Bluewave Digital

I do this all the time. I have these great, crazy ideas for projects that I never finish. This very site is proof of that. Most of the problem is not having enough time to finish anything that I want to do due to work and school. However, I have a project in mind that if everything goes well I can start now, and then continue next semester when I will only be taking the remaining two classes that I need, plus work.

It all starts with the nagging feeling that I want to start cooking for the Internet again. I used to look forward to the Saturday night cooking, Sunday night blogging that allowed me to flex my creativity in the kitchen. I just haven't had time to cook something pretty and then post on the site. However, I have an idea in mind that may prompt me to actually start again.

Part of the problem is trying to figure out how to cook for one and still have recipes work. To overcome this problem, I may do one of two things, either cook for two and save leftovers, or have "guest tasters" that I would invite here to consume what I come up with. Either would work for me, and honestly I'd prefer the latter as I do enjoy cooking for people.

What makes this a more unique idea than the last time I did this is that I want to turn it into a video podcast. I'm an editor, right? I might as well make use of the skills that I am going to film school for in some capacity. However, given the nature of my kitchen, I'm going to have to come up with a very...creative way to actually film in there and make it look semi-decent.

Enter phase one of the project: I am going to build a recording rig from some sort of computer, a webcam, Linux, and ffmpeg. At first I may just run a really long USB cable to my Linux server, but I'm going to experiment with actually building something that I can attach to my body to have a FPS type feel, only for cooking. Realistically speaking, it'll probably end up being an old laptop that I can wear like a backpack, but ideally, I'd take one of these guys and make it battery powered and wearable, like a belt with the webcam attached to it. Because my kitchen is also a black hole for light, I'd head or shoulder mount a LED flashlight, for the extra oomph my overhead kitchen light can't provide.

Cost effective-wise, it may end up just being easier to get one of them snazzy eee PC laptops (the ones without a hard drive) and just rig it to run with the lid closed and record to a flash stick or something. I don't know if they would have enough CPU power to be able to record decently, though, so that may not be an option.

The other option might just be to record from the server with really long USB cables, and simply to mount two webcams in the kitchen at interesting angles, like over the stove and on the counter, and just record two streams that way. Of course I don't know if the Linux machine I have can handle two separate ffmpeg threads at once recording 640x320 video at 30fps, but that's an experiment I can try later. Worst case scenario would have me upgrading the server, which it desperately needs anyway.

We'll see. I just nabbed two webcams off of Woot! for rather cheap, and they work with Linux, so I'm already partially committed to the idea.

I'll continue to update posts about this once I start experimenting with various options. If I do decide to go all out and actually build something, I'll post up the specs, as well as any scripts/configurations I write as a "How-to" in case anyone wants to be crazy like me.