Final Testing Stages

We've successfully migrated over to Bluehost from CHS Webmaster and so far, things are looking good. I've asked some friends to do a final quality test that goes over things like bandwidth, quality, and the like, and the great majority of the friends I asked to help on the final test are those who've been with me through the talking ("I'm gonna do this..."), the planning, the testing, and just being there, so I thank all of them profusely for being there for me while I got this thing off the ground.

I'd like to add special thanks to Michelle Grunkemeyer from CHS Webmaster and Catholic Homeschool website, who was instrumental in getting the MDTV webpage off the ground from a technical standpoint and even found Bluehost when it was realized we were going to need a ton more bandwidth. Colleen Hammond, a wonderful traditional Catholic and TV person herself who I've been able to bounce ideas off of and get another perspective from a professional standpoint. Paul Nichols from Catholic Cartoon Blog who's been extremely supportive of this concept throughout the years that I know him, and the fact that he's a hockey fan is cool too (Alexander Ovechkin rocks, man!), and there are many, many others who've been praying for this to finally come up, and to all those who I know I've talked to but are too numerous to list, thank you for everything. It's really meant a lot to me.

Stay tuned! Almost there!

Bringing you up to speed...

The beta tests for quality and bandwidth have concluded and went well. The only thing I have yet to do is check and see how well they work on an actual TV, as these videos are set up more for a Media Center computer in the first place. They might look a little muddy on fullscreen TV, but they still look pretty good for this being web video.

We will be transferring service from CHS Webmaster to Bluehost at the end of this week, so we will be up and flying shortly. CHS Webmaster is a great, inexpensive service with a LOT of bandwidth for those needing average websites. MDTV, unfortunately, is not average in terms of bandwidth consumption and thus we'll be moving to a hosting service that has no bandwidth limitations.

We can make this grow, though, with your support (prayer, financial, old equipment, whatever), and perhaps move to our own T1 where we host it all ourselves. Keep praying for this to grow, and who knows; perhaps we'll even be on satellite.

Stay tuned!

Potential Disaster Averted, But...

...the problem is simply this: The bandwidth charges would financially devestate us.

What we're in the process of doing now is finding ways to host these videos much cheaper than we could otherwise do so at the present. Ultimately, a T1 line with our own server would be the best, but in the short term, we need something else to insure that we have the best possible product delivered in the least expensive possible way.

We're almost there! Keep praying!

Stand By...

Barring disaster, Mater Dei Television will begin programming on Feb 17, 2009.

Donations can be accepted through PayPal at this address: donate@mater-dei-television.org

Keep checking back to this blog for programming updates and other pertinent information regarding Mater Dei Television.

I sincerely hope that MDTV will inspire, inform and educate all who view it.

Progress!

OK, I've taken a template that was downloaded from the Open Source Web Design website and am molding it (finally) into something that will be Mater Dei Television's first website.

Well, first usable one anyway.

I have also embedded the JW FLV Player into the website, complete with sample video that came bundled with it, and it worked...to a point. The player I embedded was actually in the place I wanted it to be (seeing that I've had about 3 weeks of coding experience up to this point - remember? I'm using a TEMPLATE), but I need to find out how to get more than one window embedded. When we can figure that much out, we are SO in business!

So, while my Adventures in Coding are put on hold, I wait and I blog.

Stay Tuned!

JW FLV Player

The JW FLV Player has been uploaded to the website today and Quanta Plus was installed on the Ubuntu box on Tuesday, so now it's just a matter of playing with the latter and learning how to use it well enough to get the former to work with it.

The JW FLV Player seems to work the best, from what I can see anyway, with playing back embedded MP4 files fullscreen. There is a newer version of the software but I'll go ahead and use this first while I'm playing with it.

We shall see what comes up soon. In the meantime, we're sitting on a test pattern...

KVM Installed

By and large, this generally isn't that big of a deal to report, but today it is and here's why...

By now, if you follow this blog at all, you no doubt have seen the website for Mater Dei Television. Our test pattern page is a very basic page done on KompoZer that was put up there to let people know that we're going to start broadcasting soon.

I was not, nor I'm still not, impressed with it.

I wanted something with DreamWeaver type quality to it, but I don't have that kind of cash right now (and since we don't have any programming up quite yet, we're not exactly getting donations yet). I decided to look open source and came up with Quanta Plus. It looks nice from the screenshots, but it's only for Mac and Linux.

Enter the KVM.

The KVM will allow me to hook one of my Ubuntu boxes up that I've not had online since we left Indiana. It's downloading right now. I'm trying to set one goal per day at this point, regardless of how big or small, that I can get done that will advance Mater Dei Television and get us on air quicker. My goal was to get the KVM up yesterday, so I briefly fell behind. Now that I'm installing Quanta Plus, I'm back on track.

Goal for tomorrow: Commence work on permanent webpage. ETA to completion: One week.