Eveything old is new again ! Flesh Machine (2000) will be showing at the the Society for Photographic Education's Mid Atlantic Conference entitled, "Technocracy", November 7 & 8th 2008 in Pittsburgh, PA. The video will be screened at the Miller Gallery on Carnegie Mellon's campus over the weekend as well as during the conference on Saturday. There is a reception at the Gallery on Friday November 7th at 5:30pm. I'll be a guest panalist representing [PAM] at the conference and giving a artists talk moderated by Warhol Director Tom Sokolowski and featuring panelists from Eyebeam and Rhizome See http://www.spema.org/

flesh machine 2000
2000 - 3 min

deus ex machination 1999
1999 - 3 min
compainion piece to flesh machine

SlideshowPro is perhaps one of the most robust off-the-shelf Flash video/image players and publishing solutions on the market. It uses the javascript swfObject method and supports XLM based configuration files as well as PHP control and automation. The options and ability to customize are mind boggling and too numerous to list here. Most impressive is the ability to allow cross domain publishing, meaning users can embed player into other sites and social networking platforms.

There are basic 4 packages to choose from when purchasing the player and all of them very impressive.

Joomla users will happy to know that there is a free Joomla module called EasySSP that will have users up and running in short order. The developer of EasySSP also created an interactive configuation page to help users tweak out their instances of even further.

I am using the Flash/Standalone version but also plan on purchaing the Director version in the near future. It took some hunting around on SlideshowPro's website to get the standalone version running properly. In the months ahead I plan to roll it out in modified forms on numerous web sites. Stay tunned.

Having explored the Slingbox recording options with Mreplay Live and finding them extremely convenient and innovative but disappointing in quality  I began looking for a free recorder for my slingbox that would allow for more recording options. A google search came up with the Slinger SLR and VSLR applications written by Peter Jennings.

SLR is a simple application (Windows Only & requires the brilliant VLC Player to be installed) designed to record and, together with the VSLR application , view Slingbox video streams on one or more computers. Slinger SLR can be used to save Slingbox streams as files for later offline viewing on your PC, iPod or DVD Player. The Slinger Viewer offers PVR features such as pause, commercial skip, and resume for multiple simultaneous viewers.

Below is a clip that was recorded as a Windows ASF file from SLR and converted to a FLV file using the Flash video encoder.

Other Features include.

SLR Features:

• Transfer video from a Slingbox controlled PVR to your computer.
• Record the live video stream from your Slingbox.
• Automatically record to time stamped one hour files.
• Set up timer events for later recording.
• Switch effortlessly from SlingPlayer to SLR for recording.



VSLR Features:

• View the incoming stream or prerecorded video files.
• Multiple viewers can be used on several PCs for live or time-shifted viewing of recorded content.
• Pause the view of the live feed and resume at a later time.
• Stop viewing any video file and resume where left off.
• Skip ahead in 30 second intervals.
• Skip back in 10 second intervals.
• Jump to a specific time in the video.
• Fast forward through the video.
• Delete files after viewing.
• Rename or move files while viewing.
• Extract audio to mp3 or transcode video to mp4 and other formats.

Slingbox owners should check out http://www.mreplay.com. The website is still in beta but offers a really great solution that allows slingbox owners to record and share their streams via a web interface. Currently there is only a windows only client/plug-in for Explorer and Firefox but there are plans to release Linux and OSX clients in October. Interestly the web plug-in creates a server client connection between the sling stream, the local computer and the mrplay website. 2008.  There's also a plug-in that works in windows mobile devices and allows sling owners to watch and record from their Windows Mobile smart phone as well. There are plans to release blackberry and palm version of their "mobi" client in the near future.

In short here's what you can do with your mreplay account.

Control and record your slingbox to your local disk in Windows Media 9 via their web site.

Edit your clips via their web site.

Convert to flash 9 on their server and store it locally and on line at their site.

Share via an URL from their site or use embed codes. Tagging and descriptions are options as well.

The recording options are hard-coded to

• Format: Windows Media Audio 9 Standard, Stereo, 32.000 kHz
  Windows Media Video 9 Standard, 320 x 240, Millions
• Data Rate : 77.58 kbits/s

As of note my sling box although I have the HD option is set up with just a coaxial input at the moment.

The Windows beta version of Sling Player which was just released allows time shifting up to 60 minutes and incorporates a very useful channel guide.