Welcome back to the Dive Into Mark show! We got a Roomba, the dog is in hiding, the kids are asleep, and I finally shaved. Mmmm… smooth.
In local news, the police installed a speed trap right outside my house, just in time for July 4th weekend. Hey, thanks! Unfortunately for them, the tens digit is broken, so it shows “Your speed: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4…” I feel safer already.
Last week, Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing.net announced that he was also switching to Ubuntu after 22 years of servitude to Apple. I think I see the pattern. Cory Doctorow is such a hard-core Mac user that he actually has a Sad Mac icon tattooed on his bicep. And I thought I had migration problems.
In response to last week’s show, Dan Ridley writes, “Okay, I feel totally gypped. I downloaded your video, watched it, and at no point during the video did I actually see bunnies.”
Did I mention we got a Roomba? It’s totally awesome. It was actually a birthday present for my wife. Don’t look at me in that tone of voice. It’s what she asked for. I tried to talk her out of it. We’re still trying to decide what to name it, but my wife has announced that it is definitely a boy. She says she knows it’s a boy because of the way it waggles its butt when it goes back to its home base.
I went to BJ’s this weekend to buy a ridiculous amount of everything, and I parked next to a car that had a bumper sticker that read, “Sorry I missed church, I was busy practicing witchcraft and becoming a lesbian.” Apparently, this has been a popular bumper sticker for some time, but living in North Carolina, this is the first I’ve seen of it.
Bunny credits:
Bunny pictures licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License. (Find your own with Flickr Creative Commons search.)
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Now that’s more like it.
How do you spell relief? B-U-N-N-Y!
— Dan Ridley 
Yeah, I literally laughed out loud when I saw this bumper sticker which is along the same lines:
http://www.cafepress.com/angryleft.12035289
— Meri
Sorry if you’ve already answered a question like this (I scanned the post about the previous show and its comments, but couldn’t find anything), Mr. Pilgrim, but what do you use to edit this? And why Matroska for the format?
I apologize; you use Kino, according to this: http://diveintomark.org/archives/2006/06/26/essentials-2006.
What’s with the Yanni soundtrack?
Bunnies!
— Jeffrey
I saw a Roomba and some other vacuum robots demoed in a department store in Seoul, Korea. I found them all far too loud. My cheapo 520W Samsung vacuum is much quieter and with a Korean woman at the helm, it takes next to no time to clean my apartment.
I bought one of those electric toilet seats instead. They’re amazing.
The roomba looks like a Norman. Definately a Norman.
— nikkiana
@Will: that’s really only part of the story, which is a tale of woe and heartbreak.
The process breaks down into 5 parts:
1. capturing the video of myself talking
2. taking screenshots of various things
3. editing the raw video capture, inserting the screenshots, adding background music, adding scene transitions, etc.
4. adding subtitles
5. converting to a publishable format and publishing
Kino would be quite capable of doing step 1, if I had managed to buy a computer with a Firewire port, which I didn’t. (A new one is in the mail.) So I’m currently doing the first step in iMovie and then copying the .DV files over to my Linux box. Bleah, but fast, since I have Gigabit ethernet now.
KSnapshot is great for the screenshots in step 2.
Kino is kinda passable for step 3 (Diva might be better, eventually). For last week’s video I admit I used iMovie for the editing step, and then exported it as .DV. Bleah. This week’s was in Kino.
For last week’s video I used Subtitle Workshop (freeware, not open source, Windows only) for step 4, just because it was the only thing I knew about for any platform. This week I tried Gaupol, which is very cool and highly recommended. And they use my port of Mozilla’s character encoding autodetection routine, which is also cool (but unnecessary in my case since I’m just doing ASCII). It exports to SubRip (SRT) format, which I can put directly into my final product.
Step 5 involves a number of different audio and video conversion tools: ffmpeg, oggenc, and mkvmerge. I’ve cobbled together a script with all the encoding options I worked out, which I’ll post at some point. For those of you who think you can laugh at me because I’m “forced” to use command-line programs, let me assure you that there are plenty of graphical video encoders for Linux. The problem is that graphical video encoders suck on any platform, because they try to hide complexity from you, and video encoding is one of those things that absolutely requires understanding the complexity, otherwise your final product will either be twice as large as necessary or look like crap, or both.
