Slimbo Speilburg [slim]

My old Sony Handicam was becoming an embarrasment, even my kids were ashamed when I'd lug it out and stand near the other preening dads with their cool little DV players. So I invested in a cool little dv player of my own, the Canon mv700i, as I'm a bit fond of canons still cameras.
It's a lovely little thing, nice chromey buttons, good build quality, absolutely tiny too. The tapes I got with it gave you an hour of vid which is plenty, especially as they're only a couple of quid and the whole thing fits into a camera bag instead of a big video camera bag. Image quality is superb, and of course you dont get any degradation when you transfer it as with analog, becuase it's digital and leet. I bought the 'i' model for an extra few quid because it accepts analog in, so I can transfer my old vhs stuff to DV tape for storage without degradation. I figure using a little DV cam to do the capture is a lot less faffy than rigging up my video player to my pc.
There are a couple of downers, both relating to the size of the thing. First its so small that it's quite hard to hold steady. It does have image correcting gubbins but it's still hard to get a shot as steady as with my older bigger cam. Also, as its so tiny, the mic is obviosly too close to the drive motor, so you get a bit of that noise on the soundtrack of your vid. Bit of a shitter really, you'd have thought they could have designed around that or something?
Now with my old analog camera, you recorded shit with the camera, you plugged it into your domestic video recorder and recorded it off to vhs. A dv cam is a whole different kettle of shit. This plugs into my firewire port on my pc, and appears as a device on my 'my computer' list. Double clicking on the icon on the camera allows me to watch the vids off the tape on the pc. I think the camera was supposed to ship with some movie editing software, but mine didn't, bleh, so I started off using the Microsoft Movie Maker thing. This isn't bad on first view, it does lots of stuff like transitions and fx (if you download the free update v2 off their webby), in fact I spent a lot of time building up nice movie with lots of leet features, until I realised it was shit. Why's it shit? Well it appears to encode everythign into windows media format, which is useless for making DVD's out of. So I got me a copy of Pinnacle Stuido, and had loads of fun makign dvd menus, sound tracks, ! titles, transitions. It's a world apart from the free stuff, and well worth investing in if you've got a dv cam. Problem here is it offers so much over the old analog transfer to tape and watch method that you spend much more time on it. Of course the end result is far better so worth it in the end. The rendering of the final dvd for writing also takes a long time, a couple of hours on my p4 3.2 ghz machine with 1ghz of ram.
Oh, another iffy bit. An hours Digital Video in raw format is about 12gb, whereas a dvd is about a quarter of that, so the video must be encoded to fit. So what do you do with the source? Delete it? Keep the tape, what? I dunno!
Oh, final a bonus is that you can get software to allow you to back up 12 gb of data to the things, which is kinda comparable with DVD-R costs, but of course the tapes are re-writable.
I'm happy overall, some catchas, and some dissapointments but it is a lot of fun. The end result is an amazing dvd of my family events which I can copy, show off and pass around without worry about it being degraded or worn out or being chewed by someones shitty old furgason or whatever.

The irony of the BNP [beej]

So, right wing politics then.
I was just talking with the continuity announcer for BBC TWO and tonight she has to introduce the BNP's Party Election Broadcast (its on BBC ONE later as well). People are quite touchy about the whole BNP thing, especially your average pinko media-ite, but she's very matter of fact about how the UK is a democracy and if one political party can have five minutes of air time then they all have to.
Now what is so wonderfully ironic is that she's Asian and she was wondering whether to put on a bit of an Indian accent just for laughs. The BNP wouldn't see the funny side would they :)
It's a bit like that Louis Theroux ep where he meets the white supremacists and they tell him he's Jewish (ummmm... no he's not you KKK retards!)

Wimmin. Wimmin and Work. Sigh. [brit]

I'm sure you've all heard of the glass ceiling that wimmin face; if shaven-headed lesbotarts are to be believed, every woman struggles to earn more than 40p a week because of the evil man things that control teh worlds!
Anyway since the glass ceiling is now all but defunct, a throw back to the 80s much like most of Beej's record collection *g* they've decided that this time it's the glass cliff they face! oh yes dear reader, a cliff no less!
So, what can we do eh? if wimmin don't get promoted to CEO within 5 years, it's because they are being sexualised against. NOW if they DO get promoted, it's only in those roles that are so fraught with danger and risk that they can't get down the shops at lunch or pop in for a 'doo and then they end up breaking down with teh stress and teh wimmins problems.
It's a win win for the Sinead O'Connor-a-likes that fill out all those Take-A-Break style one-third page 'shock exposes' on people like Harriet, who after working 14 hours a day for 3 years was only given a bonus of a million quids!
14 hours? is that all I hear you cry! damned right that's *all* - you don't hear those Nike footwear makers in Bangalore complaining and they do 200 hours a day!
Holy smoke!

