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After reading how FrontRow is a crap I ended up playing with Windows XP Media Center Edition only to learn that is crappy too. Namely, per official Microsoft Extender FAQ the whole MediaCenter - Extender architecture is as good as its extenders and extenders are closed source. So I do get decent experience on a PC, but in the living room Xbox extender is pretty much useless for anything but playing mp3. The reason for that is that Microsoft do not support any codecs but Microsoft's and there is no...
Looks like neither mplayer nor xine could play .smil playlist. Apple way of converting .smil to .mov by adding SMILtext and saving as .mov is a hack. And .qtl could be used to playout supported content in full screen despite Apples efforts to collect money for the priviledge...
So far Apple kept their Podcast Chapter Tool private and only available of OSX. Trying to hack it out have been unsuccessful so far. My guess is that is because editing .mp4 is supported in QT 7.x and QuickTime for Java is QT 6.x. Anyhow, the easiest way to edit .mov (and .mp4?) is using quicktime.std.movies of QuickTime for Java. Here are examples Part 1 and Part 2 or this. Still, not very clear how to create .mov refferencing external movies? Is it as simple as creating Movie and saving it without...
Amazon started selling Intel based Mac Mini. Mac Mini 1.5GHz Solo is at $599.99 and Mac Mini 1.66GHz Duo is at $799.99 or both are at MSRP. Amazon runs $25 mail in rebate on both until 03/21/06. Mac Mini review by arstechnica pointed out that MacMini CPU is socketed and thus MacMinis are upgradable, but at least for now it is quite expensive $300 to go to Core Duo 1.83GHz and $400+ for Core Duo 2GHz. Still, it makes MacMini very cheap Yonah entry-level box that could have longer life with CPU upgrades....
First, there was xbox in Rover running Linux and freevo. Then there was Jeepintosh. And now there is Mac Prius.... well, almost. On a Prius note... Prius is not only 50mpg car but also a portable electricity generator and UPS...
So Apple released Intel based MacMini with their stinky old remote. At $799 Core Duo version is competative with lower end Pentium D boxes starting at $700+, alas Gateways and such offer more raw power and disk space (2.8GHz, 2x1MB L2, 800 MHz, 1GB RAM, 250GB HD vs. 1.66GHz, 2x1MB L2, 667MHz, 512 MB RAM, 80GB HD), but lack extras like 1G ethernet, bluetooth and built in wireless. Oh did I forgot remote? Anyhow, looks like for the first time ever Apple appears if not cheap, but at least as a good...
Transcoding on Linux still suck. The options are pretty much limited to ffmpeg, mencoder and transcode. Underneath it all boils down to libavcodec and all three are no more then different command line frontends. Surprisingly all are quite slow. But first thing first... MPEG-2 According to this TMpgEnc beats both transcode backends (ffmpeg and mpeg2enc) head out. I observed the same Encode FPS VSIM PSNR Notes TMpgEnc 2-pass VRB (D600 1.6GH) 5.33 61.98 32.00 Could double the speed with single pass...
So far the ways to make .mp4 are limited by final file muxer. There are just 2 muxers that available on both Windows and *NIX: mp4box (from gpac) and mp4creator. Both are stand alone programs, thus there is no way to make .mp4 as one process within either VFW or DirectShow on Windows, or whatever capture-encode-packaging on *NIX. There is a 3ivx mp4 muxer, but it doesn't support AVC. The story with AAC audio is no better. There is no DirectShow Encoders, period! Looks like Nero Recode does it using...
It is impossible to grab PAL DV of Mini-DV tapes with NTSC camcoder after all. Took me learning raw DV format to give up on ingesting my PAL tapes with NTSC camcoder and it looks like NTSC camcoder just grab 10 DIF sequences per frame from tape that has 12. Here is what I tried so far: Forced NTSC camcoder to dump the stream over FireWire despite that camcoder complains about incompatible tape format. This could be done using GraphEdit and Microsofts DV DirectShow filter. The result would be Type-1...
Sonic DVD-It doesn't like 704x576 PAL MPEG-2s and would transcode them to 720x576 for PAL. Additionally since MPEG-2s edited as MPEG-2 most likely would have a GOP other then IBBPBBPBBPBBPBBPBB, building DVD with DVD-It (transcoding and having standard GOP) and then replacing transcoded MPEG-2 with original using IfoEdit, will not work - audio and video would be out of sync. This makes DVD-It useless for MPEG-2 based production. TODO: 1. On DV25 to NTSC DVD verify: a. AC3 5.1 audio b. That DVD-It...
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