Category: Uncategorized

NewTeeVee has an excellent post (and equally good comments) on the relative lack of public interest material in the online video world:

“Hopefully there’s [a way of supporting] the more provocative, less commercial creators of today before they become footnotes in nostalgic cultural histories tomorrow.”

Ouch. Worth a read.

(Somewhat embarrassing for me that my own comments were held in moderation for a day, while waiting for the SciCast server to do whatever it does that causes it to recover from one of its periodic outages. It was patchily down for more than 24 hours there. Oof.)

Wondering about the whole US screenwriters’ strike? Yeah, me either, really, so here’s John August’s lengthy but (natch) well-written account of the situation.

I’ve a lot of sympathy for them, to be honest. The concept is sound, even though I don’t get residuals for any of the stuff I’ve done (I’m not a drama writer, so what I’ve done has been on a buy-out basis; Producers don’t get residuals here either, mind. Directors sometimes do, but not Producers).

Forget DVD sales, too – the alarming issue is that writers aren’t getting paid for internet sales. At first glance this appears entirely indefensible, especially in the light of the $1bn Viacom suit against YouTube. If online copyright infringement is worth that much in damages, surely the material being online must be worth something in the first place. So… why don’t the writers get a cut of that, in the same way they do in other media? Run that by me again?

Or… just watch this ‘Not The Daily Show’ clip from some of the writers of… uh… The Daily Show.

Yes, again. Interesting read, though.

And as ever the comments are full of people saying – to paraphrase – ‘speed doesn’t kill, bad driving kills.’ No, you muppets, what kills is hitting people with a car.

The situation strikes me as the British equivalent of the American ‘guns don’t kill people, people kill people’ debate, which is a bizarre justification for a gun lobby. Sure, the NRA’s right in a linguistic sense, but mass ownership of firearms certainly makes it more likely that I’ll get shot in the head.

I used to buy car magazines; I was wildly excited about my Mini Cooper. Two things have more-or-less seen off my interest in cars: my desire not to be aligned with the nonsense spouted by the road lobby, and Mercedes, who naffed up the Smart Roadster so badly I doubt I’ll ever forgive them.

Damn, that could have been a great car.

Seeing if xmlrpc posting is still running in this brave new FastCGI world.

[update: oooh, blimey, that worked. For those following along at home, the relevant .htaccess incantation in my /mt directory is now:

#AddHandler cgi-script .cgi
AddHandler fastcgi-script .cgi
<FilesMatch "^mt-xmlrpc\.cgi$">
SetHandler cgi-script

All this on Dreamhost, by the way.]

[update 2: reverted to:

#AddHandler cgi-script .cgi
AddHandler fastcgi-script .cgi
<FilesMatch "^mt-(add-notify|atom|check|config|feed|testbg|upgrade|wizard|xmlrpc)\.cgi$">
SetHandler cgi-script

…as per these notes.

Looks like everything’s working again. Switching the comment state of each line reverts back to plain old cgi, so we’ll see how it goes.]

[update 3: be sure to:

touch mt.cgi

…whenever you diddle with plugins, to restart the app in FastCGI. I keep forgetting, and MT gets stuck at upgrade checks.]

At least, I think I’m running MT under FastCGI. I’ve previously had problems with client posting, but we’ll see if that’s still the case with the .htaccess file I’m now using.

I’m trying to add a comment to this entry linking here, to help people who (like me) might be confused by Movable Type’s distinction between ‘tags’ and ‘categories’.

Frustratingly, MT’s docs system is telling me I’m not signed in… but only when I submit a comment. Up to that point, it’s telling me I am signed in, and is refusing to sign me out.

So… let’s see if the Trackback ping from this post gets picked up. Otherwise, it’s down to Google to link this stuff together.

[sigh]

YouTube co-founder Steve Chen said at the NewTeeVee Live conference that high-quality video streams are coming soon to the ‘Tube. But further, he’s reported thus:

… the need to buffer the video before it starts playing will change the experience. Hence the experiment, rather than just a rapid rollout of this technology. On stage, he said the current resolution of YouTube videos has been “good enough” for the site until now.

What?

I can only assume — or rather, hope — Chen is talking about genuinely high-quality video. Like ‘high def’ high quality. Because the issue with YouTube quality (apart from often shitty source material, which isn’t their problem) is that they’re using the video codec in Flash 5. This makes sense, because it means they can run ffmpeg on their server farm to transcode uploads, but there is a cost: Flash 5 video sucks.

The codec is Sorenson Spark, which is a close cousin of H.263 and H.264 but is visibly lacking compared to more modern implementations of the latter. Lacking, that is, at the same bitrates. There’s no shame in this, since Spark was designed years ago, for systems with far less compute power than can now be thrown at the challenge. But current H.264 implementations will deliver better quality and/or a larger frame and/or higher frame rate for the same compressed file size. And you tend to maintain audio sync, which is a particular weakness of Spark in Flash.

Higher-quality video needn’t mean lengthier buffer times. So… what was Chen talking about, again?

[Update: slightly more plausible report in the NewTeeVee Live official transcript. Still doesn’t make complete sense, though — Spark is old and shitty, they’re already doing better H.264 for iPhone and Apple TV… so… huh?]

Oooh. Forget the EX1 (archive to BluRay XDCAM discs? I don’t think so) – this is the new hot game in town. Sony’s Z1-replacement Z7, incorporating an interchangeable lens, HDV tape recording, and simultaneous recording to Compact Flash. Yes, Compact Flash. Oh, and it does 1080p, too.

Sounds darn-near perfect, if you ask me. I wonder what the low light performance is like?

Coming February 2008, for more money than I’ve got. Blast!

YouTube is already serving H.264 to iPhones and Apple TV; Adobe is rolling H.264 support into the next version of Flash; both high-def DVD standards can use H.264; and now DivX has bought MainConcept, an H.264 codec developer.

Two thoughts:

1. Can we now stop with the ‘DivX is just as good’ arguments?

2. Microsoft are the only vendor not doing H.264 (RealPlayer will handle it, if anyone still cares)

Give it another year, and the main delivery method for video will be H.264.

Oh, happy, happy day.