MXL - Media Exchange Layer Explained

0:00 Welcome everyone to Extra Hours. The good thing about starting the show like this is that it's proof that there's lots to talk about. We were talking so much about things before the show started that it puts us in good position for this show today. So, hello, I'm Grant. Welcome to Extra Hours, part of the OfficeHours.Global network. work. We have assembled a crack squad of media production professionals. Actually, not just

0:33 that. There's quite a... Amateurs. You've got the... Amateurs. Let's start with that guy. That guy up in Seattle, Washington. Hello, Guy. Welcome. Hello. Hello. Nice to be here. Have you got your outside camera connected again? I'm disappointed when I don't get to see it. It is not at the ready yet. Oh, it hasn't. Camera seven? Camera seven? Actually, it's camera eight. Yeah, camera eight.

1:07 Guy often gives us a little weather report and shows us this paddock outside, see some cows, and I gave him no warning of such. Anyway, nice to have you with us, Guy. you have to have a little think about what the highlights are. I'm going to come back to you. What have I missed? If I missed a bunch of shows this week, you have to tell me what's hot.

1:30 Actually, I do have the cows. Stand by for cows. Oh, you've got the cows. Yes. So I had to come about it another way, but this is my little MXL switcher that I vibe-coded that actually anybody in the world could go ahead and control. You could go search for the cows. If you go to MXL switcher, This will probably be down in about an hour, but you can go find the cows yourself.

1:54 So somebody take control. The cows are to the right out in that field over there. So zoom in for me. Go find the cows at mxlswitcher.com. It's always awesome to me that what's mind boggling is that you've got a 10 gigabit connection to the internet. And it looks like you're just on the farm in the middle of nowhere. But I guess if you could point the camera the other direction, we'd see more of suburbia.

2:21 Is that right? Well, somebody grabbed it. That's not me staring. So whoever's got control over the cow cam, the cows are to the right somewhere. It's going to be like, oh, no, Guy's connection has just, oh, we've lost Guy because his whole system's been hacked. Oh, there they are. They're off. There we go. They're off over there. somebody's finding them yep there you go push in how far to push in this is

2:53 amazing though what you're seeing is Azure yeah up in the cloud with very super low latency those graphics are actually being overlaid with MXL up in the cloud MXL was just huge at IBC and I put together this you know vibe coded this whole thing together to it's a basic switcher camera one camera to a play out, guest, and yeah, somebody remotely could just go onto this mxlswitcher.com right

3:18 now before I tear it down. I wanted to just build it for IBC and then tear it back down. But I've been having fun with it. Just vibe coding away. Letting people stare at my cows from all over the world. Or they're not my cows, they're my neighbor's cows. Let's be straight here. These are not my cows. You're not a farmer? No.

3:41 How is it handling multiple people trying to do it? You know, that's the interesting thing here. You see this, not to steal the show or anything, but there's this thing over here that says teacher mode. So if I enable teacher mode, I don't know if I have the admin code. I don't have the admin code right now, but I could actually make it so that each person only gets 30 seconds, 60 seconds, 90 seconds, and they have to put their name in.

4:05 So you would have, it's your turn to drive the camera and then you would have to release it. So if we do this for like an aquarium or something like that, and there's a bunch of kids in a classroom, we could give each kid like 90 seconds. So it would say Bob's now controlling the camera, then Susie. That's incredible. I'm doing it now.

4:28 So I'm going diagonally. How's the latency for you all the way across the world? it's so that little preview in the in the in the right hand side yep that's very usable like it doesn't feel obviously it's a little bit latent but i mean i i would i've had experience on site controlling cameras yeah that's the craziest thing about this so it's going up

4:59 SRT at 20 milliseconds up to Azure, WebRTC to you in the little preview, it's getting mixed with graphics on another instance to put that office hours global overlay. So if you think about what's happening there, it's going two different ways to you right now. One with Dirty Feed and one or with a program. Yeah, it's crazy. MXL is the future, man. I can't even kind of

5:26 I can't demonstrate like when I say I'm starting to turn it right now like as in I'm starting it now like that's crazy that's completely crazy it is how fast this is and this is SRT out of a this is a PTZ optics move camera and built into that camera is SRT. So all it's doing is it's encoding in the camera. There's no other box.

6:01 This is straight out of the camera SRT to the cloud. That's cool. That's really cool. Someone else has got it now just for transparency. Okay. I think Vic said, where's the i5? The i5? Oh, it's the other side. You're looking east right now. I5's about a mile west. There's a satellite dish. They wouldn't need that anymore, that neighbor. Brendan just said in the chat, this piques my interest, guy.

6:41 Is this peer-to-peer WebRTC or through an upstream provider like Fonage or Dolby? No, this is Azure with this... Gosh, I'm not even... We even heard the chickens. Was there chickens? No. I realized I have my door open. Oh, is that the Gromps chickens? There's a park, yeah. We're getting fully from... You're hearing chickens in Australia, but you're looking at Seattle cows. Those chickens were right on cue.

7:19 Oh, look at the track in the cars. Yeah. SRT to server is what he was saying. SRT to the server is just straight up. SRT to the server. The fun thing is if you go, yeah, you should probably run around the horn if people have questions, they can. But I wanted to tell you that you can do round trip embed. So if you wanted to come into this, there's a little button to send your own SRT,

7:51 and you could send it back to yourself by putting your destination here. So you could actually stream this back to you. So as you're controlling it, you could have the feed come to you SRT, which would be kind of bonkers if you think of it that way. Fun stuff. So this is hosted on an Azure instance? Yes. And multiple. All right. Three put together.

8:19 And somebody's now switching cameras. That's my Behringer X32 there. And there's a playout. And I just wrote... It's not even here. I just wrote a Stream Deck companion instance with NMOS. And actually, I used buttons and NMOS. So that was something that just got released recently, too. I did a whole write-up on GitHub. You'll have to take a look at it. But it was just minutes to the show.

8:46 I'd written it via Starlink from my van at the gym before coming here. I made it have companion buttons. So it's all in the GitHub. It's crazy. I mean, because of Jonas being at IBC and announcing EZMXL, that's what led to all this madness is Jonas. It's all Jonas's fault. And Andy's. Andy Carluccio for coming out with Zoom ISO Cloud that's going to do MXL.

