Live from Austin!

Eeyore’s Birthday Party

Yeah, I’ve edited last year’s just in time for this year’s. I had a sudden outbreak of weddings to deal with.

The New York Times reports that most people have decided to sit out the HD format war between Blu-ray and HD-DVD.

I’m one of them. I remember DCC vs MiniDisc. MiniDisc won, if by ‘won’ you mean ‘lingered for a few years longer’. I also remember SACD vs DVD-Audio. Both of those lost, in that even people who have DVD players capable of playing DVD Audio (like me) typically don’t bother to hook them up to support it (like me). I saw an SACD player in someone’s house at Christmas, but it was being used as a CD player.

As the guy from Sony admits, the improvement from DVD to HD is pretty marginal unless your TV is 40″ or greater. This seems to match my conclusions from comparing 1080i OTA HDTV to upscaled DVD on our TV.

Then there are the downsides. The most obvious being the sluggish performance. For Blu-ray, typically it takes 30 seconds after hitting the power button before the disc tray opens; 30 more seconds after inserting the disc before you see menus. Of course, that’s the optimistic case, it can be much worse. Assuming it actually works at all. And to think I get impatient waiting 10 seconds for my DVD player.

Then there’s region encoding. I like being able to buy UK TV shows and movies legally and watch them, and I’m not prepared to go back to having a disc player that’s limited to US releases. So I’m not buying Blu-ray until region-free players become available.

Then there’s ripping video. Sure, it’s kinda specialized, but as iPods and portable video players and video-capable phones become more commonplace, it’s increasingly appealing. I did consider ripping some TV shows to watch on my BlackBerry on the plane this Christmas.

So as far as I’m concerned, wake me when the war is over and I can get a player that plays the winning format, in all regions, for under $300. Until then, I’m not interested. Even if I get a PS3, I can’t see myself buying any Blu-ray discs.

How would you like a digital video camera that records 15fps video in 3GP format (QuickTime-compatible) direct to flash drive, is small enough to fit in a pack of gum, and has 33 hour capacity?

It’s currently $295. In less than 10 years cameras like this will be so cheap anyone will be able to afford one. Phones will be able to upload their video live to the Internet, in case of confiscation.  The future of ubiquitous surveillance is coming, whether you like it or not.

While we were in England, we got the train from Bournemouth to visit London.

London was an important part of my life as soon as I was old enough to be allowed to travel there without adult supervision. Some people are naturally country folk, some people are city people; even though I grew up in small villages and quaint towns, that was never where I really wanted to be.

I was curious to see how London had changed since I last saw it, nearly 10 years ago. We arranged to stay overnight with Shimrit in Stoke Newington, which Sara amusingly misheard as “Stoat Newington”.

Memories fade, and my main reason for going to London was to take my new video camera and visit a bunch of familiar places and record them; the streets, the buildings, the traffic, the crowds.

We arrived at Waterloo Station, so we started off by wandering towards the Thames and taking a look at the London Eye. The Eye had been built some time after I left the country. I’d seen it on Doctor Who, but not in real life. We didn’t actually go up in it; there was a long queue, and the ride itself would have taken another half hour or so out of our busy schedule. There were more important places to see.

We crossed over to the Houses of Parliament. They were protest-free, thanks to the new “Serious Organized Crime and Police Act”, which bans such serious crimes as holding up a banner outside Parliament. We continued on to Parliament Square, where some Iraq war protesters were quietly camped out along the fence facing Parliament. Across the street, heavily armed police kept everyone away from their elected representatives.

We turned right and headed along Whitehall, past the Treasury and Cabinet Office. Some tourists were gawping at guardsmen outside Horse Guards; it’s good to see that the Queen is doing her duty and keeping the Colour regularly Trooped. We passed the old War Office; and defra, who were probably busy panicking over the latest outbreak of foot and mouth.

Trafalgar Square was disappointingly blemished by scaffolding, tarpaulins and wooden hoardings. It was also full of sky rats, of course, but they’re expected, so you can’t really call them a disappointment. We stopped at a small Italian restaurant nearby for a spot of lunch, then continued towards Leicester Square.

As we walked past the Odeon towards Piccadilly Circus, everything started to get very familiar, and I started to get tearful. The Swiss Centre is still as it was, and the Trocadero hasn’t changed much. Apparently the former is due to be modernized a bit, so I was probably lucky to get to experience it in its retro cuckoo clock glory.

