A brief progress report.
Times are changing and much has happened here at skysurfer.media – for one, the migration to a new server is complete! I now boast almost 2Gbps unmetered egress and enough processing power to handle multiple streams and multiple viewers. Although I am the sole user, this means there should be no problems with bandwidth sharing live productions. I’m also poised to take advantage of Cloudflare’s global CDN now, though this meant transferring the site from Porkbun – which is really too bad because they’re nice people and the pig is cool, but a golden cloud does fit the motif of this site better, anyway. In the process, I fixed the records for my mail server so now indigo@skysurfer.media emails can get delivered by gmail, hotmail, etc. And, the image server is now 100% fully functional, even auto uploading new images for background processing… I’ll start making photos public again soon.
One big change in the works is with video streaming. I’ve put a lot of effort into getting VLC to be the server side publisher, but there are still problems and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s all because 4.0 still hasn’t been released and the code is out of date – VLM via telnet is cool, but the #output lines are tedious, RTSP throws a lot of errors, and there’s a lot of conflicting documentation. Staying compatible with what 4.0 will require is impossible with changes to RTP and VLM, and the built-in scheduling is clunky, albeit a nice feature. In the end, I’ve come to the conclusion that VLC is a great player and front end for ffmpeg conversions, but it’s not the best choice for producing. Enter Gstreamer. This is the right application for the job with lots of plugins, auto detection of everything, and it will take full advantage of the CPU to do everything concurrently and quickly. Individual streams from the internet, cameras, drone or whatever, will all get fed to mediamtx, then a stream can be made easily available in a number of formats, embedded into a web page, or even viewed directly from a web browser (this was the initial goal, no third party services, no third party app). This change coincides with Firefox’s recent inclusion of WebRTC and means I probably won’t use Owncloud now. But, it does mean learning a new platform. All the same, live streaming should begin in the next couple of weeks.
And lastly, contacts and chat. Bluesky social wins the slot for micro blogging and I will soon start running the framework for a PDS so @skysurfer.media will be federated. Since the takeover of Twitter and it’s rebranding to X, millions of people have started using Bluesky, a free and open source alternative from the originator of Twitter. Over the years, I’ve played with all kinds of different protocols and privacy schemes, but the same challenge persists – how to protect personal information while being publicly available. One problem is with the myriad of different options out there. I don’t want to have a contact page with X, Telegram, WhatsApp, Weechat, IRC, Discord, Messenger, and on and on… and I don’t want to limit people by requiring a signup or an app. Signal is another application that’s quickly gaining popularity as they’re trying to conquer the same problem by taking over text messages and phone calls with end-to-end encryption and a self-created handle (I can be contacted @indigo.72 for the time being), but although they’ve nailed it for the difference between privacy and anonymity, there’s no multicasting… so between email, Bluesky, and my phone number, there is no reason for a chat room. DMs can be sent via bsky.social, too, and Signal can handle video chat and small groups making it a good replacement for apps like Zoom. Along with live streaming, I no longer see the need for Jitsi Meet, either.
In the end, I may also phase out WordPress. It’s a bulky security nightmare, but it does auto-update. I have this site for a few reasons, three of which are: 1) journaling, personal notes, collection of thoughts and things I find along the way – for this, bsky will work just fine; 2) blogging, longer pages, albums, places, events – WP for now; and 3) sharing – this is the most challenging part of all, to give images and ideas to the world, while not allowing exploitation or abuse of services. As it is, I could provide users with email, a VPN, and lightning fast DNS, but this is not the scope of my site. I will probably add an internet radio channel and also produce my own music, but my focus is visual. By Summer, I should be in full effect, streaming from the jeep and the sky, being able to edit and share from wherever I am, and skysurfer.media will finally be live and mobile.
Stay tuned.
Indigo