9:13 so you'll be able to do MXL. Can you describe what MXL is? You guys keep bandying these acronyms around. When I was around, MXL was a brand of microphone. NDI for the rest of us? Kind of, but there's no encode and decode cycle. So when you think of it, it's a media exchange layer, kind of like a siphon or something like that.

9:36 You would think of it as... Dante with video? Wait to... Almost, yeah, but you're not multicasting it out. It's living in RAM, so the video frames are coming in and they're getting stamped with the... They call them grains, and they've got timing on them, so you can just reach in and grab it. And right before 1.0, it was just internally in this machine

9:58 that you could grab onto, let's say, camera one and then throw an overlay on it, and it's not adding any more, well, very much latency see because it's so so fast it's in ram in fact they were saying you could do faster than real time which how's that work you go into the future it's like a fifo a first in first out circular

10:20 buffer that's going on yeah it's a ring buffer it's a ring buffer yeah is the way it works and then um andy carluccio when i i uh was mentioning and i was learning about this in our discord he said yeah think of it more like siphon not ndi because there's no speed hq codec where you're And that's what puts the load on when you're looking at SMPTE 2110, you're transporting and you've got this cycle.

10:42 And so with this, it's just in this, like in my instance, it's an Azure instance that all these other instances are grabbing onto. But at 1.1, the version that was announced last week, they added inner host capability. So now you can go, if you have a fast enough network, 1.3 gigabits, you can actually go across over like, So Cisco announced some switches that have this capability.

11:08 So you can now go across. So it's getting interesting. I mean, the way I used to always wonder is like, how did NDI and TriCasters not, they had this secret sauce. Did you ever hear about this, Grant, where like they kept the best for themselves, like NewTek made NTI, but they did something in there. And we're always wondering what it is. I think that's kind of the same model where there's this way of them reaching in and you could do some more outs or something that nobody else could do.

11:42 So I think it's the same kind of technology where you have this ring buffer where you could just reach in, grab the frame, spit out frames faster than you could because there'd be no decode or no encode cycle because it's living still in this memory. So it's exciting stuff. People should pay attention because it's, well, big at IBC, and there was lots of manufacturers, Riedel, Grass Valley, Sony, Lawa.

12:10 Just everybody's getting behind this, and it's open source. So that's the thing. It's not SMPTE. There's no standard where they're going to take forever to write up a paper. You're not paying royalties on it then at all. And that's the big thing is with NDI, you're paying, you know, somebody's getting money off the advanced SDK and here we're not. It's open source.

12:29 So we'll see where all this goes. It's just interesting time to be alive. Really is. All right. So Jason, John and Courtney, just wave to everyone. Hang on. You got to wait till you, there you go. Now you can wave. There you go. That's the introduction. unless you can beat Guy's demo. Like that was impressive. Hi, Guy. Oh, yeah, check this cool thing out right now.

13:00 I'm just so excited about it. I'm just like a little kid. It's very cool. Yeah. All I can do is show you that it's raining cats and dogs in Albuquerque. That's about it. Yeah, and I got news for you. The Emmys are going on right now. There's cows outside my window too. It's pictures from the LA Times. Oh! On the blue carpet.

13:19 Okay, that's what's going on right now in Hollywood. Yeah, I'm sorry. Good, good. So we'll go to the first question there, because it's still related. Courtney, what's that one there from Douglas? Alrighty then. Mr. Douglas Carmichael has a question. I am very impressed with the MXL switcher. How did you do it, Guy? It's all clod. I mean, it's just banging on Claude and asking it questions and saying, hey, could you build this?

13:54 But it started out with one test to just see what Jonas had built with this Easy MXL. And he just had like a clip player and color bars. And when I saw it, I was like, well, I want video. I want to be able to send something up. Oh, more than that. Yeah, I was like, okay, let's just go build this on a test to Azure instance.

14:15 and let's just try to send one a camera feed up. And so I sent RTSP up through that PTZOptics. And then from there, it was like, well, can I put up a better clip than the test clip that he's got? And so it just evolved. And pretty soon I had two instances, and then it was like, hey, what if we had something called a TAM player?

14:38 And the funniest part about this was, so the TAM player is basically like replay. So if you're in it, you could go click on the top there. There's a little record button, and it'll send you to the player. And so get a load of this. You can actually go back in time, mark it in Outpoints, and download a clip using it too.

14:59 So it's kind of like what Grass Valley was showing off with AMP, but this is all just built in a couple days. Yeah, just by asking questions. asking a lot yeah it's got a multi-view as well yeah i built the multi-viewer i built a tamp with in and outs and then actually put commentary on today too so you could actually uh you can't

15:27 see it but there's another dashboard that has commentary where the sports announcer could put their voice over the top of the video from anywhere in the world and i listened to it in program i was like it's working it's working i couldn't believe it was working is that is that multi-view is that just a single a single video stream that's a 1080 it is one going one stream

15:50 but it's composited inside of this uh mxl environment and then one goes out yeah at first i had a struggle with it because it tried to build it with each being its own stream inside and i was like no don't do that and finally i kicked it out as one composite and then it flowed because otherwise it was because if you click on the top there there's like a little button that has some

16:12 numbers that tell you how many cores and how much RAM, you'll see like a total health dashboard. Yeah. In there, it gets a little crazy. I don't know if you could share a screen, Ron, to show what you're seeing, but it's, you don't have it set up? I can only share, I can only, at the moment, I can only share screen through Zoom, which I could

16:35 do, but. Oh, wow. It's getting some serious. That might send Taylor. Taylor. Yeah. Taylor and Torspin. Oh, there we go. Yep. Here's the MXL VM1 health. This is the big one that has RAM and 15 viewers are on here. And you can see how many people are connected. You can see the inputs. How much is this instance costing you? This one is costing about $2 an hour.

