1 year performance video (aka samHsiehUpdate)

Technical information

Viewing 1 year performance video

You absolutely, positively need the latest version of Macromedia's Flash player to view the piece. You can download and install the free player software in minutes. We use Macromedia's new flash video format to dynamically load video and the newest player must be used in order for the video to load properly.

You also need a broadband internet connection. Most consumer broadband connections should work fine.

Troubleshooting

• Seeing only a white box or broken plug-in icon.
  Once again, you need the latest version of Macromedia's free Flash player. We don't check for your version of Flash or if you have Flash installed. If you enter the video page and all you see is a white box, check that you have the latest version of Flash installed.
• The video plays choppy.
  You may not have enough bandwidth to run the piece properly. You need to be able to maintain a data stream of about 400kbps. We've tested the piece using consumer broadband connections with no problem. Or, your computer may not have enough power to play the video properly. We've tested the piece on less powerful computers without problems but if your computer is more than 3-4 years old you may not be able to view the piece properly.
• Time isn't being saved / can't log in.
  Be certain you have Javascript enabled and your browser is allowed to accept cookies from turbulence.org. You also need a browser which supports iframes (see next point).
• Everything is completely messed up.
  You need to use a newer browser. We suggest Firefox (free download) for Windows users (Internet Explorer 5 or higher is OK too), Mozilla or Firefox for Linux users and Safari, Internet Explorer, or Firefox for Macintosh users. We DO NOT suggest Netscape Communicator 4.x! All newer browsers support iframes.
• Log in from another computer?
  Yes, your time will be saved if you use the same email address to log in.
• Saved time is gone.
  That's OK, just log in here.
• That didn't help.
  Perhaps you created an account using a different email address? Try another.
• Still isn't working.
  Perhaps you created an account with a fake email address and now you want to save your time because you've gotten into the piece?
• Ah — no, I don't think so.
  You can email and we'll see if we can locate your account.

Deep tech (for the net art geeks)

1 year performance video is built with Flash, PHP and MySQL along with the usual client-side suspects: XHTML, CSS, and Javascript.

The over 160 individual clips (in flash video format, FLV) are stored in directories on the server. Two XML files (one for M.River and one for T.Whid) contain 4 chunks of information about each video: the path to the video on the server, it's probability of being played, it's frequency per playlist creation and it's duration.

There are two SWF (flash) files on the performance video page (one for M.River and one for T.Whid). When you load the page each file calls a PHP script (videos.php.zip), passing it two variables: the time on the client computer and which XML file to load.

The PHP script loads and parses the XML file and then outputs new XML based on the time and internal logic programmed into the script. This new XML output is loaded by the SWF on the client machine, parsed into a playlist, and then each video is simply played one after the next. Currently we send an XML file which takes about 8 hours to play (only about 16kb of data per XML file). Once all the videos in the playlist are played, a new 8 hour list is loaded automatically.

One problem we encountered was a bug in the Flash Video Exporter 1.2 software which caused the FLV files to not send their 'complete' event back to flash. It's hard to load the next video when you don't know when the last has completed! We created a workaround by using the duration of the video (contained in the FLV metadata) to determine that the video was complete (or as complete as it needed to be). Any suggestions on optimizing the actionscript (netstream.as.zip) greatly appreciated.

file downloads:
›› mriver.xml
›› twhid.xml
›› videos.php.zip
›› netstream.as.zip