Anyway, my script currently produces pretty good quality video (XVID) and very small audio (OGG) with subtitles (SRT) in a Matroska container (MKV). All of these are well-documented formats with low overhead (unlike the AVI container, which is a total hack and wastes a lot of space, and unlike OGM, which is poorly documented and has few tools, and to which I can’t figure out how to add subtitles). All of these are allegedly non-patent-encumbered, although I have my doubts about XVID. But at least the reference encoder is open source, and it takes a lot less processing power to play back than Theora.
— Mark
Is the media file intentionally gzipped or am I/is my browser too smart to download the original file?
I need to do something like the following:
> file -b 20060704.mkv
gzip compressed data, from Unix
> mv 20060704.mkv 20060704.mkv.gz
> gunzip 20060704.mkv
> file -b 20060704.mkv
Matroska data
before I can watch it. Same for the last episode of the Dive into Mark show.
— Martin
Thanks for explaining the use of Matroska over OGM. Until now, I had wondered why yet another container format exists. (At first, I thought you were using Matroska just for the over-the-top non-QuickTimeness humor value.)
Since XviD is based on MPEG-4 Advanced Simple Profile, I don’t see how it wouldn’t inherit the usual MPEG-4 encumberance. Personally, I think that if you choose an MPEG-4 series codec and the potential patent issues the choice entails, it is uncool to be incompatible by not using the mp4 de jure standard container format as well. (No, I have no idea about subtitle tools for mp4.)
> Since XviD is based on MPEG-4 Advanced Simple Profile, I don’t see how it wouldn’t inherit the usual MPEG-4 encumberance.
You’re almost certainly correct. Have I mentioned recently how much this all totally sucks?
— Mark
> Is the media file intentionally gzipped
Sorry about that. Try it now.
mark@atlantis$ file 20060704.mkv
20060704.mkv: Matroska data
— Mark
* Don’t quit your day job, but I’d pay $30/yr to hear you rant about shit.
* In your next installment, would you please say “Meme”. Extra props for saying it in a way that makes it sound like a totally natural thing to say. +$10 to the kids’ college fund if you teach him/her to say it.
* I swear I saw the likeness of Guy Kawasaki in one of your hardwood floor boards.
* It’s a Herbert, definitely Herbert.
— Dan
I updated the post with enclosure information and successfully subscribed, downloaded, and watched both episodes with Democracy Player. I had to subscribe directly to the feed URL itself because DP does not appear to support feed autodiscovery. Bah.
— Mark
4. adding subtitles
You could try http://kitone.free.fr/subtitleeditor/
— Bob
What stupid format is the video in??? Can you make a Windows media or Quicktime version?
— Bing
Bing, I think you missed the point of the last few posts.
— R. Paulson
Ignore Kai with the embedding movies in flash comment, just make them harder for us die-hard Debian free (only) users. Bad enough all the porn^W commercial sites are doing that. Or should I be building Gnash from source already?
The bunnies are good, can we have dragons next time?
> Can you make a Windows media or Quicktime version?
You must be new here.
— Mark
Ahhhh, North Carolina. I miss that place. Well, ok, I don’t miss the power outages 3 times a week.
— Bob Aman
hey mark, did you get one of these?
http://the.taoofmac.com/space/blog/2006-07-04
they’re hilarious. I guess some Mac users get your points and still have a sense of humor!
— michael
I got several tickets froma camera that installed down the street but by the time I relized it I had already 6 tickets for running a red light. I really wish the cops would stop putting up speed traps!! Love all the flickr photos!
— Britney
About dv capture, why not put your mac under any linux ppc distribution (like ubuntu for mac) and use dvgrab ?
— benoitc
The most anoying thing about the article on switch from mac to linux is not the fact of the switch its Mark insistance on insulting so called “mac fanboys” be-littling them on the way out.
The equivilent term for a Linux hack, like Mark is aspiring to be, would be: Linux weanie/Script kiddie.
The obvious question about the article is dude have you heard of making backups? as a so called computer “guru” maybe you might of thought of backups?!?!?!? of course nothing EVER corrupts on LINUX so you would never need to back anything up. Even my aged mother backs her stuff up.
Ubuntu, Debian, Red Hat, Yellow Dog, SUSE etc etc all riduculous flavour of the month OS’s.
The ONLY sane reason to switch to one of the above “weanie OS’s” is that you are a hobbist (nothing wrong with that) and you like playing more than you like working.
If your after a GREAT server OS get solaris… Linux just doesn’t come close to the stability/completeness of Solaris and its incredibly Solid API’s.
I am a Solaris programmer by trade and I mainly use a computer to get to a X11 dtterm terminal so I can open the one true editor vim (gvim is for girls). I don’t want to muck about with the computer… I want it to give me a prompt and give me a compiler and give me a dtterm. OS X just works….Doesn’t get in my way.