17:01 But all in all, it's costing about $3 between everything. the other page though that was a lot of fun is this one here you see where it says send us your feed you can actually scan this oh somebody's on too somebody's on too let's see who's on too is it going to cut somebody already did it who knows what we're going to get here

17:25 yeah get ready to dump yeah there is no dump if there's no encode layer It might be broken. Man, this is a cool test. I've never seen the VM get that high with all those cores. Yeah, somebody's on. But yeah, it was a lot of fun during the AI water cooler to see New Zealand pop in. I was like, dang, this is crazy.

17:50 We could just have a guest pop in. So, I mean, think about this. I had a friend that was streaming this weekend, and I was worried about it because he was just asking for bonded cellular. and i was like dude you should really send it up to some place that's stable and then have a holding slide that said we're having technical difficulties we'll be right back and i was like hey this thing

18:11 that i just built could do that he could have just sent me up srt and then had a holding slide or had you know a wide lyrics shot if he paid without the because right now whoever's sending up it yeah you get rid of the watermark so then you could just have a wide shot because it was a concert downtown Seattle oh yeah there's somebody's uh yeah there it is that's crazy okay so I don't

18:35 know who this is but who are you uh let's make somebody around the world is live um sending us SRT to that URL and I think we just extra house has gone to a whole new level yeah about voluntarily hacking the stream they must have dropped off but let's make something it says oh maybe somebody was at the show no it's already dark it's already over i think

19:09 all right broadcast but isn't that crazy that somebody could just send an srt you can pull it and push it push it back in and you can even do a side by side there's a two up let's see if my two up layouts working uh the um multi-view is starting to break up a little bit and it just for me at least it was just saying poor connection

19:32 bummer it's because you've got you've got a hundred people all trying to impress this thing trying to get guest two into the two some people are overriding it but oh yeah there there's a layout mode where right now it's in two up showing a side by side but ideally this matrix would show guest two so uh guest two would be here then we could do a side by side of of guest two that

19:57 that's the this one so yeah if we did a two what's it what's it coded in uh i don't even know actually it'll tell us in github so it's it's github guy cochran and then it's this one right here called mxl cloud production demo and it tells us doesn't it tell us html python shell javascript i don't even know it's code yeah it tells us right here that's working that's cool oh actually here's

20:31 the here's the big uh diagram too that when to answer douglas's question yeah so it comes in to Azure. It's a DAS V5 running Ubuntu, goes into Media MTX, gets converted. I thought there was two. And then it shows the viewer's web browser. Actually, I got more. Yeah, here's where it starts to get more complicated when I went to three instances, because I started

21:01 with two. And so it shows the Fabric Pier. And this was the network island where I decided to try version 1.1 to see if it could actually go across to a different instance and not in the same one. Oh yeah, update four, the full facility. So contribution anyone, your phone, scan the Lyrics code on the kiosk page, app opens, and then here's the production.

21:30 There's just so much in here. I mean, this is what happens when you let your ADHD run wild and make a switcher app in four days. You just keep going. Yeah. This is why it's going to kill us within the next four years. We'll live it up in the meantime. Use up all those Azure credits. But the death will be televised by AI.

21:56 That's right. Yeah. And then the other thing was I tore the whole thing down and then had it rebuild it in another new atmosphere. So anybody, this is all free. Anybody could just grab this whole thing, point their AI at it and say, go build this in Azure. So pull it all down and push it up. It should all work. You could fork it and make it into whatever you want.

22:22 This is the thing that is kind of mind blowing to me now is how restricted I'm being in my thinking sometimes you know it's like i'm trying to get it to do a particular task i think there's probably john i'd be interested in your thoughts on this because from a from a design point of view i feel like i'm i have always been the designer like this is what i want not from sorry not from

22:53 a visual design but from an architecture or or how the product actually works and the thing that's changing for me now is I don't necessarily know. I need to challenge my thinking about the best way to do something. And here's a solid example I was doing last night. And that is a simple WordPress site. I think I spoke about this before. It's a simple WordPress site. And I thought, actually,

23:17 what I'm going to do is put CloudFront on the front so that it's completely cached. And so because the site doesn't change that much so why not just have the whole thing cached for 30 days and then do invalidations you know when you do um a new um new update and so the way i did it is i thought well i'm just going to have the origin as a separate name domain name and cloudfront as

23:44 another domain name and so that was fine it was working okay except that it it started the client was starting to post origin URLs and getting confused because they were doing their admin through a different domain name than the public site is. Anyway, I was like, I still think this is the right way to do it, but I sat with Astra, you know, in chat GPT 6,

24:11 and just said, you know, this is what it's doing. And it said, no, I think the best way is to move it all to CloudFront and then have the origin completely hidden and forbidden and then all of the admin is cash-free. And so I was like, okay, that sounds great, but that is like a 12-step process to get to that. And the reality was that I just said, okay,

24:41 I'm going to wait till after hours and then I'm going to give again, people get scared by this idea, I'm going to give Codex access to AWS console. And it just did it all. And it's working really well, like the whole process. And so my point is that I thought that I had the right idea about how to separate this to make a really fast website.

25:10 And it had a better idea and now has implemented it. And it's working incredibly well. And so now I'm at a point where I have to question, like, learning something first. So what I'm finding is that I'm doing a process of, particularly when I'm driving, I'll do chat TVT in voice mode and talk, and I'll plan out my codex prompts. And so now I'm asking all these questions, and it'll start asking me questions back about the project that I'm doing.

25:45 and then I'll get off out of voice mode and then say, okay, now create this as a codex prompt or an MD, you know, like markdown file. And then that goes into codex and goes off and makes it. And it's, yeah, it's incredible. It's kind of mind-blowing. But another example was, I don't know if I said this the other week. I think I couldn't have because I was doing it

26:10 last week and I wasn't here last week. I'm doing an online event. We had 60 sessions that recorded. All the recordings were put onto Vimeo. They then need to be posted into an online platform for viewing and thumbnails set in there in that platform as well as thumbnails set in Vimeo and the style guide on Vimeo needs to be set, all of that stuff. And so

26:40 was just like, I think computer use or like the browser within Codex could do this. I opened Vimeo, I opened the online platform and I said, this is what I want you to do. And it went slowly to start with and sort of worked it out. And then it just, it flew through it. And so it just, it radically changed my turnaround time on posting all of these videos.

