At the moment I can’t get what I want. And it’s a bit frustrating as normally technology is ahead of my requirements, not behind. Normally it’s me looking at these cool new tech toys and going ‘neat, one day I’ll get one of those’
My annoyance is that convergence (of PCs and home entertainment systems) hasn’t taken off as fast as I would like.
If you want - in your lounge room - to watch digital TV plus record it to a hard drive, as well as play DVDs and watch any media files off your PC…you currently need 2 or 3 different boxes in the lounge. Of course, I want it to be one. And not a full blown Home Theatre PC.
The more I think about this, the more I realise I’m really after an X type solution. As in Xfree86 and X.org - a small, media terminal in the lounge room, with no moving parts, but controlling the powerful PC sitting in study.
Continue reading “Dreams of a Media Terminal”
I’m using Google Earth a fair bit. I’ve been fascinated with turning maps into 3D views since secondary school; when we learned how to create a height versus distance cross-section from a topology map.
Google Earth has the ability to cut and paste latitude & longitude co-ords directly in, which makes it quite easy to Go To a place of interest.
Continue reading “Finding local data for Google Earth”
In other words, how much disk space does it take?
I did some samples using a fast moving show. It was a standard definition recording, captured direct as the MEPG2 data. I then converted it to Raw, uncompressed frames, then did two MPEG4 compressions; one average quality, the other very good. Both used MP3 audio. The second figure is the percentage relative to the base MPEG2 recording.
Continue reading “How big is one minute of TV?”
DVB (digital TV) recordings, as I’ve said before, are cool but fat. I squash them down to AVI files containing XviD (MPEG4) video and MP3 audio. Yes, THAT MP3. Still an excellent audio compression scheme.
One day I’m going to write a full on ‘how to’ but here’s a summary from 10,000 meters.
All software is for Windows. I think all are open source; they certainly are free. Doom9 has most of these applications.
Continue reading “Digital TV to XviD : 30,000 foot view”
Have really got into the video conversion is a big way over the last few months. Main reason is I bought a set top box for the PC. It can record both Standard and High Definition video. As an aside, I’ve previously commented on how Australia got this so wrong.
Anyway recording digital TV is cool. The pictures are wide screen, clear and literally DVD quality (even in Standard Def mode!). But they eat disk space at the rate of 3 to 4 GB per hour.
Digital TV (and DVDs) both use variations on the same compression scheme; the excellent MPEG2. A newer standard is MPEG4, with a common implementation called XviD. I can use XviD to squash down my recording to about 10% of their original size with only a slight loss in quality.
To make this go quicker, I’ve recently hit upon frame serving.
Continue reading “Video Conversion - Frame Serving 101″
I may have mentioned that I use the free iTunes for Windows as my MP3 library and player.
If I did - and you installed it - this here is a note to say that the recent Version 5.0 seems to introduce an autostarting service that caused me - and others - mucho grief.
Called Apple Computer Bonjour it seems to not play with either Norton Internet Security or with http per se (https just fine). Result is that all Internet web sites won’t load, via Firefox or IE.
Apparently fixed in the ‘oops, sorry about that’ 5.01 release, where Bonjour is removed. I manually disabled 5.0 Bonjour in Services and the problem went away. But am still following advice of uninstalling 5.0 then installing 5.01.
The 2005 AFL Grand Final was a ripper. I started watching it, excited but only about 75% interested. From the opening bounce I was enthralled.
I don’t watch much footy these days. A few short years ago I was an Essendon member; going each week, reserved seat and all that. But I became disillusioned. Not with my team, but with the fairness of the whole AFL competition. But that’s not for today.
Congratulations to the Sydney Swans for a fantastic performance. I used my mobile phone to record (live) the sound of that last frantic minute as we watched the match at my brothers. As I later said to a niece: I can’t believe a few people could make so much noise. The sound when Leo Barry took that mark was massive. A few seconds later a huge roar echoed throughout the house. I’m sure the kids in the rumpus room wondered what on earth was going on.
The Age headline summed it up well: “The mark that saved the flag”. It truly was. The final amazing act in a brilliant and exciting game.
Slightly different this time. The Age contacted me and asked if I’d be interested in writing a piece based on one of their topics; normally I suggest topics to them. Who am I to resist a challenge 
Twas all about how NASA is working with the University of Qld to develop smart hardware - that you can re-program.
Your old PC can be used as remote storage for the new PC.
Melbourne Age and Sydney Morning Herald. A look at content managers.
