All,

This email is copied from a blog post here:
http://blog.ambisonia.com/2008/05/13/ambisonia-uploader-90-complete/

(Except there are screenshots in the blog post.)

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The Uploader is around 90% complete. I've interspersed screenshots
through this blog post.

That said, it wont be deployed for a couple of months yet. This is
because the Uploader uploads to Amazon's S3 (not the Ambisonia
Server). What I need to do now is to migrate all of Ambisonia's
existing content to Amazon S3 (which will take a little while because
of certain challenges).

Further. The aim of having the content on Amazon S3 is that I can
stream directly to playback from within the browser.

I am also writing automatic transcoders (instead of the current manual
DTS conversion which relies on irregular and inconsistent transcoding)
so that the streaming versions will be consistently available no more
than 60 minutes after uploading.

I was initially keen on AAC for the streaming. The problem with AAC is
that it can not be streamed via Optical to an AV receiver. Some people
will want to play back the 5.1 file on their computer to computer
speakers (not good quality I know), but many people will want to go
optical to the AV receiver.

AC3 can go optical to the AV receiver .. and I am currently doing a
test to see if it can STREAM to the browser THEN go optical to the AV
receiver.

I did some tests and Quicktime can also decode AC3 directly to
computer speakers (at least on a MAC). So if the tests work then I can
kill 2 birds with 1 stone by using AC3.

Again, progress is slow… but it is moving.