27:09 and the client was blown away how quickly we could have fully edited videos. But with the right thumbnails, the right details, all of that stuff. And it picked up along the way. It was like, oh, this one isn't the right video. Because it's the other thing is I'm sitting there doing other work and the video starts playing five seconds. And then another video starts playing.

27:32 And so without me telling it, it was testing it. And so once it had posted all the videos, it went and played every video to make sure that they played. And so that was kind of mind-blowing. Anyway, I just feel like I'm in the race trying to catch up with how to best use it as tools. I think it's constantly changing. You know, like every new model comes out and how do you interact with it changes and what effort mode.

28:04 and that's the game every time a new model comes out is trying to figure out how do you effectively use this and then how does it affect your work and how much do you trust it and what is being changed that they're not even communicating with all these little updates that they push out you know when you're on the bleeding edge this is the the price you're paying is some of it is

28:24 just learning how to use it versus just you know when you're an early adopter this is this is kind the pain of it but it's still going to make you way more efficient or do things that you weren't able to do before um so it's well worth it it's a good investment and obviously you'll be ahead of it when it changes again in the future uh next week yeah so every couple weeks there seems to

28:48 be a new frontier model that hits and changes the game and you know but they're all learning from each other and going as fast as they can. So then for you, John, do you feel like there's these two experiences that you're having? Because you're messing around with it, you know, at home, doing all these amazing things with Core Video and things, but then you've got a very large company that you work for

29:17 with a big development team and infrastructure and all this and SOPs and you know like there's all these processes that you have to go through is it is it hard to kind of what are they overlapping at all is it you know is it people that are messing around as much as you are that are trying to do that for work related tasks yeah i think that um

29:39 everything that we do um at work as as a core process of what is software development like STLC still needs to live and operate to have successful software life cycles. And if you're going to generate AI slop and just create some point product and abandon it in three weeks, okay, you don't need a STLC. But if you're going to create software that you want to live and extend past, you know,

30:09 a small cycle and other people use it and trust it, then you're going to have to establish these principles that have been long, way before we had AI, even back when we had machine code, right? These people were doing very similar processes than what we do today. If you look at how software is created today, guess what? It's just lean manufacturing. The Japanese, you know, they learned this a long time ago,

30:32 and it's the same principles. I mean, now we call it agile. But go read, you know, your Six Sigma's books and your lean manufacturing. It's all the same. interesting so like i came out of manufacturing and now you know heavy into a software and finance company um but i was like oh i i know all these principles i know this is all it all related to

30:52 me right away because it's the same how do you produce and uh support a good that you're putting to market it's you know that's all it is that's yeah it's about making something that's repeatable that people can trust, that you can use, that can withstand an audit. All those things are important if you are someone who wants to create software. If you want to have fun, do whatever you want.

31:18 Don't use GitHub. Don't use any source control. Just put stuff out there. But if you want to actually create something that you're proud of and you can stand behind, then learn how to create software. Learn what a software release cycle is. Learn what DevOps is. Make sure you're doing testing. you know like the reason why the ai is now doing this for you is because they're like okay people

31:41 don't trust this so i'm just going to now add a step to my process that's going to validate my output and it's going to cost more tokens but if the humans aren't willing to do that and then they're going to make fun of me for this then i'm going to just go ahead and address this yeah courtney we were talking about this before because you had made software before for your own

32:03 use, you know, in your own business use. And it was like, I'm not going to release this because I didn't have to service it and, you know, do customer service. I have all these, I mean, I've released commercial software before and almost every tech support question I'd get, I would, you know, go, okay. And I would put a link to the operator manual, which goes out with the software and here's

32:27 page 25. Here's step-by-step instructions on how to do what you're asking for. it's in the operator's manual i just send them a link to that but yeah and you know uh i find the first thing that corporations are doing is handing off their tech support to ai and more and more like the behringers you know they got that uly bot now to handle your tech

32:51 support you can't necessarily speak to a live person you got to deal with the chat bot when you give it a problem and they're relying on that chatbot to provide answers to all the stupid questions at least and um you know the question is how do you get past the chatbot to elevate something to real programmers that are can you know elevate a software bug or something to

33:15 those that can actually fix it right right yeah it is an interesting thing with uh with customer of support now because i've seen i've seen some of it can be really good if it if it knows the product really well then you can ask it particular questions and it'll give you really good answers that it can also be completely wrong um very easily um and send you on a wild goose chase

33:45 um yeah we found that like pairing someone who knows system thinking really well and understands how to use ai with someone with deep business knowledge they can't be stopped interesting yeah you know like just like uh that's cool we have a lot of training so we have a program because we call bax um so we take someone from the business who has no it background and we teach

34:08 them how to be a ba those people would like super business knowledge and have ba skills and then one developer they can just crush through work that would take uh you know one or two teams and much longer period of time yeah yeah i mean especially the the tasks that you do that are repeatable um but you know i i had to do it is a perfect perfect example of what you're just talking

34:36 about because my business partner is the one that's always done quotes and proposals and things for our event technology business. But we had this huge one to do, a really big proposal, and it was a request RFP, you know, all the stuff you hate. And so I just spent a lot of time doing a lot of the voice with ChatGPT voice mode and going over a bunch of stuff

35:06 and copying things in and then asking all these questions and then got Codex to build out rather than it being a PDF, I wanted it to be a full interactive website. So we built this big website for the proposal. And the example is that it was because of my understanding of how I could leverage AI to do a whole bunch of this stuff meant that I ended up taking the lead on the proposal,

35:33 ironically on our biggest on our biggest um proposal that we'd done um because i could leverage all this stuff and it was like yes this is perfect and then it was just yeah change these and and he would just write out a bunch of changes in fact again it was a spreadsheet that he made all the changes and i just went changed in them into kind of prompts changed a word here or

35:58 there, turns into a prompt, and then just gave codex access to that spreadsheet. And it just went through and made all those changes. And so it's that example, I think, of the business thinking and the developer thinking. But I don't think that you don't need to be a developer, obviously, to use AI, but there is still something about harnessing the tool in a way that there's

