________ ________ ________
2020-04-19 / \/ \/ / \
/ __/ /_ _/
Hello! Wow. It's been a minute? Suffice / _/ / /
it to say that life has gotten in the way to \_______/_\___/____/\___/____/_
some really ugly levels, but I'll write / \/ \/ / \
about that later. I'm hoping the inspiration / _/ /_ _/
I'm feeling to complete this file will /- / _/ /
catapult me back in to writing, I have a lot \________/\________/\___/____/
to say. I've also rejoined fedi (yeah I
know) which is somewhat hindering my drive to write. Blowing off those little
bits of steam means I rarely build up enough pressure to rattle out something
long form. If you want to find me, I'm @cat@hackers.town. They're good people,
and very interesting!
When life gets real bad, or my mental health suffers, I generally retreat
deep into nostalgia. It gives me somewhere comfortable, safe and unchanging to
hide and accumulate orgone. One space I've found a real wealth of nostalgia is
the Internet Archive's VHS Vault[1].
I think I've written somewhere before, maybe in-passing on social media,
that I strongly believe the medium is as important as the media and it's the
combination of the two where you really find art - for example dungeon synth
music benefits greatly from the tape hiss and motor noise of an audio cassette
release while black metal benefits greatly from the muddy sound. Likewise
genres like post-punk and goth rock benefit greatly from the warmth of vinyl
records, clicks, pops and all.
Which brings me back to the VHS Vault. VHS goes beyond just the medium
adding value because VHS culture is rooted in home copying and trading, this
was true of the early anime scene and of concert bootlegging and movie piracy
to name a few examples. Because of the DIY nature of it and the ease of doing
it, VHS tapes are almost all unique. The choice of tape, the quality of the
VCR and the tape or TV signal being copied, all of these factors modify the
result, adding their own qualities and tool marks.
And then on top of that, time is a factor. Video tape degrades over time or
through plays and more modern hardware produces closer copies than older
hardware, etc.
I find it fascinating to think about and to explore and I get lost in the
Vault's library for hours, watching educational videos, movies and TV shows,
music television, almost anything through the patina of time, hardware and
tape generations.
It's also left me with a desire to share what I've found, and it's a long
list, but again I feel like the medium should honor the media; a YouTube
channel would be boring and has been done to death, and just plain text links
to video files wouldn't get much of a look beyond some mild interest in the
titles and filenames. My initial thought was to try and work out some kind of
private live streaming, I wanted it to be similar to how we would have done
anime fansub screenings back in the day; a private club, usually operating out
of someone's house, people come around we watch a few tapes and chat about
them.
I might still do that, I'm not sure. I managed to get a pretty good
streaming set up that let me send video and audio into Jitsi without too much
fuss and in higher quality than just the baked in screen sharing. It still
needs some fine-tuning though.
I also remembered RantMedia's old RantTV stream and setting up something
like that was a really neat prospect. It's essentially just like you would do
any streaming radio service but for video, so there's no VOD like you'd have
with a media server and you don't need to access it through a specific website
like you would a YouTube or Twitch livestream for example, it's more analogous
to live TV in that way.
So that's what I did! And, dear gopher, you're the first to know about it.
Being a study in retro media, delivered in a pretty retro way, I wanted to
align it pretty closely with baud.baby so baud.vision was born. You can get
information on the project through either gopher://baud.vision or by fingering
info@baud.vision and, most importantly you can tune in to the live feed by
pointing your media player at http://baud.vision:21225/vcr - I've only tested
it with VLC but I'm sure it'll work with just about anything that'll let you
connect to a remote stream.
There's also nowplaying@baud.vision but that broke and I'm not sure what I
did so it'll take some investigating when I have a minute.
The backend is dead simple, it's running an Icecast server and using VLC to
stream video to localhost. I fiddled with some other options but this was the
best way I found, Icecast setup is simple and VLC is a really powerful tool
and I have a lot to learn about what I can do with it.
I'm still fine-tuning the setup, mostly the VLC piece but I also need to
set up SSL and build out the library.
The library was probably my biggest mistake. My initial thought was to just
download a bunch of the tapes to the local machine and stream from there but
the VPS filled up FAST and I've barely scratched the surface of what I want to
have in the playlist. A better option might be to stream from the Internet
Archive to the server and then out via Icecast but what I gain in storage
overhead I lose in bandwidth so it's a trade off. Initial tests seem to work
fine, though I had some audio issues that'll need to be ironed out. We'll see,
it's still very much a work in progress.
I hope you enjoy the project and the videos I have in there so far. There's
a lot more I want to do so stay tuned for that!
[1] https://archive.org/details/vhsvault?sort=-addeddate
EOF