I am dumbfounded. 90% of the reviews and comments about M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Happening” movie were negative. I watched the movie tonight on our Blu-Ray and I found it to be a brilliant sample of art. I loved its atmosphere and the message(s).

The problem is that viewers (including critics, from what it seems) don’t think hard. They thought that the message of the movie was “nature taking revenge on humanity — be kind to the environment”. And so by having plants releasing toxins to kill people, viewers found that plot ridiculous. While the nature stuff is the visible “message” of the movie (and it’s not even proven in the movie that nature was the culprit, it’s just the No1 suspect), it also had a second message that could only be seen if you look at the signs the director gives you. And that message is “don’t be lonely, don’t fear to love, trust others”.

The director masterfully starts the movie in Central Park, and we later see that “the happening” is happening in the metropolitan area, which is where millions of people live. As the movie progresses, the heroes find themselves to smaller and smaller groups of people. In fact, through their panic, they start to think that the smaller the group they belong to (and lonelier they can be), the safer it is. But as we will see later with Mrs Jones’ death, this is not necessarily true.

Tell-tale signs about the “loneliness” message in the film is when Julian says “don’t hold my daughter’s hand unless you mean it”, the ring that changes colors depending on the emotion of the person that wears it (do we need a device to tell us what we feel?), and it’s very clear when it shows how lonely modern people are when the two heroes are communicating via the sound tube (which is a separative kind of communication). Only when they overcome their loneliness and fears, start to trust each other, get together and show true love to each other, they become unaffected from the toxin. Mrs Jones died because, even if she was alone in the field and therefore shouldn’t have been affected, she had such a poisonous mind that she didn’t feel love for anyone. She was the epitome of loneliness. She didn’t trust anybody. In fact, Mrs Jones’ character is like the “bad boss” at the end of a computer game level. She was everything that’s wrong with modern society, even if she was living all alone far away from the society (a very artistic way to show that if you hate society for what it is and so you don’t contribute to it, you contribute to all that’s wrong in it, so nothing gets fixed in the end).

Basically, what the director wants to say is that our society sucks. But it’s not going to get fixed if we remove ourselves from it or from our loved ones. Fixing starts with the person closer to you.

Finally, it’s very possible that the “crazy” plant-owner guy and his wife lived too, although we don’t see that in the movie. If we have seen that, maybe it would have been more obvious to viewers what the movie is really all about. I believe that the director could have made a few things more clear for more bozos to understand, so I will take a point out of my final movie rating for his shortsightedness: 9/10.

I expect this movie to hit cult status in 20 years or so.

This is why I hate it. Instead of giving you free firmware updates for your camera that you can easily install via USB, they ask you to send the camera to a service center and they charge you crazy money for the new firmware — that usually just fixes bugs that were there in the first place. The prosumer/pro market milks people like crazy, and it’s usually over-priced. I guess it’s the prerogative to make money, but I just don’t agree with such tactics. At least RED gives their firmware updates for free.

Google’s Android is finally open sourced, and my baby’s code can be found in it. Here’s a recent git change that my baby did. How cool is that?

The producer of a National Geographic TV show says that he used $150,000 cameras on the following police chase video, but if you look closely (look at 00:12), these are at least a bunch of HV20s mounted in the car. Their rolling shutter effect itself is giving them away too. Regardless, it’s great to see these little gems appear on TV. Discussion about it here.

In other filmmaking news, check this music video (password: andy), shot with the Nikon D90 DSLR. The best D90 video I’ve seen so far online.

Best news of the day. I have being blogging and reviewing for over 2 years now in various cellphone articles about how bad UIQ’s performance and UI was and is. Sony Ericsson said that UIQ “didn’t attract the operator, manufacturer or consumer interest needed to stop it from failing.” Well, how was it supposed to do that when consumers were ready to throw up on the phone with that appalling UI?

Update: Ooooh! Look at the fanboys! My blog post made them angry! Bwahaha!