36:24 something about it. I don't know why my brain works that way, but it just, it has to keep driving it. And so now that proposal is all done and we got another little one that came through and we're like, great. I use the same chat thread, you know, I can spin them off. And sometimes it says fork, and sometimes it says, you know, start a new chat based on this history. And so it was just did that,

36:50 fork it off to another another chat message and then just go with an agent and then just give it the details and spits it out for you yeah do you though because i like i feel like it knows that stuff itself um you're trusting in context right yeah rather than giving it yeah if you give it parameters and say build me an agent that can do this okay now you can have consistent outcomes

37:17 even when it's memory and it forgets something or throws in something from a former proposal that's not supposed to be there the chance of hallucination gets much higher yeah yeah that's that's that's fair i just think i guess there's different ways of doing the agents because there's people that will do i have this you know planner agent and then i have this worker agent i have this other

37:40 you know they have five six different agents i'm like you know i can probably just do all of that in one and it will spin up its own agents itself or, or kind of sub tasks that will go off and do, um, just to burn through more tokens. But, um, but that was my other question. And then we'll move on. But, um, John,

38:01 we were talking before about like the fact that I'm on a $200, um, uh, chat TPT plan. And I know that, you know, you're using AI a lot through the, through the, the company that you're in. and that you have to kind of use that API, is there no way of like, there's sort of enterprise plan where you could say, we're going to buy 10 $200 plans a month

38:27 and give them to our devs. Can you do that? Or does it not scale that way in an enterprise? You can. You're essentially buying buckets of credits. So each person... And how is that different to what I'm doing? um because you can't like roll over to somebody else so if you have like a business account and then i have 10 seats the 10 seats worth of credits could be used by one person or five people

38:54 because you're going to have varying use uses and you don't want to have those credits sit and and expire each month yeah okay so you do end up better in the long run because because you're sharing a pool. It's a pool, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And then when you get to really big scale, you're not paying retail credit prices and paying API costs really makes sense.

39:18 Like a family plan for cellular, basically, yeah. Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Just, you know, make sure you're in my circle so I can call you for free. That's right. The old Verizon plan is you can only call your people that are homes. Only five people. Everyone else doesn't matter. We had something where it was free 20-minute calls. I remember from 7 o'clock at night, you could do 20-minute calls to other people,

39:50 anyone on that network. And so we took advantage of that. My mom had a bag phone. And so it could call and ring twice, and there would be no charge. so if the phone rang twice we'd have to call my mom back because the inbound calls were free to her nice you know there's always a way to game the system yeah that's awesome that's so good

40:18 yeah i remember dad had a nokia an earlier one wasn't a wasn't a 3210 it was before that 20, 21, 10 maybe. It was early. And I was playing with it on a road trip and I was like, messages? Because remember, this was like two lines of text on those and messages. It was before SMS was actually, you know, active. And I was playing around with it and, you know,

40:45 working out how you could send a text message on this phone, how quickly it's all changed. All right. Nice. Some good comments in the chat. Thank you for playing along. That was a good little AI discussion. I don't think we can get away from it now, Guy. We managed to pull it still into media production because we're like using it to create these switches and core video and all sorts.

41:18 fun stuff fun stuff everybody needs come on in the water's fine it's fine that's right yeah all right what's our next question there courtney next one comes in from toronto canada our friends to the north uh craig kadoki says uh with apple watch recap and live rewind always listening and recording your surroundings how will this impact how you interact with other people

41:44 and what privacy concerns will it bring to the work environment? Jason? For me, it won't. Because keep in mind, this is like a couple-minute buffer. It's never stored. It's basically just always transcribing. So to say it's always listening is not wrong, but it's also somewhat misleading. It's always transcribing. That's not the same thing. Yeah, okay. I know that was like a 15-second thing or something.

42:13 Yeah, 15 seconds, right. Yeah, and someone was arguing, like, how helpful is that? It was like, I can remember 15 seconds ago. Well, the use case was stupid. Like, if you look at the demo, right, what the demo was, was somebody rattled off their specials. Do you actually think someone's going to be like, hang on a sec, I had no idea what you just said.

42:34 What did she say? Like, you know, come on. I can just repeat it if you like. Auditory processing disorder. no but i'm a highly aural learner i would never do that in front of a waitress like you know you gotta wait until they leave at least come on yeah there's something about it i i to be honest i'm more interested in that feature than i was in the duo um you know like uh so i'm kind of

43:03 I'm more interested in the watch than the expensive flip phone. But I think that I was just listening to the radio as I do it every so often when I can't be bothered putting on something on my phone. And they were talking about how they're trying to bring in legislation here in Australia around smart glasses and trying to ban smart glasses in certain areas and stuff.

43:31 And this is all related, right? It's all privacy stuff. And I don't know. I think we're fighting against a cause that we just have to expect that when we're in public, that we're being videoed and we're being recorded, our audio is being recorded. Which I think it does sort of change society a little bit, but that's the reality of it. Courtney? Yeah, I think the privacy issues are going to wear their ugly heads and the lawyers are going to get involved, and this product is probably going to disappear.

44:07 Because depending on different states have different laws, so how are you going to deal with that? You have to have a notification if you're recording in any way, and I know, Jason, it says it's not recording. But people will interpret it as that, and I'm sure they'll bring lawsuits about that. They'll say, well, it is recording because it's saving it in that little buffer, just like they tried to say that just making a copy of a movie to play it back in your computer is making a copy, and that's violating the copyright act.

44:38 So the lawyers will get involved. And the other problem is once they advertise this feature of the watch recap, and it looks like every other watch that everybody's wearing at the table, you're going to wonder that now, will they now have people who are very paranoid, like working at Apple, for example, that they'll make you leave your watch at the door? or, you know, that you could have modified or hacked your watch to instead of just transcribing that 15 seconds of audio into a secure enclave on the phone

45:13 and only summarizing and not transcribing verbatim and all the other safety protocols that they put forth in the explanation. Yeah, but I could do that right now. I mean, I could right now turn on just press record and let it run all day if I wanted to. To voice record it. Right. And that's the problem is it's making people more and more paranoid. But people may not realize that. But if they advertise this as a feature that they can say, coming to every Apple Watch near you, people are going to say, wait, you've got one of those Apple Watches. I don't want you in here. Just like Google Glass.

