There is a free program called VideoLan Client (VLC)  that is often described as a Swiss army knife for media files. It will play just about any music or video file, even odd and unusual formats such as Ogg Theora and flv. You do not even need an administrative password to run VLC, because it can run as a portable application from a USB stick or a home directory without changing anything on the host computer. You can download it from this website:

http://portableapps.com/apps/music_video/vlc_portable

Happy viewing!

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It captures the communication problems, the sense of chaos, the flexible attitudes to copyright in terms of vintage BBC tv shows and web service design. America does Youtube. China does Youku

Enjoy. Tell me if it plays in the UK. There is little chance that a cease and desist letter will remove this video clip.

Computer users in China cannot access this content, because the BBC website scans your IP address to make sure you are based in the UK. Mac and Linux users do not have access to the official download app. Here is a step by step summary of how I got the BBC Iplayer to work in China.

Find a VPN to a UK based server.
VPN stands for virtual private network. If the VPN provider is based in the UK this will make your computer appear to be located in the UK. The same principle applies to accessing US only services using US based proxies and VPNs such as Hotspot Shield, which lets you stream http://www.hulu.com .

I found a service that charges $10 a month. I use http://consult-here.com/vpn.html . The VPN provider will send you details on setting this up. It’s like following a cooking recipe. Consult-here.com’s service has been quick and stable, but don’t use a VPN for banking or entering Emails, because you cannot control who can view your usernames and passwords.

Install the Iplayer Download Manager

The official download manager is available to Windows users from the Iplayer site. Mac users should download and install iplayer downloader from www.lawrencedudley.co.uk/iplayer

This software exploits a loophole that lets Iphone users download h264 files without DRM so you get tv quality video wiithout copy protection. This means Mac users can play the files on Quicktime or VLC and the downloaded videos will not self destruct after 30 days.

I’ve been enjoying some great BBC programmes such as Louis Theroux’s Law and Disorder and Survivors. My Chinese Internet connection gives me enough bandwidth to download shows for later viewing. It is also quick enough to stream shows in Internet Explorer, Firefox or Safari during offpeak hours such as evenings and weekends when fewer people are sharing the connections in China or the UK.

I know the BBC has plans to offer the service overseas. Let us hope that it is not inferior or crippled. I would be happy to pay the equivalent of a BBC license fee to access its content. At the moment the BBC does not give me this opportunity.

The subsequent revelation that tens of thousands of people have died is making some of us uneasy that our self congratulatory tweets and blog posts were somewhat inappropriate.

Kaiser Kuo of Digital Watch wrote a very thoughtful, but ambivalent post about the role of Twitter in spreading news about the earthquake in Sichuan. On one hand, he recognises the value of Twitter as an effective communication tool that bridged the gap between the Chinese and English speaking world when he notes:

The other dimension to Twitter that proved very useful in this case was its global usership: there were lots of Chinese messages I was following, and I was among many people bilingual individuals translating more useful, insightful, or interesting tweets from Chinese into English. Call it “bridge microblogging.”
The Sichuan Quake and the Hubris of Twitter Users

However, he also argues that IM and other forms of media were also getting the message out of Sichuan when he writes:

On balance, though, I feel there’s something fundamentally unsettling that attention within the Twitter community should have shifted at all off the matter at hand and on to a celebration of the particular communication tool we were using. There’s no doubt that it was useful, but by no means did this episode drive a nail in the coffin of traditional media, which by my lights has been exceptionally good in its reporting — Xinhua, Phoenix, CCTV, and many other Chinese news organizations have really taken full advantage of the candor Beijing seems to be allowing and encouraging.

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Tags: Twitter, China, Sichuan, earthquake

Reports are emerging on international news sites that the death toll from yesterday’s Sichuan earthquake is 10 000 and rising.

Al Jazeera’s English site reported that there was extensive damage in the epicentre of Wenchuan County and surrounding areas.

The toll is expected to rise sharply as authorities and rescue teams make contact with the worst-hit areas of Sichuan.

Nearly 900 students might have been buried under the rubble, Xinhua news agency reported.

In Shifeng, two chemical plants were damaged, burying hundreds of people and forcing the evacuation of more than 6,000 others.

Rescuers are trying to locate survivors.

State media reported casualties in the provinces of Sichuan, Gansu and Yunnan as well as Chongqing, a municipality of 30 million people that neighbours Sichuan.

Buildings toppled in at least six counties near Wenchuan, Xinhua said.

About 80 per cent of buildings in Beichun county have collapsed, and about 10,000 people are believed to be injured there.

Similar stories have been published on news networks, including the BBC, New York Times and CNN.

