It was WWDC day today, and new products were announced. Here’s my take:

Mac OS X: Indifferent. This was like, the 100th rewrite of Finder. It remains to be seen if Quicktime will be any faster with the new hardware acceleration. The $29 upgrade price was good though.

iPhone: I wanted a true 16:9 OLED screen at 4″ and 640×360 resolution. That would fit almost on the same size iPhone as the current ones (because of the 16:9 instead of 16:10). I also wanted a VGA video-call camera. Maybe next year.

Macbook Pros: I might opt for the new 13″. It was very interesting seeing Apple bringing back Firewire, as there was a huge bitching about the lack of Firewire by HDV prosumer and fw audio users for the last year’s model. The backlit keyboard is a very good addition too. However, compared to the other candidate for my next laptop, the MSI U200, it’s heavier, has a lower res, and it costs double the money. I haven’t decided yet for which of the two laptops I will be going for. I prefer a Macbook, but does it worth the extra $800? I am not so sure.

I wanted a new AppleTV too, one that can decode 1080p and allows for third party codec plugins.

Slashdot reports about the fact that many blogs are orphaned these days, because their creators didn’t make the quick buck they were expecting to. Really? Is that why most people started blogs? Because that’s definitely not the reason I did. I never ran any ads on my blog for example, and I have resisted in the idea of some of my video readers who suggested adding donation buttons. I get my payment in different ways:

– My blog is my shrink. By writing many personal things in it for everyone to read, it’s a way to lift weights off of me. It works.
– It’s a way to vent and rant at bullshit that happen in the world. Feels good.
– Help others with my various tutorials. I know that they have helped a lot of people and I get ‘thank you’ messages about it almost daily.
– Review products and tell my readers what my analysis is, or my experience with them was.

This doesn’t mean that I might not abandon this blog. If I get bored again, I will.

That was my first video on Vimeo, uploaded there after a Vimeo employee back then asked me to “upload something first before I criticize the service”. I thought I had lost the original footage for it, but I found it this evening, so I re-exported it in higher quality, and with some grading (now that I see it graded, I prefer the original look though — too late, already uploaded). HD version and downloading here.

There is one more older video of mine that I want to re-edit from scratch, if I ever find back the tape I had recorded it on (I deleted the captured .m2t footage a few months ago by mistake). I might have reused that tape though, not sure. Whatevs…

As you might have heard, the Palm Pre can pose as an Apple product and fool iTunes that it’s an iPod. According to DVD Jon, Apple can very easily close that door for Palm with an iTunes update. The question I am asking here though, is if it’s morally right for Palm Pre to pose as an Apple product and fool an application.

Don’t beat yourself, there’s not an easy answer to it. Both sides have good arguments. Apple could argue that it’s unlawful to present a product as an Apple product (even if the user never sees that), and that iTunes is designed to be used with an iPod only and that might create support problems for Apple. Palm on the other side could argue that the iPod is a monopoly assisted by iTunes, and that originally iTunes was simply just an media player and it even had an SDK to add support for other devices (before Apple removed that ability to maintain their newly found iPod monopoly).

I am kind of siding with Palm on this. iTunes was originally a generic media app, and slowly but surely Apple locked up the app from other vendors and plugin creators. While iTunes belongs to Apple and they could do what they please with it, it’s simply unrealistic for any other vendor to compete anymore, given that iTunes has a development history of 10 years now, and that alternative solutions (e.g. Songbird) are buggy as hell. Then again, that’s not Apple’s fault…

It’s a tough situation, really. We will see how Apple will respond (update: they closed down that door for Palm by July 2009), because I have the feeling that they don’t quite like Palm a lot. First a big chunk of their iPhone engineers moved to Palm overnight leaving the iPhone team half-crippled at the time, then Palm allegedly infringed on the Apple multi-touch patents, and now there’s this iTunes stunt. Honestly, I smell a lawsuit, but maybe Palm has enough patents of its own to keep Apple in check. Only time will tell.