45:46 You can't sue on being on your misconception of something, though. Oh, yes, you can. You can sue. You can, but you're not going to get anywhere. Trust me. Yeah. You can sue anybody for anything, and it takes a deep pocket to defend yourself, even if they're dead wrong. If you have to get copyright, proof of copyright violation lawyers involved, that gets really expensive real fast.

46:12 So I don't know. I think privacy concerns are going to be a problem. But these days, everybody's got a phone with a camera in it. But at least you know when they're holding their phone up and something's going on, you realize, oh, well, they're videotaping me. but if it's just built into a pin or a watch you don't know who's videotaping you and who isn't

46:32 so yeah yeah i think that it's going to bring privacy concerns i mean what was it uh microsoft's recall they never even released that because they were so concerned about uh copyright issues and privacy issues that that was a problem and this uh with the recent gamer nexus that was a terrible idea though and i think of lg's uh lg's television sets that are listening to you all the time and

46:59 exporting all of your data all the time and summarizing it and now that it can summarize it in the set itself and just send you know tokens or data or something encrypted that they say you you agreed to it though yeah i know but you can't you know if you don't i've had this problem with a Vizio television set. If you click on, I don't agree to this,

47:21 it goes, okay, you can't receive any over-the-air broadcasts anymore. Because we want to monitor whatever channels you are broadcast. And I couldn't access the antenna on my own television set to receive free over-the-air broadcasts anymore, because Vizio had taken over the tuner and said, if you don't agree to pass this through our ad server, then you can't watch your local television broadcast.

47:47 I threw the TV away and bought a different one. Good. Yeah, then you went and got your black and white CRT TV out. Yeah, that's right. And then you tried to tune it in. You're like, oh, no, they're digital now. I can't get the analog signal. Unfortunately, it had an analog tuner, so there's nothing being broadcast but snow. But it's my snow.

48:06 I have the right to watch it. He threw his computer out, got his ham radio out. He's like, I'm going back to this. Yeah. Yeah, do you know, I think, Craig, it's a great question because actually as a 46-year-old or whatever I am, I think about how, yeah, I think I have to be careful what I say when I'm kind of in public and with other people that I may not know.

48:33 But, you know, I just had a conversation with my 16-year-old son and he was saying about how his friends are always joking about, you know, kind of inappropriate things. is talking about like Hitler and, you know, all this sort of stuff. And he says, oh, you know, they say all these things. And I said, you know, that's not good. But also it is actually helpful for kids particularly to have a group of friends

49:00 where you can say inappropriate things and you learn about what is kind of crossing the line or not crossing the line or, you know, like because you need to be able to do that. And the idea that that place for kids. Yeah. That sounds nice until Child Protective Services shows up on your doorstep and your kids are gone. 100%. But that's what I mean.

49:23 I'm like, if those kids all have watches now that are recording some of that stuff and someone, some, you know, not fully developed brain says something stupid and now is like is quoted saying that that's a problem. Like we need to be able to have safe places, not only for kids arguably, but there needs to be safe places for you to be able to say things that you may not actually even mean.

49:51 And I think that's the cancel culture that we talk about as well, right? That it's, you know, you can't say anything now that could be taken totally out of context or you just didn't, you said something you shouldn't have. you know you're not allowed to do that anymore but we'll see where it all goes john did you have something ted yeah i just i'm just happy now that the transcript of the advertisers have i get a

50:17 copy of you know it's like we finally at least on equal playing ground i'll know exactly where this is coming from where this conversation happened in the day um nice i honestly don't think it's that big of a deal they're just doing what they always do sherlock right now you don't need another tool that can do this and they get access to the data it can help train their models

50:37 because they're so far behind because they don't use everyone else's public data that they're doing so they're trying to just grab information to try to improve their product set i think it's inevitable that apple is going to do this but um it's it's interesting uh to see it to see it lay out like this i'm sure there'll be a bunch of people freak out about it and then forget about

50:57 it and then we'll move on and lose even more privacy like we do every year. That's the space. A little bit of outrage and, you know, that's all it takes. Yeah. Nice. All right. Next question. From someone here on the panel named Jason Bashe in Albuquerque, New Mexico, who is getting an iPhone Duo? I've decided against it. Not me. Jason, you probably concluded the same thing as me, Jason.

51:29 It was just kind of like, I don't think I need that. Yeah, more or less. So what really got me was I've been using my phone a lot for 3D modeling, for creating USDZ. And finally, if we have a fixed aperture and a fixed shutter speed, we have a shot at being able to capture really good 3D models and creating USDZ. we don't like and if you look at that on the duo you don't you're not going to get it so again like

52:00 there are a lot of reasons and keep it keep in mind i i own a vision pro that you know has a has a terabyte storage i'm not afraid of spending the money um that's not at all it it's that i'm a photographer first and a developer second and and then a guy who likes cool things third and to that end when the pre-order came up, I just decided, you know what, I'm going to trade this one

52:27 in. I'm going to get an 18 Pro as I always have and save a thousand bucks because again, I will not compromise the camera. It is my primary camera. And why do you think that it doesn't have the same camera as the 18 Pro? Right. Honestly, I don't think that – so it could be a supply constraint. It could be that they're just not good enough at doing it. It could be that there's some sort of –

52:53 Not room for it for the two batteries that have to power the dual display, you know, not room for it. Yeah, it could be a power constraint. It could be as simple as they didn't want the, you know, the camera hump on the back to be deep enough in order to do it. But the other main thing that the Duo doesn't have is that really cool encoding at the sensor MLAI proofing that they showed off where if you take the picture, it's encoded directly from the sensor.

53:24 And then it creates its own what was actually shot. That is not in the Duo. And like those two things together, it wasn't even about the $1,000. Like if they were the same price, I still wouldn't do it. Because again, I want to be able to create 3D models and with a fixed aperture and a fixed shutter speed, that's like, that is the reason to upgrade for me.