Shanghaiist has been updating its site and publishing tweets several times an hour as new information becomes available. They cited a terrifying estimate from a Colarado geologist, Roger Bilham that the final death toll may be as high as 150 000 (Source: Rocky Mountain News).

Yesterday, I wrote a post about the immediacy of Twitter as a tool for breaking big news stories. We have also seen a number of videos and photos documenting the event, including this footage from a Sichuan university dorm.

Expect to see these sites carry diy footage of damage, survivor stories and tv news reports and as they get published on the Internet.

Let’s wish local services and relief agencies every success with their rescue efforts.

To those who are unfamiliar, John C Dvorak is a well known tech writer, blogger (http://www.dvorak.org/blog), podcaster and curmudgeon who hosts Cranky Geeks and NoAgenda. No Agenda is an hour long dialogue between John C Dvorak and foul mouthed Internet millionaire, Adam Curry. The podcast is an hour long rambling rant with a great deal of swearing, paranoia and conspiracy theories about nothing in particular. The most recent episode from April 19th had John C Dvorak spouting his observations about China (Link: http://www.mevio.com/shows/?mode=profile&show=noagenda).

Here are some highlights:

• China is getting contracts for civil engineering projects in Africa, which it is using to sell computers and equipment at knockdown prices to locals through the grey market
• Malaysian Chinese businessmen are all triads and ruthless deal makers who are much more cut throat than their counterparts in Taiwan
• White people visiting China are treated much better than overseas Chinese
• Chinese artists cannot paint clouds properly, because the air is so polluted
• Everything in Shanghai is really cheap compared to Hong Kong, especially Coca Cola
• Mao suits and memorabilia are very difficult to find these days
• North Americans should visit Shanghai for a weekend to enjoy the restaurants and architecture by flying from Vancouver

To his credit, Dvorak says that the western media knows very little about everyday life in China and that you should come here to get a better understanding. He also confessed to hamming up the negative comments on his blog to elicit a range of responses, which he uses to broaden his understanding. Call him a wind up merchant or a class A devil’s advocate. I recommend that Dvorak reads Duncan Hewitt’s excellent account of modern China called Getting Rich First: Life in a Changing China. Unlike Dvorak, Hewitt has lived in China for over 20 years, speaks good Chinese and used to be the BBC correspondent so he knows what he is talking about.

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Tags: Dvorak, NoAgenda, China, Hewitt, Getting Rich First: Life in a Changing China

It was the internet story of 2007, the website that brought you sneezing pandas, laughing babies, an epic battle on the African savannah and a guest appearance by Tony Blair in a video starring George Bush’s dog.But for any web surfers in China, these and other gems purveyed by the video-sharing phenomenon YouTube look likely to become impossible to access, after the authorities signalled yesterday that they would no longer tolerate the “broadcast of degenerate thinking” on the internet.
The Guardian

Here is the same story in Techcrunch.

China has moved to censor and control online video websites under new measures that could block YouTube and other services in China.

Under the new regulations that will be in place starting January 31, sites that provide video programming or allow users to upload video must have a permit and be either state-owned or state-controlled. Permits for video hosting sites will be subject to renewal every three years and operators who commit violations may be banned for up to 5 years.

Chinafilm.com, a site run by the state-run China Film Group said that the majority of online video providers in China are currently privately owned.
Techcrunch

Maybe it is a slow news day in the first week of the new year, but why is this so different to anything that has happened before? I follow technology news from podcasts on Techcrunch, Ziff Davis, CNET, Twit, The BBC and Revision 3. There was scarce coverage earlier in the year when Flickr images were blocked from within China. You rarely hear anything when Wikipedia’s status changes. Youtube does not work all the time and international podcasts continue to distrubute their content using Feedburner even though it will not work with podcatchers such as Itunes when you try to download using their feeds in China. The Internet outside of China has a tendency to ignores these issues or they jump to false conclusions. For example, Techcrunch erroneously claimed that search engines such as Yahoo and Google had stopped working in China. I have previously discussed the need for good quality English language technology news sources. (See my earlier post)

After I was burned by Techcrunch on the earlier GFW story, I have always been a little sceptical about their Chinese coverage. However, this story about new regulations for video sites has also been picked up by The Guardian. I am still waiting for some more rigourous perspective and look forward to further analysis about what this means from other sources including Shanghai Daily, Danwei, CWRblog and Shanghaiist. In the meantime, I left this comment on the Techcrunch post.