Digital video - options, options, options. [brit]

I can't be the only one with this problem.
We have a gazillion hours of footage stored on tape; covering everything from Umatic to digital media in various formats (my personal favourite being the various Ogg Vorbis audio streams. In short, if it's a medium used for storing audio/video, we have it, and we have truck loads of it.
A few years ago, some bright spark bought a Mediahawk 2000 series. You probably won't have heard of this unless you work in the broadcast arena, but it's the sort of thing Sky and NTL use to deliver video on demand - or in their case, pay per view movies. The system runs PowerMax OS which is basically a Flash based OS and is a complete and utter nightmare.
So, I'm in a quandry. The assets we have, both in terms of hardware and media cover off pretty much the whole spectrum - and I need to sort a single entry and delivery point; and more importantly format, for the whole lot; on the MediaHawk itself there are some 6,000 ads (covering only the work we do here) at both MPEG1 and MPEG2, with various 0.5-1TB arrays holding the rest on other systems.
Faced with this scenario, what is your thinking in terms of choosing a single format for both video and audio? The target audience for this is user's desktops on the internal network here (to start with) - given that it's a Gbps backplane and 100Mbps to the desk, the actual file size of each asset isn't really an issue.
As far as I can see, there are four options:
1. Microsoft Media (HTTP/MMS) 2. Apple Quicktime (HTTP/RTSP) 3. Real Media 10 (HTTP/RMS) 4. MPEG 4 via either DivX or Xvid
Each has it's positives, each has it's negatives; either way, I'm happy to hear what anyone has to say on this subject as it's taken me weeks to research each and set up test beds, and I'm still not convinced any of them deliver 100% of our requirements (quality of stream, web compatibility, embedded player, downward compatibility with previous versions of player, ease of encoding etc).
As far as audio, I know that it's MP3 at 192kb/s and that's that; as we have practically every radio ad ever broadcast in storage already.

Phone companies [muz]

In case you couldn't tell by the topic, this blog is about the scum of the earth, otherwise known as mobile phone companies. Now, some of you may be aware of my ongoing battle with T-Mobile - it essentially boils down to their being inept, and then covering their ineptitude by sending customers round infinite voicemail loops. Well, finally, things got to be too much, and I called them and requested a PAC number. The conversation went something like this:
Customer service rep: 'I'll just put you through to our customer management team.' Me (wanting to avoid a 30 minute conversation about 'Why are you leaving' and 'What we can offer you if you stay'): 'Er no, thanks. I'd just like a PAC number sent out, thank you.' Customer service rep (in an irritated fashion): 'Yes, sir, customer management will have to deal with that.' What the fuck?! I'm leaving because of shit service, and they think that being rude to me will somehow induce me to stay? Genius. And the thought that a customer service rep can't click on the icon that says 'Send PAC number' is somewhat ludicrous, too.
After a 20 minute conversation with a customer manager, who was actually quite polite, I managed to convince her that there was no chance I was going to stay with T-Mobile. She then pointed out that if I waited until the 18th June, to request a PAC number, I wouldn't have to pay the early termination fee of some 15 notes. Now, faced with this dilemma of principle versus pecuniary saving, I took the only correct choice. I said I'd call back on the 18th. Damn these underhand, conniving people.
Anyway, I went ahead and ordered a Nokia 6820 from O2. Handset was free on a £30/month contract, which includes 200 cross network minutes, 500 free texts, 500 WAP minutes, and 0.5MB of GPRS traffic. (Depending on how much I use, I may add one of their GPRS bolt-ons to my tariff.) All very reasonable. Call up O2, as instructed, to discuss eventual porting of my existing number, and am told by the customer service monkey that the 6820 is out of stock, and it wouldn't be delivered for tree to four weeks, as opposed to the 'next three days' displayed on my invoice. FFS! I bleet at them a bit and then hang up, not overly impressed. What should turn up the next morning but a suspicious package with 'O2' on the side. Madness. In summary, don't trust what mobile phone customer service reps tell you. Ever.
Expect a blog on the phone in a couple of weeks, after I've been using it a while.

