I watched “Rambo” on Blu-Ray tonight and I was delighted to see that their deleted scenes were in HD, and untouched: uncut to regular 16:9 and ungraded. So I could easily go back to the 2.35:1 version and graded in-movie footage, grab some snapshots with my Kodak digicam and compare. Most of the “Rambo” movie uses the blue grading theme that is in fashion at Hollywood in the last 5 years, although if you look closely you will see how the highlights were totally burned out during grading. I really like the ungraded versions, they are more natural, very close to what you would get from a consumer Canon camera like the HV20 when shot in PF24 with “CineMode” turned on and the “neutral” color setting.

Ungraded, as shot

Graded, in-movie


Ungraded, as shot

Graded, in-movie

This is how I would have graded this


Ungraded

Graded, in-movie

I was checking some prices tonight and 1080p TVs are much more affordable now. Don’t make the mistake to get a 720p/1080i TV, make sure it’s a full 1080p one.

I would wholeheartedly recommend this 30,000:1 contrast ratio Panasonic 42″ 1080p plasma panel for $1400, and if you still don’t have the money for it, get a Vizio 42″ LCD 1,000:1 contrast ratio 1080p panel for $800. This plasma Panasonic kicks the Vizio’s LCD ass in terms of quality, but on its turn, the Vizio would kick the ass of most 720p TVs anyway, so always strive for that 1080p panel.

This is the most curious thing. During high school we were about 10 girls in my little town, all in the same grade, that we would hang out together. From us 10, now all at age 35, only 4 got married (including myself). Not having married at that age is kind of unheard of in rural Greece. Sure, it’s normal that someone might end up not married, but when 60% of your friends aren’t, then something’s fishy. My mother thinks… that we have all been cursed somehow (I’ve been engaged unsuccessfully twice before you see), and it truly saddens her every time she thinks about all of us.

I believe in my gut that if I had stayed in Greece I would be one of these unmarried friends too. I never had anything in common with the Greek way of life, ideas and beliefs. I was always my own fruit, kind of a banana in a sea of strawberries. I love Greece, but not for the same reasons the rest of the Greeks do. Thankfully, I fell for a person who is very open minded, intelligent, successful, handsome, and so life eventually smiled to me. I hope life smiles to others too.

Look at this picture. It’s a screenshot from apple’s AppleTV. Look at it carefully and hard to find something wrong with it. You see, the reality is that a UI can tell you a lot about how a company thinks, especially a company that invests a lot in UI design.

What bothers me in that UI is that the “My Movies” menu item is the very last on the video menu. It’s placed by Apple even below the “Trailers”, which are nothing but ads. This shows me how little Apple respects the filmmaking artists in general. If you don’t endorse, via the UI even, the personal video items that folks do at home, you will eventually get users who will pay less attention to the filmmaking art in general: either via not becoming the future Spielbergs, or even via stop buying as many movies as they do now via the iTunes Store.

And that would be the epitome of the read-only culture, as Stanford professor Larry Lessig calls it. Users who are passive in front of iTunes’ offerings, instead of being endorsed to shoot their own videos too. And Apple does this damage without any help from the MPAA/RIAA front, it has just fell on its own pit, without realizing it. This very small detail, shows to me, that Apple is not more modern or forward thinking than MPAA/RIAA themselves (at least when it comes to the AppleTV department), because they can’t see the big picture either. They are in this only for their little store in the corner, without realizing that when time will be 7 PM the market will be empty of shoppers.

The sad part is that this is the same company that also develops iMovie, FCE and FCP.

1. The problem

The Linux lusers are trying to convince us for years now that GNU/Linux is ready for the desktop, but they still can’t manage to put together a reasonable GUI to rip CDs. JBQ got the Foo Fighter CDs and he asked me to rip them on Linux because two of these six CDs have the Sony rootkit for Mac/Win.

So there I went to rip them in mp3 with Sound Juicer and it was a pain in the butt. It took me half an hour to understand all the gst-lame switches and configure them, as there is simply no in-depth user documentation for them (and gst-inspect was not installed even if all the other needed libs were). On the gstreamer manual they tell you that the “mode” switch can take values from 0 to 4, but no one tells you what these values are. To get that information, you have to look at the source code! So after fucking around with it, I think I got my head around most of that shit, so here’s a small tutorial for all of you who feel the same way. A tutorial with real information instead of half baked man pages.