We visited tate modern, of course. One thing we always missed in Boston was a decent modern art gallery, and Austin isn’t much better, though the Blanton does try.

By the evening, we were exhausted. We had some vegetarian curry at a restaurant near Shimrit’s pad, then crashed on the futon.

The next day we tried to take things a little easier, and started off at Oxford Circus for a day of shopping.

Now, I could be misremembering, but it seemed to me that the crowds were far worse than ten years ago. It was a rainy English summer day, but the herds of people reminded me more of the run-up to Christmas. We struggled towards Tottenham Court Road, ducking into stores here and there.

Given the current exchange rate, we tried to buy as little as possible; but inevitably, there were books, CDs and DVDs unavailable in the US which we were unable to resist. We went in to HMV, but tried to limit ourselves to stuff with a single digit price.

We had lunch at The Plaza, which had mysteriously moved the food court up to the second floor and made the basement vanish entirely. Baked potatoes. They’re not nearly as popular in the US. I used to buy one most Saturdays, from a guy with a cart in the Market Square in Cambridge.

Tottenham Court Road is still just like it used to be. I even recognized several of the gadget stores. The infamous Centre Point is still there, and still unnavigable by foot. The Telecom Tower is still visible from Oxford Street, but sadly sanity has prevailed and its existence is no longer an official secret.

The biggest change to London is that there are now coffee shops everywhere. Back in the 90s I had to bring an espresso machine back with me from Italy; now, you can’t walk for more than a minute or two without finding somewhere offering Illy or some other variety of “Genuine Italian espresso”. And tasty snacks, too. I definitely approve.

One good English food item I had forgotten about until I saw them at Waterloo Station was the pasty. I wonder if there’s somewhere in Austin that will sell me a good pasty?

Anyhow, we finished up our day with a little book shopping at Foyle’s and Borders, then got the train back to Bournemouth.

Breakfast with a squirrel. Experimenting with the new MPEG-4 camcorder.

I’m not sure why Google video always seems to hose the first few seconds of the video.

The first one shown is Blacktip, who we haven’t seen in months. Maybe this time he’s gone for good. He never did learn to leap at the corn.

A lot of blather about the video iPod has missed the point. No, I don’t think that many people are going to want to buy 320×240 copies of TV shows and music videos at $2 each, that they can’t even burn to a DVD. That’s not why the video iPod matters.

You’ll notice that the new video iPod is still almost exactly the same as the old iPod, because it’s still primarily a music player. That’s why people will buy it, for music. If it was supposed to be a video player, it would have a bigger screen and smaller controls; you don’t need a big rotary dial for something you’re looking right at, but you do need things like brightness, contrast, and color controls, and probably a multi-way DVD-like joystick.

The point of the whole exercise is that Apple has about 90% of the digital audio player market. Now every iPod will have video, which means everyone buying a new iPod for its music capabilities will incidentally have the ability to play videos while they’re sitting bored on a bus or plane. They wouldn’t have bought a portable video player just for that, but if their iPod incidentally does the job, they’ll probably start encoding content for it.

And when they do, it’ll be MPEG-4, based on QuickTime, with H.264 video codec and AAC audio.

Right now, downloaded video is a mess of crappy pseudo-standards. Obsolete container formats like AVI and ASF. MPEG-4 codecs like XviD and DivX, but not put into actual MPEG-4 files, because that would be too useful. Dozens of crappy encoders and tutorials teaching people to assemble bastardized cross-breeds of Ogg audio and MPEG-2 video, XviD and MP3, H.263 in AVI containers, and so on. Plus, of course, the closed proprietary crap like WMV and Real.

Now thanks to Apple’s video iPod, out of the madness we might actually settle on a single standard that’s actually a standard. Every software encoder out there is going to have a simple preset for iPod, just like some of them already have simple presets for PSP. (Which is also MPEG-4, thank goodness.)

It’s basically exactly the kind of thing Microsoft would do. Use a 90% market share in one market to dictate the formats everyone will use across another market. Except that if Microsoft did it, they’d be dictating that everyone use their proprietary Windows Media standards, whereas Apple is going to push the entire industry into the open MPEG-4 standards—which are already cross-platform, playing happily on Linux, Windows, Mac, and a bunch of DVD players too.

