Twit O'Gram Player

Posted on Monday, June 25, 2007 @ 01:18 CET

Dave Winer had an idea that jumped at me while reading through my list of feeds that really peaked my interest. Its quite simple really, mixing podcasting and Twitter in an interesting way. Basically you record a short audio snippet (a max file-size of 200kb is Dave's suggestion), upload it somewhere and then post that URL to Twitter. He's already set up an XML-RPC service to do parts of this automagically, including documentation.

Anyways, I whipped up a quick player to keep track of the MP3's being posted to the twitogram user on Twitter. It should appear below if you have Flash 9:

The "standalone" is here: http://twitogram.paulofierro.com/

Now the interesting part is building the client. First you need to get the audio. You could record within the Flash player itself, but for that to work you need to have a Flash Media Server available (this is what Odeo was doing if I remember correctly), but Red5 (the open-source solution to FMS) might be able to do this. However, it currently states that Red5 will only record an FLV client stream, though you might be able to splice the audio stream from that somehow.

Now if you already have the MP3 file on your local disk you might be able to read this from the local file using the ByteArray API - I really need to play with this feature of the Flash player. Otherwise you'd have to upload this to some server first and get the bits via Perl/PHP but that's just wasting bandwidth and I think ByteArray should work.

From there its simply an XML-RPC call to the service and you're done. How cool is that?

I'll have to figure out if I can get Red5 up and running on my MediaTemple server tomorrow, and test the audio recording. Otherwise there might be someone still hosting FlashCom (FMS1) and dive into ByteArray. Hopefully these will be simple things to accomplish :)

Update (27/06): Added a check for when the sound is done playing and removed the "Twit O'Gram: " prefix from all the messages.

Update (28/07): Updated this post with a link to the new Flex version of the client.

- paulo

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