anthonyeden

Do you know these feeds actually go to broadcasters? They could be internal feeds for refs, match review, head office monitoring, etc.

The broadcast contribution feeds I’ve seen in the past are MPEG-TS, not via RTMP.

Still a great find.

Most modern commercial buildings in Australia unlock doors when the fire alarm goes off.

‘Processing fees’ likely includes the cost of administering the CRM, creating tax receipts and reports, donor support, and all the other ‘processing’ tasks that come with running a large fundraising effort. It wouldn’t just be the credit card fees.

Technically DMX needs 110 ohm cable - the connector is less relevant. But most DMX devices are forgiving, and will accept whatever rubbish cable you throw its way.

Friendly reminder to anyone who installs or maintains PABXes: test your emergency calling whenever you make change.

In Australia, you can call 000, say you’re testing a phone system, read out the Caller ID you’re supposed to be calling from, and they’ll confirm the number and location. This happens with the 000 operator, not the police/fire/ambulance operator you get transferred to in a real emergency.

Other countries may have different testing procedures.

I have seen tradies attempt to ‘disable’ smoke particle detectors by putting tape or a rubber glove over the sensor. This technique often triggers the alarm almost immediately.

Commercial fire sensors do have plastic caps which block airflow without triggering an alarm. They’re designed to be kept on during construction until each sensor is commissioned.

The official Gravity Forms post [0] indicates you were only compromised if you installed Gravity Forms via direct website download or Composer install.

From what I can see, Composer install methods use the same Gravity Forms API to fetch the install package as the auto-update feature within the plugin. Their WP-CLI plugin uses the same mechanism too.

It will be interesting to see if the Gravity Forms developers engage a third party security firm to investigate this incident. So far they have not mentioned it.

[0] https://www.gravityforms.com/blog/security-incident-notice/

This is an interesting article. It’s worth mentioning open source software exists for the StreamDeck. Companion is very popular in the AV production industry. https://github.com/bitfocus/companion

That Media Realm site is mine. Thanks for linking! RDS is one of those technologies that’s been around for decades and still amazes people. You can buy hardware encoders for about AU$500 these days, and I love introducing stations to it and getting their name and song data to show up on car radios.

Thanks. I ended up going with Lemon Squeezy a couple of weeks back. Had a lot of account verification problems (500 errors on various screens), but eventually got that sorted after their support realised there was an actual product problem. I like their product, but wish the product setup & cart was more flexible.

Digital River emailed out of the blue a few months back saying we need to do new Know-Your-Customer paperwork. The forms are painful and I've had to resubmit a couple of times for minor mistakes - unsure if they'll ever actually accept it, and it seems to take a week or more for any response to a ticket.

Their new platform terms come into effect today, and they have absolutely buried the scale of their new monthly fee (US$100/month for me - unsure if it varies per customer). None of the emails mention the fee amounts. Customer support couldn't tell me the fee amounts. I checked the portal again today and the new contract finally has the new fees in it.

I setup a new merchant of record a few weeks ago, but that doesn't help the fact they're sitting on a few grand of my sales. My balance is above their new payout threshold (US$2500), but it wouldn't surprise me if they sit on the money and let the monthly fees eat into it until it's back below the threshold.

Thought I was doing the right thing by using a merchant of record to handle my international B2B sales since 2016. Apparently not. Fun times.

I agree. I personally leave my Decimator MD-HX’s in ‘Free Run’ scaling mode at my preferred resolution. The in-built ‘no signal colour’ of my choosing helps me troubleshoot the problem in a signal chain quickly.

Worth mentioning for the novices that SDI does not do HDCP, so you can’t pass copy-protected content via this setup without workarounds.

Of course, it really should be up to the conference AV suppliers to organise all this, not the presenters themselves.

I can’t answer your question directly, but I will chime in and mention a parallel space where a number of small creators have built solid businesses - church visuals.

Many churches want motion backgrounds to project behind their lyrics, so companies such as StoryLoop, CMG, Shift Worship, etc. have sprung up to serve this niche.

The general business model is an annual subscription to access all their media. Monthly subscriptions don’t work because people sign up once, download it all, and cancel.

These companies have grown largely by nurturing Facebook groups of likeminded creatives who go on to become subscribers.

My main exposure to ISDN in Australia was in radio stations.

In Australia, we had an ISDN2 product (BRI) which gave us that 128Kbps bitstream. Hardware boxes from brands like Musicam Prima, Tieline and Comrex would allow transmitting a bi-directional MPEG2 audio stream. When I used to dial these things, you’d hear a low-bitrate stream first for a few seconds before the 2nd number would dial and you’d get that full 128Kbps. Different brands of codecs were theoretically interoperable, subject to the settings and codecs matching. I remember the Tieline codecs probably sounded best because they had their ‘MusicPlus’ codec (which I think was actually AAC+ under the hood). But most other codecs were only MPEG2, so you were stuck with that.

We used to use these for outside broadcasts, backup links between the studios and transmitter site, and links to other broadcasters (e.g. the TV news presenter dialing in to tease the nightly news headlines).

Even after the internet was well and truly established, ISDN was still used a lot for this because it was ‘standardised’ and also a pretty much guaranteed bitrate - whereas ADSL might give you a couple of megabits but with no guarantee you’d have that between your two locations at all times. When you need low latency two way conversations, you can’t just dial up the latency and keep re-transmitting packets until they arrive.

The local telco used to be able to install these fairly easily on a temporary basis so you could do a broadcast from a temporary location (e.g. local advertiser books a broadcast at their store). You couldn’t really get a temporary internet connection put in at the time. You could get stereo audio both directions, but often you’d use the left channel for your program audio, and the right channel for an intercom in everyone’s earpieces. So long as you played the music from the studios and just fed the mics down the ISDN from the remote location, the quality was passable.

We also had ISDN10/20/30 (PRI) for general telephony. I interfaced these to SIP PABX’s a few times with Patton boxes, but the docs were always for T1 not our E1.

I don’t really miss it, but it’s kinda cool in retrospect.