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Date: 2/6/2005 | Much to my home audience's disgust somewhere in my tool chain of DVC -> firewire import -> encode to MPEG2/DVD -> create VOB's -> burn to DVD+R some scenes are repeated in the output video. I think the import is too blame, but now I don't really care, I just want to fix it.
I assumed that somewhere there would be an application that could read an MPEG2 file, show me a list of scenes, let me delete some and then save out the resulting video WITHOUT reencoding it. (GOP accurate editing is not a problem) And there seem to be a few that allow you to do just that, but you have to sit there for hours watching the film (yes the source is at least 5-6 hours of video) waiting for the dupelicate scenes and then manually find the scene edge, select the scene and then delete it. Wow, like a have 5 hours to waste doing that. What I need is something that gives me a high level overview of the video, like a list of scenes, with keyframes across the page and each row being a scene, so I can quickly pick out the scenes I want and don't want. This seems so obvious that I thought they'd be 100 freeware/shareware apps out there doing it. Apparently not. Or am I just blind? Also I can imagine such an application would be dead handy at removing commercials from captured TV, not that I capture TV to MPEG2, but the same app could be made to work with AVI files as well with a little work. Update This is a mock up of the UI I'm thinking of, a list of scenes down the page with "one click" delete ability. Then hit save and out comes a new video file minus the deleted scenes but not re-encoded at all. (GOP accuracy is fine). 
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| Clean Sheet Redesign | |
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Date: 19/5/2005 | There are 2 types of programmers, those that lean towards incremental change and those that lean towards radical redesign. I fall fairly much in the incremental camp and have done so for a long time. For a long time (4 years?) have needed to make substantial architectural changes to an application I've written and for the sake of incremental change not bothered fixing certain "dead ends" in the design that I'd discovered. I tried redesigning it at least 3 times and then bringing those designs to life in code. And failed. 3 times. I have a few insights into why these redesigns failed that I'd like to share.
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| ハウルの動く城 | |
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Date: 13/5/2005 | Does anyone know when ハウルの動く城 (1, 2) will come out on DVD somewhere in the world? Or possibly in theatres in Australia?
I am not going to watch a cam captured divx/xvid version of it and ruin it for myself... :{ But the waiting just goes on and on. I emailed MadMan who have brought other Studio Ghibli movies to Australia and they said "this year" for theatre release (no DVD eta). Well it's May. I guess "this year" means December. |
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| Gmail Tutorial | |
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Date: 12/5/2005 | To stem the tide of Gmail users emailing me about setting up Scribe to access Gmail via POP3 I've written a short Gmail tutorial. If you have any additions / corrections or comments on the tutorial let me know and I'll update it. Any troubleshooting you had to do would also be useful to collect into one place for new users. Thanks.
As far as I know Gmail doesn't support SMTP as well for sending mail so don't ask about that. Happy Gmailing! :) |
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| Video Encoding | |
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Date: 3/5/2005 | We seem to have run out of VHS tapes at home and the machine is dying anyway so last night when I needed to record some tv (not for me) I installed the TV card drivers again and played around with the encoding settings. I have a Leadtek Tv2000 which is a basic PCI TV tuner card and it works Ok I guess. Despite it saying that it supports MPEG4 in hardware don't believe it.
The bundled PVR/record/view software 'Winfast PVR' is a mix of good and bad, firstly it gives you a functional UI to setup channels, setup encoding options and capture video. It does 'skin' everything but it looks hideous. However 15 minutes in to my hour long capture it crashed. So stability is not good enough for everyday use. Oh and you do get a hardware remote and IR receiver with it but it only worked for the first few days I had it and then died. No amount of fiddling with drivers and new batteries would resurrect it. After recording the show I had a go at optimizing the encoding settings, because the default use of MPEG2 was a) eating all the CPU and dropping frames/audio and b) creating 2gb files for less than an hour of video. So I started by dropping the MPEG2 bitrate down to 4000, and it looked terrible. So I started exploring the other codecs. The most obvious one to try was DivX 5. So I made some test encodings, and at full rez (PAL: 720 x 576) it would drop frames badly, as the CPU (1.4ghz Athlon) would by pegged at 100%. So I tried half res (which is still watchable for TV) and it would sit around the 90% CPU mark. However when the scene pans around it has blocky artifacts which are very noticable even with the bitrate ramped up to 4000. So I kept looking and the next thing to try was Xvid. With half res video and Xvid's quality rating set to about 3.5 the output video was very watchable with only very slight video artifacts and the CPU would average about 85% load. Very nice! I checked the output avi with GSpot and it told me the file was 90% audio?!?! What the? Ok so the audio compression was set to "ogg" (my fravorite format) but according to the filesize it seems like it was actually PCM (uncompressed). So I switched to mp3 encoding for the audio and wow... the output capture files are now tiny! I'm encoding at about 250-300mb an hour, with very watchable picture quality and decent audio. Most people expect to get about 1gig/hr. So I'm doing way better than that. When playing back these Xvid/mp3 avi files back it uses about 20% of the CPU, nice in of itself, but it does mean that I can't encode and playback reliably on my current setup (85+20 = 105%). So no Xvid PVR for me. At least until I upgrade. Now what I need to find is a reliable capture and PVR application that I can hook into a tv guide to auto record shows of interest. That search is still ongoing. The WinFast PVR software is a) too unreliable and b) can't be scripted to record shows, their schedule file is a binary .DAT thing (grrr!). I'm hoping that some freeware app can do good video capture off a TV card... any suggestions? |
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| Tiger | |
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Date: 2/5/2005 | I've been reading up on Apple's new version of OS X 'Tiger' and it's pretty much heading directly where I wanted linux to go. With a full OpenGL implementation of the GUI for maximum hardware acceleration. Powerful OS level API's for graphics, sound and data. Visually beautiful UI - Aqua. Support for lots of multimedia add-ons via firewire and usb2. Top level authoring capabilities.
And linux has X windows. Wow I'm so overwhelmed. ;) To me it doesn't seem like it's a matter of 'if' I'll jump on the Mac bandwagon but rather 'when'. I doubt that a Mac Mini will really give Tiger room to stretch it's legs. According to some it wants a ATI Radeon 9600 or NVIDIA GeForce FX to run Quartz 2D Extreme, a feature which I think I'd appreciate. So from my limited research into which Mac would suit me (a free one hehehe) it seems the iMac G5 17" @ 1.8 Ghz + 512mb RAM would be a minimum hardware platform for decent performance in Tiger (right?). A mere A$ 2,520 at my local Apple retailer. Which is quite a bit more than a dual Opteron upgrade for the existing machine. *sigh* But I think the Mac has a really rosy future with a disproportionately high level of mindshare in the geek community. |
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