I can’t stand country music. However, I like Blitzen Trapper, a lot. The “Trappas” sound country at first listen, but they are not exactly it. They are somewhere between ’70s folk, country, americana, bluegrass, and rock all mixed together. There’s even a bit of electronic in there! They are known as the band that can’t be placed musically in any genre. And yet, I would never consider their music and give them a fair chance if it wasn’t for a single song that I happened to stumble upon about two years ago: Sci-Fi Kid (legal download).

The song somehow strikes a cord with me as I am a huge fan of science fiction (although the lyrics also feel like it’s all about drugs). It represents the more alternative rock side of BT (which I prefer). I wish I could direct the music video for that song.

Sugar’s got a space ship tripping over dusty stars
Keen cars, living large, playing big guitars
Hackin’ in, making holes, and it’s not so hard
It’s just a extra part in a kid like me
Me
A Sci-fi kid like me

Since that song, I purchased most of their music, and I enjoy most of it. I still can’t easily get used to the songs that use the banjo and the harmonica, but overall, I love most of their tracks. And of course, having such a weirdo, multiple-personality (musically) guy as a front man, helps. He has peaked up my curiosity.

Watch below their biggest hit so far, the music video for “Furr”, and download one of my favorite songs of theirs, the rare “Crushing the wheat”.

During our love-making process tonight.

JBQ: Do you love me?
Eugenia: My love is as big as the clouds, the sea, the sky, the galaxy, the universe!
JBQ: 🙂
Eugenia: Then again… there might be parallel universes that you don’t know about.
JBQ: 😮

Today, we had to upgrade to TwonkyMedia Server 5.x, because its 4.x versions were not serving .mp4 files to our XBOX360. There was a tip online to rename the .mp4 files to .m4v in order to fool the XBoX360, but apparently version 4.4.11 had a bug about .m4v files too. Only renaming them to .mov would force Xbox360 to play them but if I was to do that, then our Sony PS3 wouldn’t play these files.

So the upgrade to v5, fixed most of our problems. The XBoX360 now plays all my .mp4 files, .m4v (that it didn’t before), plus all the other formats that it was able to before (e.g. WMV). It also supports the .mov container, the MPEG4-SP (the kind of .mp4 found on cellphones), something that the PS3 doesn’t (although the PS3 supports AVCHD and HDV files, that the Xbox360 can’t). Both consoles can playback XViD/DiVX AVI files with the same success (so-so, that is). The XBoX360 can playback more kinds of WMV and WMA than the PS3 can (e.g. I had a WMV video here that its WMA audio wouldn’t work with the PS3, but it did with the XBoX360). The XBoX360 also supports streaming .mp4 videos (e.g. Youtube HD rips), and non-PSP .MP4 containers (e.g. the kinds of MP4 that Adobe CS4 exports by default) — the PS3 doesn’t support any of these kinds of MP4s (it only supports the ones that their container has some “PSP” extensions, usually it is the default exporting format on video editors, except for Adobe’s).

For the rest of the formats out there, e.g. Sorenson, MJPEG etc, I would need an AppleTV. Plus, the AppleTV would behave best with .mp3/aac audio files, something that the PS3 only does so-so (it seems to confuse album art), while the XBoX360’s AAC and mp3 compatibility was terrible (non-DRM AAC from iTunes wouldn’t work at all, even after installing the AAC plugin, while one of my mp3s was playing in slow-motion)!

There was also a specific .mp4 file that TwonkyMedia would think it was audio and would only serve it as audio (even if it’s video). Renaming that to .mov made it visible in the list while using the v4 server. But after upgrading to version 5, while version 5 fixed everything else, the file wouldn’t be visible again because it now seems that TwonkyMedia v5 looks inside the format rather than figuring out what’s what from the extension. But that’s just one file, and besides, TwonkyMedia is *the best* UPnP/DLNA server out there anyway. If they can’t get it right, probably no other piece of software can (everything else I have tried is buggy as hell).

In other words, if you don’t want to be setting up Linux PC media centers that will piss you off one way or another while configuring them, to play A/V files on your TV without having to transcode each time to the device’s supported formats, you need all three devices (with their firmwares upgraded): PS3, XBoX360 and AppleTV. And that doesn’t even give you OGG, Theora or MKV by default (which are only semi-working via third party addons on the AppleTV).

