1. Do you make the entire show yourselves?
2. The web page too?
3. Why is the show called 'mariposaHD'?
4. Why did you leave the USA?
5. Why Argentina?
6. How did this show happen?
7. Why aren't you using streaming video?
8. What are the system requirements to watch mariposaHD on a PC?
9. What is BitTorrent?
10. What is taking so long?
11. Oops, my BitTorrent client accidentally closed!?
12. I like what you guys are doing. How can I support mariposaHD?
13. Why did you guys make this show?
14. Why did you guys make this show for the Internet rather than a traditional television network?

 

 

Do you make the entire show yourselves?

If by “yourselves” you mean dominic, jeff, tamir, and mike then the answer is yes. We wrote, produced, directed, filmed, edited, scored, distributed, and “acted” in this show, mostly from our living room in Buenos Aires. We used pro-sumer video cameras, off-the-shelf PCs, and freely available software.

 

The web page too?

Yep. We wrote it, designed it, and coded it, using an open source content management system called Drupal. We also administer a Red Hat Linux server that's running Apache HTTP server and our own BitTorrent tracker.

 

Why is the show called 'mariposaHD'?

Long before we came up with the idea to make the world's first HDTV show for the Internet, we came up with a name for our shared interest in documenting natural beauty. It was "The Mariposa Project". We wanted to come up with a title that was abstract, didn't really mean anything, but evoked natural beauty. Mariposa means 'butterfly' in Spanish. At the time, we were reading lots of books on evolution that described how the intricate colors and patterns of sexually reproducing organisms evolve over millions of years of attracting members of the opposite sex, as described by Darwin's theory of sexual selection. The natural beauty of a butterfly is a perfect example.

As our ideas for The Mariposa Project evolved, so did the name. 'mariposaHD' is what we call our show that's about natural beauty in HDTV. It's a nice word and can easily be read, pronounced, and understood by most of the world.

The 'm' is always lowercase, because "it's softer", and the 'HD' is in capitals, as it stands for High Definition.

 

Why did you leave the USA?

Picking up and leaving the USA is an inherently intriguing topic for American viewers. Despite the fact that almost all of our ancestors managed to pick up and move to America in pursuit of their dreams, almost no one ever thinks about leaving. We each moved to Argentina for different reasons, but they generally all revolve around exploration and adventure. We hope to show, in HD, that there are many places to live and work in the world that are just as interesting, intriguing, and comfortable as the wonderful U.S.of.A.

 

Why Argentina?

Hmmm, that's a hard one. Maybe you should download a few episodes or check out the photo galleries.

 

How did this show happen?

You would never believe it.

 

Why aren't you using streaming video?

Because it sucks.

Since the dawn of the Internet, people have been talking about "streaming video" as the next big thing. Unfortunately, in our experience, it simply doesn't work. No one has ever been able to deliver a system that works well on most computers, on most connections, from most places in the world. The Internet simply doesn't work that way. The other big problem is picture quality. Existing streaming video is usually compressed and downsampled to a quality below standard TV. Our goal was to present our work in the highest quality format possible. Most importantly, the technology to stream HDTV over the Internet just isn't there yet. Our "download, wait, watch, and keep" model is cutting-edge enough.

 

What are the system requirements to watch mariposaHD on a PC?

Here are Microsoft's recommendations on the minimum you'll need to playback the two HD formats:

720p:

• Windows XP
• Windows Media Player 9 Series
• 2.4 GHz processor or equivalent
• 384 MB of RAM
• 64 MB video card
• 1024 x 768 screen resolution
• 16-bit sound card
• Speakers
  

1080i:

• Windows XP
• Windows Media Player 9 Series
• 3.0 GHz processor or equivalent
• 512 MB of RAM
• 128 MB video card
• 1920 x 1440 screen resolution
• 24-bit 96 kHz multichannel sound card
• 5.1 surround sound speaker system
  

 

What is BitTorrent?

BitTorrent, created by Bram Cohen, is an Open Source peer-to-peer (P2P) protocol that facilitates the economical and timely distribution of large files over the Internet. What you should know:

• a .torrent is a pointer file, hosted on our site, that points your computer to the episode information you request
• a BitTorrent client, we recommend the free open-source Azureus, is software that uses the .torrent file to connect to a tracker
• we host the tracker that coordinates BitTorrent peers simultaneously downloading and uploading little pieces of your mariposaHD episode
• we host a seed for each episode thus insuring 365.25 days/year access to all episodes of mariposaHD
• if you are a geek, like us, and need to know more about the inter workings of BitTorrent or anything else for that matter, checkout howstuffworks

 

What is taking so long?

Be patient as the magic of BitTorrent takes some time to start going but within a day (and hopefully much less time) you will have a fresh episode of mariposaHD delivered to your desktop.

 

Oops, my BitTorrent client accidentally closed!?

Don’t worry if the download gets canceled before it's finished, the partial download remains on your hard drive. Simply restart your BitTorrent client and within a couple of minutes the transfer will resume.

 

I like what you guys are doing. How can I support mariposaHD?

There's lots of ways:

1. The No-Brainer Way: after you've downloaded an episode of mariposaHD, seed!
2. Buy something from Amazon.com thru our mariposaHD store. Every time you buy something we've used or featured on our show, we get a cut of it.
3. Make a donation with PayPal. We distribute mariposaHD free of charge. That's a lot less than a movie ticket, a DVD, or a monthly cable bill. It costs a lot of money to buy cameras and host web sites. Help us out here, eh?
4. Support our sponsors. mariposaHD has made sponsorship arrangements with various makers of the products used in our show. Prove that this kind of advertising model can work and try some of their products.
5. Read our ads. Some pages on mariposaHD feature content- and viewer- targeted ad links from AdSense by Google which (we hope) are relevant, useful, and unobtrusive.
6. Participate in the show. We constantly need new music, web designers, programming help, beautiful girls, etc. Post your ideas for our show in the Participate forum.

 

Why did you guys make this show?

1. We quit our real jobs, so we have nothing better to do.
2. We're frustrated that there isn't much quality programming being produced in HDTV, so we decided to make a show ourselves.
3. We like travel, adventure, and hanging out with hot Argentine models all day. We brainstormed for a long time on how to make that lifestyle into something productive so that we can continue doing these things indefinitely.
4. The concept of making your own TV show in High-Definition and distributing it for free on the Internet had never been done before. It sounded like a really cool idea so we decided to try it. We figured there was at least a small chance we'd become rich, famous, and successful doing it.
5. We live in Argentina and they definitely aren't getting HDTV any time soon.

 

Why did you guys make this show for the Internet rather than a traditional television network?

If you were creating a brand new show today, what would you do?

In the next 5 years, the video entertainment industry in the United States and the rest of the world will look radically different than it does today. The technologies that we use to produce this show (HDTV cameras, pro-sumer video editing software, BitTorrent, video compression codecs, etc.) will radically change the television industry in the same way that MP3's and iPods have changed the music industry.