David April 6th, 2008
I posted an article on Thursday regarding the multimedia options available for the LDS community. While the streaming video technology is still relatively new, video, audio, and transcription downloads are readily available within a short time of their original presentation. The "official" transcription from lds.org takes a few days because it is reviewed for spelling and grammar, since this becomes the permanent record of the talk. Here are a few resources available for obtaining Conference talks:
- Deseret News (local newspaper) - summaries of each talk, audio & text transcripts
- KSL Television - video, audio, and news stories related to LDS community
- LDS.org - official site for LDS Church General Conference, includes video, audio, and transcripts.
As an aside for those who really enjoy listening to the inspiring music between talks, the download files for individual talks at LDS.org don’t include the music, but the full sessions do. If you use an MP3 editing tool, you can extract just the music and save them to separate MP3 files. When the General Conference audio files are released on CD to LDS Distribution Centers, you can also use these to save the music to separate files. (I haven’t compared the differences between these to see how the quality of download vs CD files compare)
[EDIT] Here is an open source utility which can split MP3 files without decoding them. Since the audio is encoded when it creates the original MP3 file, if your utility decodes it first before splitting it, there will be a loss in quality of the recording.
I have heard from some people who have compared the CDs of Conference with the MP3 files, and they have said that the CD quality is much higher. That makes sense, since most downloads are created at a reduced bit rate to reduce the download size.
David April 3rd, 2008
I don’t know about you, but I have been surprised lately with the availability of online multimedia content. I’m not just talking about the popularity of YouTube with user-contributed content or downloading music from the Apple iTunes Store. I’m talking about traditional media entities offering professionally written content on their web sites. Radio stations such as National Public Radio (NPR) not only have recorded podcasts of their broadcasts, but regularly suggest additional content for their listeners to find on their web site. Do you hate missing the KSL Greenhouse Show on Saturdays? Like many other sites, you don’t have to miss it if you subscribe to a podcast on the station web site. Offering a mix of traditional and new media sources, here are the top sources for online news, ranked by the number of visitors (from Ars Technica):
- Yahoo News
- MSNBC
- CNN
- AOL News
- New York Times
- Gannett
- ABC News
- Google News
- USA Today
- CBS News
While most of these sites are offering short video and/or audio clips, some media sites are now offering premium content that they normally reserve for television or radio (together with new advertising). Did anyone see the NCAA Basketball finals on CBS.com? Did you miss seeing who was eliminated from American Idol on Fox? (you can also see their recent performances on their web site)
Most of these sites are using Adobe Flash streaming technology (like YouTube), but others are starting to use HD video plugins such as those created by American Fork, Utah company, Move Networks, including ABC, Discovery, FOX, ESPN, and Oprah.com. BYU Television, also using Move Networks’ HD video plugin, is one of the first stations that has around the clock broadcasting content on their site. In comparison, the lds.org site will host transcripts, video, and audio downloads of LDS General Conference once they become available, but BYU.tv promises to include live HD video of for all morning and afternoon sessions. LDS Church members in Utah may not appreciate how rare it is to be able to watch Conference in your own home around the world as it is being broadcast.