You currently need to be registered to run a blog or host your own website from China. That has not stopped Chinese based bloggers such a s Danwei, Wangjianshuo, Shanghaiist, Sinosplice or the infamous Chinabound from hosting elsewhere using services like Dreamhost or even Blogger. Of course, The Great Firewall could block your domain and Blogger is usually inaccessible here.

This new policy about video sharing sites may or may not be a big deal. Youtube was blocked for several weeks at the end of 2007 after a Chinese version of their site was launched, but normally there is no official notification or justification that a service has stopped working. One day, you can access it and the next day it is blocked. Perhaps Youtube will become semi permanently blocked like Wikipedia, but Google has a history of adapting itself to be compliant with China’s culture of Internet censorship. It is more likely that the China’s Youtube copysites like tudou.com will have to register with and be subject to more control from the Chinese government.
Comment left in Techcrunch

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Tags: China, Internet

It would be good to find out about Chinese technology trends from a local point of view and I am not talking about the platitudinal state sponsored media or general English language news blogs. I would like to read a well informed local English language technology blog that is on par with the best coverage from Techcrunch. It seems I may have found something good to put into my RSS reader. This morning, I came across a Chinese column in The Register by David Feng, which mentioned that Chinese net users have recently embraced their own version of Twitter called Jiwai.de. Here is an extract:

Meet the local Twitter, Jiwai.de. Hosted fully inside mainland China, fast, and all in Chinese, it’s Twitter for 172 million. It’s probably no wonder that it’s been all the rage. It’s both local (remember China’s really a huge intranet at that) and it’s in the local lingo.

And then there’s the interface. Does Jiwai.de look like Twitter? It doesn’t, actually. Much of Twitter is in sky-blue. Jiwai.de is more orange-y. And it has tabs – the stuff you don’t see on Twitter.

Jiwai.de or Twitter? | Reg Developer

It turns out that David has been syndicating some posts from the Chinese Blognation site, which seems to be just what I was looking for. Blognation has sites covering technology and Web 2.0 stories in thirteen countries, although recent internal strife means that the future of the blognation network is uncertain if not unlikely. ( See this announcement by Blognation’s boss, Sam Sethi). I hope that David Feng can continue to blog full time about Chinese technology issues even if Blognation does not survive.

While we are in this space, there is another worthy English language technology blog that deserves to be added to your blog feed. It is called The China Web2.0 Review. Both sites are in Technorati’s Top 100,000 and the Chinese Blognation site has content that has been picked up by the Register so it gives me some confidence that the sites have some authority. Beyond spotting obvious mistakes and checking the response to stories, it is pretty difficult for a non Chinese speaker to audit these sites for errors. I like Techcrunch for keeping me informed about all sorts of new services from Ning to Flock, but their track record on China is pretty shaky. I lost confidence in Techcrunch’s Chinese coverage when they falsely informed their readers that Google had been blocked by the GFW. (See this post) China Blognation and China Web2.0 Review are both written by native Chinese speakers who are based in this country so they should be in a better position to avoid such basic errors.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: China, Internet, blogs, media, technology

When Soviet bureaucrats wanted to impress foreign visitors with the success of the grand experiment, they would visit Potemkin villages – fake towns where actors pretended to be living a life of luxury amid bulging granaries and well-paved streets bustling with happy babushkas pushing prams.

It was a facade, a veneer, a sham. The actors lived in squalor, in crumbling tenements built with the typical Soviet love of concrete.

When entertainment executives are given tours of digital rights management technology, they are being fooled in just the same way. These Potemkin demonstrations depict a universe of happy devices, all seamlessly interoperating, tossing media back and forth to one another in a superbly orchestrated fashion. In this world the honest users are kept honest, are gently turned aside from overstepping their privileges, and are happy to pay a tiny sum for the right to do something new.

Source: Guardian Website

I am writing from the point of view as an ITGS teacher in Shanghai where Wikipedia is blocked and I regret my students not being able to access material from this community as an initial source of information.

Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia is clear that students should always verify the information they use through further research. Jimmy Wales argues that the community tends to correct obvious mistakes within 6 minutes and that entries are frozen when there gross acts of repetive vandalism. Hear this interview on Leo Laporte’s Net@Nite .

There are cases of US judges using Wikipedia as an information source for background. See this Guardian story and there is some debate about the accuracy of Wikipedia’s entries compared with other encyclopedias such as Britannica.

Wikipedia should not be written off just because there are some concerns about certain entries. The onus should go on the student and the researcher to verify the accuracy of information through critical thinking and fact checking. The group editorial process of Wikipedia and other community generated content is a new adventure for sharing information, but it should not be disowned by the academic community just because it is not controlled and mediated by traditional media hierarchies.