Well, look guys. What I wrote above is what comes out of my heart. I don’t lie. I don’t try to make things sound better than they are just so I be more likable. I don’t care if you like me or not. I simply write exactly what I feel. Please be advised that I’ve owned not one, not two, but THREE UIQ devices over the last 2.5 years. The UI just sucked and I always regarded it as the worst of the major phone OSes. The UI felt like it was designed by 10 year olds. The usability simply suffers at all levels compared to most other touchscreen smartphones.

And you know what was the last beating UIQ took for me? Let me tell you. For a year now my brother in Greece was asking me for a touchscreen phone. I told him I had the P990 (with the latest firmware in it and some additional commercial software in it too) and that I would give it to him. He couldn’t wait for it. In August, at last I reunited with my little bro and I gave him the phone. Two days later, his reaction was this: “Eugenia, you wouldn’t be angry if I give the P990 to my friend Alex, would you?” I asked him “why?”, and he said that he would have preferred either Windows Mobile or PalmOS. And get this, my brother was already familiar with UIQ (he used to own a UIQ 2.1 phone in the past), so this wasn’t a bad initial reaction on his part. He just didn’t like the interface.

This was the last nail as to how unfriendly UIQ was. At this point it became apparent that it wasn’t just my idea anymore, it was real, and it was spreading. Others hated its suckiness too. UIQ just didn’t inspire anyone to use it religiously more than a few hours after the initial curiosity. The UI just never felt right. And so I write about it. Deal with it like grown up men, instead of how Ares, owner of the UIQblog, deals with it. He wrote on his blog that I “need serious treatment”, and he earlier wrote on my own blog that I am a retard. Yep, that was his insightful reply, that I am a retard. My guess is that Ares hates seeing his little pet blog project going down because Sony Ericsson is killing the product. It pisses him off. And he takes it on me. It’s easier that way instead of facing the truth about UIQ I guess.

The most widely used delivery codec today on the internet is h.264. There are at least 10 encoders out there from different vendors, but which one is the best? I tried MainConcept (via Vegas Pro 8.0c), SonyAVC (via Vegas Pro 8.0c), Apple’s h.264 (via the latest Quicktime Pro), and x264 (via the latest ffmpeg).

The maximum profile/level is used by the user interface offered. For example, if an encoder only supports the “main” profile I would use that, even if it goes against another encoder that supports the “high” profile. Same goes for CABAC and CAVLC — I used the best options an encoder or its UI can offer me. What I am comparing here is *end-user solutions*, not how the encoder itself could perform tweaked if the sun was black and the moon was red. The source file is a 4 second uncompressed Quicktime 720/30p progressive file. The machine used is my usual 630-P4 3Ghz with 3 GBs of RAM (more specs were given before in this blog). All encodings used 4 mbps CBR, 1 pass, at 720/30p. Quality is compared using a Perceptual Diff utility: I compared frames 1 and 41. Frame 1 is stationary, Frame 41 has lots of motion in it.

A note on Quicktime

I tested both the .mov and the .mp4 h.264 exporting options from Quicktime, just in case they are internally configured differently. Please note that a lot of the quality loss shown below for Quicktime, is because of the gamma change Quicktime applies to these files. In the past, you could go to the video track “properties” with Quicktime, and change the “blend” to 100%, in order to get the original color look back. I would have tested that kind of exporting too, but it seems that the latest Quicktime Pro has this feature broken (it used to work a few months ago with an older version).

So I had to do it manually: I played with a lot of gamma values on PaintShopPro and when I gave it a 0.75 gamma (making it darker, as it was supposed to be), the pixel difference went down to 18,826 and 31,794 points for frames 1 and 41 respectively (down from about 200,000 points). So if Apple stops adding that dithering crap by default, they can deliver a pretty good result by default. “Defaults matter” as users whine and whine.