If there’s a clear loser here, it’s Real. No matter how much they pretend to be open, they still keep their codecs locked closed, and refuse to allow anyone to legally transcode Real formats into anything else. That approach worked for a while, making them #1 in the market, then keeping them at #2… but now they’re going to drop to #3 or lower. Nobody’s going to want content in Real format that they’ll never be able to play on their iPod or PSP. The block on Real’s audio on the iPod might have been hackable (for a while), but hacking the iPod to play Real video is going to be impossibly hard. And if I’m not allowed to turn Real media into a format I can use, why would I even bother downloading it? Or encoding to it?

Meanwhile, MPEG-4 now has a fighting chance against Windows Media. Combine the video iPod with the gradual gains Blu-Ray has been making against Microsoft’s preferred option of HD-DVD based on WMV9, and the media landscape no longer looks like it will belong to Redmond.

This weekend I…

• …completed the video editing for another DVD project. This one is sara’s grandmother talking about family history, with a tour of the farm, pictures from the family photo album, and a demonstration of the old Edison phonograph.

• …installed two UPSs. One for sara’s Mac, one for mine. We had a power outage on Saturday night, and it’s probably safe to say that there will be more of them when summer arrives and everyone turns on the air conditioning. I got fed up with rebuilding filesystems and cleaning up damage.

  I picked up the UPSs from Staples, as I really wasn’t fussy about model beyond wanting something from APC because they support the Mac well. Unfortunately, I realized when we got home that one of the two was an old serial only model, so I had to carry it all the way back and pick up a smaller USB one instead. Somehow I managed to avoid injuring myself in the process.

• …did the research for another PC-building project. I want a silent but reasonably fast machine to act as an MP3 server, and maybe connect to the TV for running MAME on. I reluctantly abandoned the Mini-ITX form factor because it seems that the only fanless cases you can get also require slim optical drives and/or 2.5″; hard drives. I want a Plextor optical drive for accurate ripping, and a big Seagate hard drive.

  So, I’ve settled on a Lian Li Aluminium case, mid tower size. It has 8cm fans which can be replaced with near-silent models. I plan to get an nForce2-based motherboard, for good Linux compatibility. I’ll run it with a Duron processor, in the hope that lower heat output will mean I can get away with the fans all turned to low. I may even try running the CPU fanless, as if I burn out a Duron it’s only $35 to get a replacement… I’ll probably wait until we get back from England before I order the parts.

• …went to see Matrix Reloaded. It wasn’t as bad as I was expecting; the reviews had led me to expect more of an emphasis on action, whereas in fact it seemed to have a more even spread of plot than the first instalment. The first movie had been great for the first half, but had then been fight scene after fight scene, sensory overload to the point of tedium. This one was much better structured. That said, it made no attempt to be comprehensible to anyone who hadn’t seen the first movie, and there was really no attempt at an ending—it was most definitely episode 2 of 3.

A weekend of ups and downs.

Most of Saturday was spent on Dan’s movie project. Everything outdoors got exposed well, but the indoor shots are grainy. One of the struts of the cheap tripod broke, so now it’s a bipod. It was free anyway, so I’m not too bothered, maybe I’ll buy a nice one now. It turns out that the mix mic input of the wireless unit doesn’t feed to the output, so I’ll need to get some parts from the electronics store and make a mix cable. Fortunately the lavalier mic worked fine, so the sound was OK.

Finished the first edit this afternoon, and worked out how to hack MPEG2 sequence headers inside the iDVD project to turn the video into 16:9 anamorphic. I shot the whole thing anamorphic this time, and it looks really nice widescreen.

I found out about the shuttle from Dan when we were having some mid-afternoon snack food during the shooting on Saturday. I immediately checked BBC News via the phone; I’m not sure what I hoped to read. Obviously it wasn’t a hoax or a misunderstanding. I don’t really have anything to say about it, I haven’t watched the video footage or looked at any pictures, and I don’t think I want to.

Sunday morning I thought about brunch, as Mark said he was planning on being there for once; however, sara and I were busy in bed until around 1:30.

Something is up with the code of the new screensaver project. It’s really frustrating how the code will work on one machine and silently fail on another. I check every return value and possible OpenGL error like you’re supposed to. I’ll look at it during the week, maybe it’s time to make a minimal test screensaver and release it as open source to try and track down what the hell is going on.