53:48 Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. I wasn't even thinking about the camera. It was just, it was just about, I don't kind of need a small iPad, I don't think. Yeah. And, and I have a million iPads. So it's like, what's the point? Yeah, but I do think I'm totally open to the fact that I may have a use case that comes along and then I'm like, and now I've bought it, you know, for that work use case or something and now I have it and it might win me over.

54:18 A couple of those things like having the face, like being able to do dual screen FaceTime. Again, it's way cool. Dual camera. Again, like I just, it's way cool. And so, you know, they said later this year, so Verizon is my carrier, and they said that they're, you know, they're going to have this switch thing where you can, you know, whichever one you pick up.

54:40 But like even I just cannot justify carrying around $5,000 of iPhone. It's just it's like, no, like at some point, you're just like, that's nuts. That is absolutely crazy. Yeah, I think the four terabyte one in Australian dollars is like 18 grand or something. Because it's three and a half grand for the base model. So it actually is, for me, it's the same

55:10 price as the Vision Pro. Yeah, $2,700 US for the one terabyte iPhone Duo. And like, again, that is safely a thousand dollars more than you know than the new one of this that you know that i will get also i'm pretty pleased that they've got a flat a flat matte black finally we'll see like again with colors we'll see it may or may not actually be black but uh i'm looking forward to it

55:38 it's all happening on friday nice yeah oh i can't even i kind of i was trying to choose i was trying to choose it to see what it was at four oh the four terabytes not even available there um i saw it initially so four terabyte does sound pretty nuts on a phone and sold out of me i just jumped up no it's it's it's

56:03 the 18th so is that on friday i'll have it on the 18th next friday yeah next friday okay this friday this upcoming friday well whatever it is i'll have it on the 18th so the next office hours I'll answer all your questions. It doesn't come. Courtney wants to comment, and I think it would be awesome if you were like, do you know what?

56:26 I'm going to buy the iPhone. I'm throwing my Samsung phone that I've had for seven years. The day that Courtney gets a duo. No, I'm not. But what I'm going to point out is I'm going to stick up. You know I would never buy one. But I'm wondering what was Apple thinking when they designed this thing, when they moved the user interface to the right edge of the screen?

56:52 I'm left-handed. And for all the people that want to hold the phone in their left hand and access stuff or click on icons to launch things, it's going to take two hands. So yours will just be upside down. Just learn how to use it right-handed. It's the right way. You're holding it wrong, Courtney. Yeah, you're holding it wrong, Courtney. we're gonna dig up steve jobs to go hey you're holding it wrong you have to change to be a left

57:17 wasn't steve jobs left-handed for all our lefties that uh wasniac is left-handed wasniac that's right yeah so that was i found that very odd and that the fact that you couldn't change it at least not yet maybe that'll be the first thing the first gonna be like the watch they're gonna have a way that you know it's gonna be upside down for you but like that's like a duck yeah it's like a dock

57:39 Every now and again, I'll get onto someone's Mac and they'll have the dock on the left-hand side of the screen. I'm like, everyone has the dock on the bottom. Why is it on the side? I have the dock on the left for a really good reason. You've got more space this way than this way. Sure. But you also have a hidden dock.

57:59 It's like it's hiding. Honestly, do you know what my dock is? Command space bar. I never use the dock for anything. No, sure. Me neither. Yeah, that's true. anyway the thing that i think is just the windows key you don't have to do these crazy combinations so much better it's half the amount of keystrokes every key counts yeah um so the thing i thought

58:27 about the duo was okay now now we're really going into completely different um screen ratios and things. Because like, we already have the iPad, kind of like this 1610 type or, you know, 4.3, I guess it is, isn't it? The iPad. And then you have the iPhone 16.9. And so mostly people are able to design their apps around those sort of two ratios generally. Now it's

59:00 it's all all out the window right like because it's that's completely changing so i think in general all apps are going to have to be very responsive um to be able to work across these different things which opens up the ability for us to to say i want the dock on the other side or you know whatever i think those options may become available so we'll see so that ratio i'm

59:23 I'm glad you brought up the ratio. The ratio is 1.4 to one. So I haven't tried it. Your passport may vary. I'm not sure if all passports are the same. The closed aspect ratio. It's the closed aspect ratio, but keep in mind, the open aspect ratio is simply gonna be that doubled, right? So it's gonna be 1.4 to one. When you open it, it's gonna be 1.4 to two.

59:48 Interesting. Because the one is the side that opens. Okay. All right. Well, we'll see what happens. But we'll be able to vibe code all these things anyway to suit it. So it'll be fine. All right. I was trying to keep the show to an hour because John turns into a werewolf at 10 o'clock and it's getting late. And so have we got some content recommendations?

1:00:18 I think Jason has one. I've got one. John's turned his light off. He's out. He's asleep. It's John After Hours. Yeah. All right, Jason, what do you got? I've got a quick one. It's not content. It's actually a piece of kit that's on sale for the next five hours. This is a really, really cool microscope. And it is 2,500X, and it's $160 US down from $200.

1:00:48 I just, just got it. It just arrived. I've like, it isn't even out of the box. I got it because I saw it at a client's place and it's, it does all the things correctly, which is just great. I love a good microscope. And this one like is the right mix of cheap enough, good enough focusing and like really easy to use,

1:01:10 which is always the hard part with these, these junky microscopes. That's fun. Cool. Guy, what have you got? yeah it's going to be more mxl stuff because i went down the rabbit hole so i was back from nab 2025 when they're first talking about it the cbc up in canada is the ones that's been a huge proponent so they did a a great presentation in fact andy was in the audience at one of these

1:01:34 where trussart who is one of the gentlemen who's really a key figure in this all with the ebu he got excited as well. So Andy jumped on board back in 2025 into helping get Zoom ISO Cloud written with MXL. So I'm going to put a link in the chat to this one that talks about why they started to figure out, hey, this media exchange fabric, we need to be able to do

1:02:01 video mix, audio mix, GFX, clip recording, playback, camera shading, and then how do we get it back out to the public cloud and so there's some really cool stuff in here and this was in 2025 so they were just starting to talk about it and now with 1.1 that was just released that there's the inner host stuff that's working and that's reality so really really again exciting