XML is for script kiddie idiots. I hate it… its dumb… for dumbies ….. its just stupid. When I started working with computers programmers could briliantly use 4k of memory to do amazing things. But as computers got more powerful programmers seem to get dumber and instead of programs now running blazingly fast we make the computer parse strings that are meant for humans not computers DUMB DUMB DUMB. we use interpreters (java is a dirty little interpreter don’t kid yourself) instead of compilers. The whole movement to use XML for everything makes me want to vomit. TCP/IP …..lets redo that in XML….. databases… now they should be in XML…. pleaaaaaassssse get a clue.
PER ASN1.1 is a real bit level protocol generator for real programmers who want the most out of their cpu’s.
If you want to preserve your data for at least your lifetime (probably many more) without any proprietory incumberances…
Step 1: Store photos in raw data. Store your audio in PCM. Make your movies out of collections of photos (24 photos for each second). write your articles in text.
Step 2: Transcribe data to slate tablets.
Step 3: Repeat steps 1-2 daily.
The man can no longer oppress you big fella.
— Matt
Wow, that comment deserves to get deleted on so many counts, but it’s just so over-the-top I have to assume the author was intentionally trolling. No one could be so stupid in so many ways all at once.
— Mark
Mark, you may be a beautiful man, but please zoom out on your video camera. Take it from this 2.5-year veteran of the television production industry, seeing just a big floating head is scary.
Clearly the start of your vLogging and Amanda’s leaving is not a coincedence. Could you share your guys’ plans for vLog domination? Will it be a threesome with Ze?
— Dive Into Zemanda
Who’s Amanda?
— Mark
She’s the Google Local rep for the RTP, NC area as shown here.
— Dive Into Zemanda
Nice mashup.
I’m changing my tagline to “I’m so hip, even my comments are 2.0.”
— Mark
Not to get all phil-o-sophical, but a vlog is its comments. Once the first vlog show is posted, it’s out of the hands of the vlogger. The comments provide the creative DNA for the next show and so on.
Damn, the implications for this are far reaching. If a vlog is its comments and the vlog has economic value, then surely laws (The No vFollow Act of 2006) will be passed protecting vlogs from comment spam. This might portend the end of comment spam.
I’m getting 1996-like goosebumps all over again! It’s time to party. Someone send out a vVite.
— Dive Into Zemanda
For the poster upthread who was wondering how to get a Matroska file to play back with quicktime, there’s apparently someone working on a Matroska component for Quicktime (for OS X, at least).
https://sourceforge.net/projects/matroskaqt/
No, I haven’t tried it myself, yet.
— d.w.
Well I can guess you use Linux?
How do I know that for sure and how do i know that in the same moment I open this page? Dead easy – just looked at the bunny picture and noticed real nice anti-aliased text, using real nice font :-)
— Peter
Mark, I used to hate shaving, too… until I found this place:
http://www.classicshaving.com/
Get yourself a good badger hair brush, a good shave cream (check out Proraso) and you’ll actually (almost) look forward to your next shave.
And for something more on-topic, make sure you check out the Roomba Bluetooth interface at MAKE magazine:
http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2006/02/how_to_roomba_bluetooth_interf.html
Have a day!
— Kevin
> just looked at the bunny picture and noticed real nice anti-aliased text
I wouldn’t mind the trolls so much if they were actually clever, or original, or at least based in reality. God knows Linux has warts and weak points, but this isn’t one of them.
http://flickr.com/photos/31377018@N00/29589143/
(Hint: The text was in the original picture.)
— Mark
> Get yourself a good badger hair brush
Already got one. I still hate shaving.
— Mark
Eh Mark, yo didn’t cracked the thing. It doesn’t matter did you managed to add “beauty” I mentioned by ourselves (withimagemgijk cl-tools?) or used some photo from some stock. It’s the fact himself and means that you do not value aestethics much, but are very keen with you software. Any young FBI proflirer will reckong you in no time :-)
— Peter
Can someone translate that into English for me?
— Mark
“Mark, you missed the point. It doesn’t matter if you added the text (say, with ImageMagick) or downloaded the image as-is. It’s the shitty font itself that indicates that you do not value aesthetics much, and you’re better at working with software. Any young FBI profiler would recognize you in no time :-)”
I think he’s saying that he can tell you use linux because you didn’t rewrite the text in a better font. Which _still_ doesn’t make sense.
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© 2001–9 Mark Pilgrim