback performance aren't among them.  That's one reason that we chose to go with BitTorrent and P2P to distribute the mariposaHD episodes: we wanted the best video quality possible.

For Internet video to eventually eclipse broadcast video (which it eventually will) the video quality and playback performance has to be BETTER than broadcast TV, not worse.  The video capabilities of a typical PC are already far beyond most televisions.  The trick is simply getting the high-quality video to the viewers on a network that wasn't designed to work that way.  We think the BitTorrent/P2P/cached video method is what works.  Not getting video in real-time is a small price to pay for vastly superior video quality.  Most people don't need to watch something in real-time anyway.  DVD's, VHS tapes, Tivoed TV shows, video on demand, are pay-per-view are all not real-time delivery and they all seem to do pretty well.  Besides, the real criticism of YouTube's business model is the economic one.  It reputedly costs them more than half a million bucks a month to pay for all those servers and bandwidth to host all those thousands of streaming videos.  How are they going to make enough money to pay for all that?  The bigger their audience, the bigger their bandwidth bill. Their economics don't scale well.  Here at mariposaHD, we've had thousands of viewers download our first view videos (which are in HD!) from all over the world and we've distributed it all from a single 2.4 Ghz Celeron server that hosts our website and BitTorrent tracker.  That's the way that Internet video will eventually eclipse broadcast television.

Okay, we finally caved in and put a video clip on YouTube today.  We're not big fans of streaming low-resolution video but the popularity of their site cannot be denied.

After spending so much time, money, and effort on top-of-the-line HD cameras, complex HD editing, and cutting-edge video compression and P2P distribution software, it has never made much sense to us to post our episodes on YouTube only to have them downsampled to lousy 320x240 low-bandwidth streaming video (and to sit alongside webcam clips of people lighting their farts on fire).

Nevertheless, we have posted a short promo clip and hopefully it will inspire some of their 16 million monthly viewers to stop by here to download the full length HD episodes.  The video itself is simply the same 3 minute intro clip at the beginning of episode 01.01 :: abstract television.

Here's the link to our new mariposaHD YouTube page and the link to the promo clip itself, which you can also see here:

Feel free to post this clip (using the links provided by YouTube) on your website or blog to help us spread the word.

We also wrote up a blog article on some of our critiques of the YouTube uploading process.

We'll see how this goes for a few days and then we'll probably post the same thing on MySpace Videos and Google Video.   Enjoy it!

Help support the mariposaHD team and rent our apartments in Buenos Aires.  The neighborhood, Las Cañitas, is fantastic.  The building is located right in the heart of the action on Baez Street.  Food, fashion, and fun are all within stumbling distance as numerous restaurants, boutiques, and bars line the safe tree-lined streets.  Apartment highlights:

• located in a 16 unit new/exclusive building
• 8 lounge chairs surrounding the rooftop swimming pool
• 5 Star Quality Beds/Bedding
• stay connected with cableTV, wireless highspeed, Skype, and a local payasyougo cellphone
• the Jumbo mega shopping complex is close enough to carry a few bags or 4 pesos via taxi
• 6 peso cab ride to Palermo Hollywood and 10 to Recoleta
• a short walk to the Palermo Racetrack and Polo field

 

photo gallery :: the mariposaHD apartments