Maestro is a nice short movie, shot with a Canon HV20 and a Twoneil’s 35mm adapter. The plot: a young musician stifled by the modern day schooling system tries to find his way to make his mark. HD version & download here.

I had a great time at Cafe du Nord tonight, watching the Malbec live giving a great show. A very energetic band with melodic songs. I chickened out at the Cafe’s rules to not use a real camera but only cellphones, so I had to use JBQ’s Android phone to capture the following pictures and video. It was great meeting for real and talking to Mark, Malbec’s drummer — and also a great HV20/HVX200 filmmaker. Download Malbec’s latest EPs for free.

View official music video for this song

The Malbec were great, so were the local Loquat. Their singer sure can sing loud. I was positively surprised to see Loquat using two HV20 videos (downloaded from Vimeo) through a projector. Nice to see that our little community’s hobby proves useful to some people out there. I won’t say whose videos they used, I’ll keep that a secret.

There are those who say that by 2011, all music will be free, and the labels will offer artists 360 contracts in order to survive (meaning, putting the artists under more financial pressure than they are now). There are those who say that RIAA/MPAA will eventually win, and convince world governments to draconian laws about piracy. And there are those who say that indie/CC art will eventually take over and make RIAA/MPAA irrelevant.

I think that the truth lies somewhere in between all this. There will be 360 contracts, some of the major-label music will be free (but not all), some music will be streamed for very cheap/free in exchange for ads, more laws will take place, indies will become more mainstream via the internet, advertisement will be more evident in art projects, and piracy will continue to exist.

Today, making music is cheap. Mixing isn’t as expensive as it was even just 10 years ago. Making an indie movie is also cheap. When costs go down, more people jump into the bandwagon for the opportunity, over-saturating the market. Currently, the indie music scene is super-saturated with wannabes (and only about 5-10% of all that music is actually good). There are so many indie bands in the Bay Area alone that is not even funny. I stopped counting at around 600. And I personally like only about 20 of them. Don’t even let me start at the thousands of albums released every week on sites like eMusic.

Put all that together, and you will see that all these happenings will weaken the industry. I believe that the last super-star is already being born, and the last Box-Office movie (meaning, $100 mil or more of sales) will be out in less than 15 years from now.

Maybe I am wrong. But maybe I am right. It’s inconceivable for us to think that there won’t be any new super-stars to gossip about, or a new super-expensive movie. But like with any other profession, they all have their time limit, as the circumstances change (in this case, the digital age). For example, being a clock maker back in the 17th Century was something! Being a clock maker today doesn’t even get you laid.

Basically, what I am trying to do with this blog post is to answer to all these other blog posts and analysis articles found on the web that the future of music/movies will be with this or that. In my opinion, the future will be a mix of all these things, which will eventually weaken these professions, and downgrade them to just normal jobs.

This doesn’t mean that music and movies will be dead. That kind of art will never be dead. But they won’t be multi-million products anymore, but smaller projects from smaller groups. It’s not that the digital age killed the industry. It’s just that it put it back in its place. Before the digital age, Hollywood over-capitalized on the whole thing — because they could. Now that they can’t anymore, they will crumble under their own weight. They will still exist, but their golden days will be over. And this is true for the indies too.

Now, some will say, “does this mean that we will never see again an artistic masterpiece?”. And the answer is “we will”. There are many masterpieces in our history written by people who don’t have 10 assistants and millions of dollars in the bank. I am looking forward for these kinds of masterpieces again. All these thousands of wannabe artists will go back to flip burgers at MacDonalds, and the ones who really can deliver will stay alive in the (now crumbled) industry and make a basic salary. But don’t expect super-stars anymore.

That’s my take on the thing, and I am good with such an outcome. The same thing I believe about my old profession btw: developers. The good developers will continue making some good money, but I don’t expect super-stars anymore (e.g. Havoc, Linus, Miguel etc). The vast majority of the programmers of the future will just “write C# for food”.