A note on x264

I used the following ffmpeg switches for the x264 encoding: -me_method umh -subq 5 -coder 1 -trellis 1 -g 300 -qmin 10 -qmax 51 -qdiff 4 -level 41 -rc_eq "blurCplx^(1-qComp)"

I did try to further optimize the x264 encoding like this: -flags +loop -coder ac -refs 5 -loop 1 -deblockalpha 0 -deblockbeta 0 -parti4x4 1 -partp8x8 1 -me full -subq 6 -me_range 21 -chroma 1 -slice 2 -bf 3 -b_strategy 1 -level 41 -g 300 -keyint_min 30 -sc_threshold 40 -rc_eq blurCplx^(1-qComp) -qcomp 0.7 -qmax 51 -qdiff 4 -i_qfactor 0.71428572 -cmp 1 -maxrate 4000k -bufsize 4M, but the video file produced was not readable by Vegas’ MainConcept h.264 reader, and therefore I could not take PNG screenshots off specific frames in order to carry out the comparison. FFdshow and Quicktime could read the file btw. I don’t have all day trying to find needles in a haystack, so if anyone knows which switch creates the incompatibility, let me know and I will update the article.

Update: It’s the -g 300 that created the problem. I removed it, but the resulted video is not frame by frame identical to the original. Some of these “advanced” switches do something really nasty to the video in terms of timing. Because the frames I get at position 1 and 41 are not identical to the original, there can’t be pixel comparison.

Update 2: Now, get this. Using this pretty optimized command line: -me_method umh -subq 5 -coder 1 -trellis 1 -qmin 10 -qmax 51 -deblockalpha 0 -deblockbeta 0 -parti4x4 1 -partp8x8 1 -qdiff 4 -level 41 -rc_eq "blurCplx^(1-qComp)" I got over 55,000 pixels of difference. However, it seems that x264 uses a different gamma than the original file, just like Quicktime does so above. So when I changed its gamma using the “Color Corrector” Vegas plugin to 0.925, I was able to get the “true” quality that the encoder is capable of. And that comes out to 16085 for frame 1, and 19597 for frame 41. In other words, if both Quicktime and Ffmpeg were to fix their gamma problems, they are pretty much identical in quality (it’s just that x264 is way faster).

The tests

Conclusion

In terms of quality, it seems that Sony AVC and MainConcept are pretty good here. x264 would probably fair better too if some of their optimization switches are not so incompatible with some decoders or if it fixes its gamma problem. Nevertheless, x264 is the fastest encoder. Quicktime quallity suffers by default more than x264 because of its extreme gamma changes. If Apple wasn’t doing that gamma change by default, it would fair much better, as my gamma test shows. Download the OpenOffice .ods spreadsheet file here.

As you might have heard, UK released some of their UFO files recently. There is a rumor in the UFO circles that “disclosure” is close, and that the UN is under preparation for that day. Some say it’s as close as 4-5 years from now. They believe that the stock market will crash when disclosure finally happens, as the world will collapse for many (mostly religious) people.

I take most of the UFO believers very lightly as most of them are freaks (rather than because UFOs don’t exist), but assuming that the aliens are already here, and that a disclosure date is already decided, I wonder what would make more sense:
1. Disclose the existence of aliens in that future date, as planned.
2. Do it now, as the stock markets and economies of the world are already down. This way you prevent a second stock market crash in a few years. You can only go so low.

I wonder if going with option #2 would push people to the max or will make them behave more. What I mean is this: when a country’s economy is going to the dogs, there’s a lot of uneasiness in the air. But when the world’s economy is on the dogs, then the chances of having many and major international wars are increasing (I will refrain from the words “world war”). It’s what usually happens, according to history.

However, when you know for a fact that there are intelligent beings watching you, do you go ahead and start that war, or you start feeling like the kid who’s left with the neighbor family for the night and must behave? I wonder what the psyche of the mass would be in such a situation and how citizens can be used by their governments to contain them. Will they become fearful children, or will revolt with double the anger?