1:02:24 stuff very cool kourtney yeah i stumbled across this video today because everyone who was interested in what was going on at IFA, there is a cool video that's out from Cyber News and Wearable channel. And these guys did a 15 or 25 of the coolest tech at IFA. And it's very succinct. And they go from item to item and they go through 25 different items

1:02:51 and they're all bookmarked here on the timeline. So it's great to move through all these little nice items that appeared in Germany at the IFA. the international uh uh funkenstragon or whatever it's called i was impressed until you said whatever it's called which made me it's maybe i don't speak something i'm sure my pronunciation is way up okay john have you got something yeah i just started watching uh season three of silo

1:03:29 on Apple TV. And what a wonderful series that is. I enjoyed the first two seasons and just kicking off season three and already really interested. And I love the concept of, you know, being trapped underground. So it's everyone's worst fear and that's what they live. But yeah. So if you haven't checked it out yet, it's definitely worth a watch. It's one of the good ones.

1:03:55 Yeah, that's cool. I tried it initially and I just couldn't fall into it. And then just recently, like a couple of months ago, I picked it up again and now I'm hooked. And now I've got a few episodes into season two. So I'll probably just like slowly go through so that when I hit season three, it should be all there. That would be the ideal.

1:04:17 So I have a quick retraction. The iPhone Duo is 1.4 to 1, whether it's opened or closed. I was wrong about that. gonna say i had a fenwick fact check um that just came through i got the text too and it was like fix it fix it then link you should have been on the panel the fan wick fact check came in um

1:04:39 yeah what i also saw too was that that 1.4 to 1 is pretty close to imax um and so i'm like oh that would be cool like watching watching imax on that full screen um that's pretty cool but it's not enough to buy it not yet anyway i need another reason all right um thank you now a couple of announcements um the first one is next week um when we're moving to or we're already doing it a

1:05:14 bit, but we're moving to, um, try caster. Vecca what's called Vector Vector. Vector. Thank you. Viz Vector. Um, and, uh, and so we're, we're going to run the show using that. I mean, we've been testing it a bit for the last little while and, um, Taylor has been doing an awesome job, um, making all that work. So even tonight, I think we're ISO recording in three players, which is cool.

1:05:41 I wanted to get a replay of something Guy said and we should have been able to just pull it up. What did he say 15 seconds ago? What was that? We have our own little replay system. So that's happening next week. We move to that. But also we've got Jeremy. I've been too engaged in our conversation that I didn't pull up my notes.

1:06:08 Jeremy something. I think? Maurice. It's coming. Maurice, is it? Thank you. Jeremy Morris is from Viz is coming and we'll be talking all about it. And so we're doing that as part of extra hours next week. And so that's going to be super cool to be able to talk about that. And they've got a couple of extra things that they've just announced as well.

1:06:34 Did you catch that guy, what their new things were that we can quiz them about next week? Well, one of the big ones was they're changing the name. I don't know how to pronounce it, but it's no longer VizVector. It's V-I-Z-I-O-N. So I'm waiting for Jeremy to show up so he can tell us. Vision? Or is it visual? I don't know. How do you say it?

1:07:03 Vision. Yeah. They seem to have solidified the lineup down a little bit. And so what used to be a bunch of different models is now three. So there'll be the TriCaster, the entry level, and then you got the mid, which is Prism, and then you got Vision, which is what used to be Vector. So he'll fill us all in on the good stuff.

1:07:26 So I'm excited to see... Well, Jeff Keighley's in the chat and he gave us a big earful around what some of the differences are over the weekend. And it was fascinating to hear because I haven't been a TriCaster guy in a while. I used to sell them, but I haven't studied that lineup. And to see it all and see what the capabilities, I'm like kind of drooling.

1:07:44 I mean, it's really cool what they're doing for us because I didn't realize all the forum E's with the forum E keyers. And I was like, what? You could do that in the cloud with a software switcher? like so now we can get our eight up gallery view there's there's a little trickiness to it uh yeah it'll be it'll be fun it's gonna be fun oh that's cool that's gonna be very just pronounced viz on

1:08:08 viz on we're gonna find out we're gonna find out so uh that's next week so please come with uh your questions and also hit up Taylor at the moment is a great time to get in the back end of what we're doing with extra hours because you can learn all these new sort of the new platform and play around with it and get an idea and help out with the show and even if you just want to come

1:08:35 and check it out and kind of sit sit back and see how it all works you can totally do that too so there you go and after hours is still happening of course and so if you want to jump into after hours now and continue the conversation you can do that you just don't expect John to be there alright because he just

1:08:56 needs to go to bed I'll join in just ignore you nice very good well thank you everyone what a cool show it was nice chatting all about it there's bananas for scale. Thank you. 37 million. It really doesn't mean much when we only have three or four questions, because we talked for too long. But I do want to thank Taylor for spearheading all of this and making it all happen. He's putting in some extra hours at the

1:09:26 moment. Really appreciate it. But of course, Alan and Rion tonight with Vic and Peter, we're making things happen in the background. So really appreciate all your work. And all the cool people hanging out in the chat. There's some good comments there. It's always good to check that out. If you don't know how to get into the chat, it's officehours.global.com and then you'll

1:09:48 get all the links and everything to make all that happen for you. So you can do that next week and that way you can ask some questions of our special guests. And special guest Ian for coming all the way in on guest two's input because that was pretty cool. That was Ian. That was New Zealand that came in. So a special thank you to you.

1:10:05 And it's still going too, right? He's got it out the window. I think he's got the... That's cool. I'm just using up your bandwidth there, Guy. I'll just keep it running. Eat it up. Eat it up. Awesome. Thanks, everyone. Bye-bye. Dude. It really is mind-blowing what you've got there, guy. Yeah.

1:10:53 It was fun. Yeah. So good. It's so good. Yeah. Yeah, right, okay. Yeah, yeah, cool. I'd be interested, yeah. That's awesome. Wow. What's your plan with that guy? Like, that's too good for... To just be a little... The switcher that you've made, it seems too good to just leave. So, oh, because you don't have a computer

1:11:47 that you could run it on, like... Thank you.