City of Heros and why its not just another MMORPG... [houmous]

Some of you will have noticed I haven’t been in channel much recently and I’ve now often got a CoH prefix on my nick. SPAM have always been a clan that has experimented with MMORPGS ever since EQ hit the streets when, a bit like heroin, it single-handly destroyed what had been our thriving, active and very social Mirc channel. Overnight it became a ghost town as everyone became obsessed with levelling and anyone who didn’t soon got bored with hanging around with no one to talk to.
Ever since then we have tried nearly all the MMORPGs that come along with varied results – Asherons Call (week) Dark Age of Camelot (about 3 months) Anarchy online (month), Star Wars Galaxy (week), FFXI (month). However nothing has ever seized the clan like City of Heroes which we have all been playing non-stop since its release.
So why is it so good? Like all MMORPGs it’s based on improving skills and powers as you level up but what we are looking at here is a game that’s really thought about the bits you don’t like about MMORPGs and come up with solutions. A perfect example is the Side Kick system. How many times have you been unable to find a group close enough to your level or been pissed off when you can’t play with your mates because they are 5 levels higher than you? In CoH you can join a group of any level by being side kicked by one of the higher level members. This boosts you to their level but still giving you the same exp that would expect at your actual level – an amazingly social tweak.
The powers and skills are all genuinely exciting and the visuals are first class. Running around a kind of Gotham City killing hoodlums is a refreshing change to goblins and rats. The missions are not mindless grinding but require strategy and thought to complete because of the toughness of the mobs. The game also runs amazingly smoothly and is virtually bug free.
This brings me to another example of an adaptation which makes this game so good. When you die you lose exp as you would expect but instead of having to then simply make it up again (groan) so you get to where you were before after, say, a couple of hours, CoH has a debt system.
What happens is that with each bit of new exp you get half goes to repaying the debt and half goes on adding to your exp level that you had before you died – a far more motivating arrangement!
Anyway I could rant on about how good this game is for ever but have a look at it on their web site here. You can download it here and buy an activation key on their site, if you cant be arsed to order the box.

Napster - not bad but... [lurks]

Oh look, a week away and no one does any blogs. Surprised? No, I expect not.
Anyhow, Napster have launched in UK today. I have a professional interest in the service so I leeched it down and checked it out. I think they could be a lot clearer about how things work so I'll summarise here.
If you sign up to Napster and use Napster Light, it'll cost you a whopping 1.09 sterling (Beej still hasn't fixed pound symbol) per track or 9.95 an album. You can stream the first 30 seconds of anything in their collection. This as opposed to forking over a tenner a month in which case tracks can be as 'low' (hoho) as 88p and no mention of how much an album is. You can stream anything you like, listen to radio stations and get access to the forums and stuff. Here's a handy comparison page.
It's a step in the right direction. It's sort of file-based like the Napster of old but the top panel ushers you into finding artists, their entire biography and pulled in content from AMG (the Allmusic.com guys) and so on. Also plenty of recommendations on another tab. There's certainly no shortage of music on it so far and big stuff that you'd expect to find too. All's well and good.
On the other hand, you're looking at paying the same - if not more - than buying a CD from Amazon. Only you don't get a CD, you get some lame DRMed WMA files which wont play on ass loads of MP3 players including the iRiver stuff. Where's the value add here exactly?
I think I'll stick to Amazon which has highly accurate recommendations and I get proper CD of uncompressed audio which I can then compress to my favorite format and play it anywhere I goddamn like. I get printed artwork and a CD backup incase my computer(s) go tits up too. If it's stinky, I can always flog the CDs on eBay too.
I think we really need stuff like Napster and iTunes music store. I like the whole streaming idea before buying but I fail to see why I should put up with DRM rubbish and higher prices than CDs. What's more, they want me to give them a tenner retainer and for me to pay for the bandwidth/net connection to download this stuff and for me to pay for the hardware (HD, CD, flash etc) to store it on and charge more than a CD.
Where's the value? There isn't any. I might use the Light version to listen for some good stuff and then go buy the CDs off Amazon and rip to MP3 like I've been doing for years already.