2. Learning about the switches

Assuming you have installed the mp3 libraries and encoders and gstreamer-ugly libraries and other shit that should have been installed by default but they aren’t, Sound Juicer reads the gstreamer presets on how to rip. To modify these presets load the gnome-audio-profiles-properties application from a terminal (or via Sound Juicer’s preferences and profile editor). Create a new mp3 profile and in there you will have to type crazy ass switches, but thankfully I have the most common of them explained for you here:

(used with CBR encodings)
bitrate = Specify the constant bitrate. Goes from 8 to 320 kbps.
quality = With it you can choose which algorithm to use to encode. Default is 5. 0 is best, 10 is worst.

(mostly used with VBR encodings)
vbr = Specify bitrate algorithm, because the Lame developers can’t decide which one is best, so they leave that to the user to decide who knows nothing about algorithms. Anyways, it goes from 0 to 4. If you are encoding in constant bitrate use 0, otherwise use 4, which is the latest VBR algorithm.
vbr-max-bitrate = Specify maximum VBR bitrate (8, 16, 24, 32, 40, 48, 56, 64, 80, 96, 112, 128, 160, 192, 224, 256 or 320).
vbr-min-bitrate = Specify minimum VBR bitrate (8, 16, 24, 32, 40, 48, 56, 64, 80, 96, 112, 128, 160, 192, 224, 256 or 320).
vbr-quality = You can let the system specify the above two VBR bitrates if you don’t want to. 5 is medium quality, 0 is best, 10 is worse. So for example, vbr-quality=0 goes up to 256 kbps.
xingmux = some shit that you add when in VBR mode only, in order to make the mp3 file more compatible — like we didn’t want that to be ON by default!

(used with both CBR and VBR encodings)
mode = goes from 0 to 4. In order 0 means “stereo”, 1 means “joint stereo”, 2 means “dual channel”, 3 means “Mono”, and 4 means “auto”.

(only used when encoding via presets)
preset = Goes from 1001 to 1004, that is, from “medium” quality, to “standard”, “extreme” and finally, “insane” quality. That’s between 96 kbps and 256kbps, VBR.

3. Creating the truly lame gst-lame switches:

1. Constant bitrate CBR.
In this example below we create a joint stereo mp3, with constant bitrate of 160kbps and one of the best but slower algorithms for the encoding (that comes out from the quality=2):
audio/x-raw-int,rate=44100,channels=2 ! lame name=enc mode=1 vbr=0 bitrate=160 quality=2 ! id3v2mux

2. Using VBR.
In the following, we use variable bit rate with joint stereo and VBR algorithm #4, and we specify that we want the minimum bitrate to be 128 kbps and the maximum to be 192 kbps. We have to use the xingmux switch too to make the resulted mp3 file more compatible with players.
audio/x-raw-int,rate=44100,channels=2 ! lame name=enc mode=1 vbr=4 vbr-min-bitrate=128 vbr-max-bitrate=192 ! xingmux ! id3v2mux

In the following, we use variable bit rate with joint stereo and VBR algorithm #4, but instead of specifying the minimum and maximum bitrate, we let the encoder decide based on vbr-quality value (I used quality 3) which is about between 160 and 220 kbps or something. Remember, when using VBR instead of CBR you must use the xingmux thingie to make it more compatible with mp3 players (and even then, the Totem Gnome media player has problems).
audio/x-raw-int,rate=44100,channels=2 ! lame name=enc mode=1 vbr=4 vbr-quality=3 ! xingmux ! id3v2mux

3. Using Presets.
In the following, we use the preset 1002, which is of standard quality, VBR (at around 160 kbps), that we also run through xingmux.
audio/x-raw-int,rate=44100,channels=2 ! lame name=enc preset=1002 ! xingmux ! id3v2mux

UPDATE: Here’s a mockup of how things should have been.