Essentially, what I am claiming is that disclosure can be potentially used as political means to modify unwanted outcomes for earthly problems. So you might expect it happen at the lowest point of our modern civilization. A point we probably aren’t too far off with all these financial, environmental and climate problems we face.

If you heard, George Takei married his boyfriend of many years recently, and William Shatner was not invited. Takei gave the reason that they didn’t have enough space for more guests, and so Shatner was left out as Takei didn’t like him anyway. Takei said that Shatner always tried to make Star Trek all about him during shooting, and he was a primadonna every time they worked together.

Shatner replied with the following video on his youtube channel, that shows that he can’t deal with all that:

I take Takei’s side on this because I can tell how Shatner operates. Even his friend, Leonard Nimoy, doesn’t seem to take him that seriously. When we saw both at the Star Trek 40th anniversary a few years back, Nimoy was making fun of Shatner on stage, and I could tell that it was not all for good fun — although Nimoy does cares for Shatner. It seems that Nimoy knows that Shatner is just a big kid, and so he just goes along with it. Others are not as tolerable, and don’t understand his psyche, and so they shun him away. That’s my take anyway.

A few weeks ago, Shatner said to the press that he was not invited to act on the new Star Trek movie, but JJ Abrams replied that he did invite him to have a cameo, but Shatner wanted to have a large part of the story be about him. When Abrams refused, Shatner didn’t want anything to do with it. But Shatner kept insisting that he was not invited. When I read their public dispute about this, George Takei’s talk about Shatner’s need to be the focus of each movie came to mind (George said that months ago). I don’t particularly like JJ Abrams, but I take his word on this. Shatner is in the red here for one more time. Too much ego.

I was blogging a few months ago that this year is probably the only year where we haven’t seen not even a single “outer space” sci-fi movie. Checking out some Apple trailers today I found this one.

I don’t know if I should laugh at its comedy, or start crying about the overall state of sci-fi these days.

CoreAVC is a small company that claims that they have the fastest h.264 decoder in the world. You have to see it to believe it. I had heard of the claims before, but I didn’t put much thought in it. But it’s indeed true.

Where Quicktime fails miserably, ffdshow can’t keep up, and VLC all but freezes, CoreAVC shines through. I tried their ‘CoreAVC Pro’ trial version today, and is able to deliver 30 frames per second at high quality of a high profile h.264 1920×1080/30p video, without sweating. It is SCARY to see this decoder only using 60% of my Hyperthreaded Pentium-4 3Ghz CPU, a four years old CPU. The decoder is worth every penny of the $15 it costs. And its newer version that’s not out yet, Enterprise, is supposed to be even faster as it will have full GPU support.

In contrast, Quicktime offered me something like 3-5 fps, ffdshow’s x264 decoder did about 10 fps (or about 15 if you tell it to drop quality), and VLC would have artifacts if I told it to skip frames and drop quality, while it was unwatchable and freeze-prone when I told it to use the default behavior (not to skip frames and use max quality that is).

You see, all this time, I had to use the “drop quality” feature on my MediaPlayerClassic (with the latest ffdshow-tryout versions) in order to be able to test my own 720p HD videos or enjoy other’s videos that I download from Vimeo. And even then smoothness was not there. I wouldn’t even think loading full 1080p h.264 videos in that PC, as the performance was terrible. But with CoreAVC, it’s a piece of cake. Now my h.264 1080p videos are as fast as the XViD, WMV and mpeg2 1080i/p performance on that PC — if not better.

Note: the test video was encoded at 1920×1080 with the x264 encoder and ffmpeg, 29.97 fps, AAC 128 kbps 48000 Hz stereo, 12 mbps average, 16 mbps peak, in the mp4 container. x264 specific optimizations: -me_method umh -subq 5 -coder 1 -trellis 1 -g 300 -qmin 10 -qmax 51 -qdiff 4 -level 41 -rc_eq “blurCplx^(1-qComp)”