As you might know, a big part of the new Guns’n’Roses album leaked yesterday, and someone posted parts of it on youtube (removed now). I heard it, and I didn’t like it. There were 2-3 songs that were barely listenable, but the rest was just Axl shouting his heart out on songs that had no melody. Their previous 1992 double album had some songs I didn’t like, but there were at least ten of these that were amazing, they had a certain recognizable melody and quality in them that made them timeless. This new album is just yada, yada, yada by Axl.

There’s nothing of interest to talk about, apart maybe some parts of “Better”. On some of the songs you could see the effort of the band to try to sound more modern (e.g. hard alternative rock rather than classic hard heavy rock), but it fails to establish that sound. It soon falls back to the classic heavy rock of the ’80s and early ’90s, which is a kind of music that simply doesn’t sell anymore.

Oh, what do you know.

I just got an email from Microsoft that says that they are postponing their removal of Hotmail access via Outlook Express after “customer feedback”. It seems they lost too many paying customers, just like me.

Windows Live Mail sucks beyond belief. It’s slow, eats lots of RAM, and most importantly, it’s buggy as hell. Outlook Express is a mature application — at least for what it was originally designed to do.

When it comes to camcorders, Samsung is one of these companies that really piss me off. Just like Sanyo and Aiptek. You see, these are camcorder companies that don’t follow video standards. They just go their own ways to use their own versions of the well understood formats creating a mess. This is because they are not really into the video industry, they don’t care about it. They just want to make a product to sell. They care not about details.

Samsung recently released a full 1080/30p HD camcorder, which records in AVC. But instead of using the actual official AVCHD format, it’s using the MP4 container instead, stereo audio instead of 5.1 surround, and its own internal AVC format. The MP4 container is simply not optimized for editing. If people are cursing 10 times for AVCHD’s .mts not being easy to edit, think that we should be cursing 50 times for Samsung’s MP4.

I did a few tests too, in “draft (auto)” quality, which is the lowest preview quality on Vegas Pro that speeds up the video preview. Here are my findings on my P4 3Ghz DELL PC:

Samsung AVCHD-bastardation 1920×1080/30p: 1 frame per second
Canon & JVC AVCHD 1920×1080/60i: 5 frames per second
HDV 1440×1080/60i: 30 frames (full speed)

I don’t dispute the fact that faster PCs will be able to edit AVCHD faster. But no matter how to put it, Samsung’s MP4 is still 4 times slower than AVCHD. And AVCHD is about 6 times slower than HDV. And HDV is about 10 times slower than plain DV.

So buy cameras wisely if you want to edit, depending on your PC’s speed. But even on the fastest machine available today I don’t think that Samsung’s stream will edit full speed. Maybe in 3 years time or so.

Currently, there are three main camps regarding the future of Gnome 3.0:
– Continue evolutionary small releases
– Break compatibility and try to make it a modern desktop
– Go to a completely different direction than the PC desktop

On a previous blog post of mine I noted that I preferred either seismic additions (e.g. artificial intelligence), or just evolutionary releases that don’t break ABI and API compatibility with apps. Here’s another way that Gnome should go in my opinion:

Remove GTK+ and X11 requirement. Write both a brand new API using the Java language (by using Classpath, not J2SE), and a brand new, modern, windowing system that doesn’t have an ’80s architecture. In other words, pull a Google Android trick (and Apple Mac OS X too, in a way). You can still run older applications via a rootless or windowed X server, the way Mac OS X does it. And you only support modern ATi, nVidia and Intel (and maybe VIA) graphics cards after having few of your devs signing NDAs to get the 3D specs. Maybe you even rewrite the sound part too (adding support initially for only the 3 most common sound chipsets). In other words, you take over the “user visible” part of the operating system and you integrate with the rest of the system properly rather than legacy layers upon layers.

To truly liberate your platform and enable new powerful and modern applications to be written, that’s what it has to be done. Not beating the old dog. And yes, this is a 5+ year plan. Not something that gets done in a blink of an eye.

Red Hat has the most developers working on X.org, GTK+, Classpath, and Gnome, so they have to be the ones to be either convinced or initiate such a thing. Problem is, Red Hat doesn’t care about the home desktop anymore, they only care about getting corporate. Novell trying to go with Mono, would fail because it wouldn’t get enough tract from the community.

So this will never happen. It was a good 10 minutes of dreaming while writing about it.