This video may not be “safe for work.”
I recently stumbled across the accessibility statement for Princeton University. “This is the official accessibility statement for…” Hmmm, that sounds vaguely familiar. “This is the official accessibility statement for…”
Four years ago, when I was writing “Dive Into Accessibility,” there weren’t really any good examples of accessibility statements to base mine on. So I kind of made one up, fiddled with it for a bit, published it, and invited other people to reuse it. I guess they did.
Now I don’t claim that all these sites live up to their promises. At least one content management system publishes a boilerplate accessibility statement by default, so there’s no guarantee that a human has actually reviewed the site for accessibility. Still, a lot of them do show some semblance of independent thought. The guy who designed the Rocky Mountain Harley Davidson website went so far as to review the site’s existing content and call out a number of inaccessible photo galleries.
Now I know what you’re going to say. “Mark, it’s a motorcycle dealership. I can’t imagine why they should make their website accessible. Blind people don’t ride motorcycles.” And you would be wrong. For the record, they also cook, dance, cycle, and listen to accessible porn (not safe for work). Hey, that porn site has an accessibility statement (also not safe for work). “This is the official accessibility statement for…” I’m just saying, the world is not limited by your imagination.
This is the Firefox plush toy. You can’t buy them anymore. I got mine as a speaker’s gift last December for flying out to California and telling a bunch of Mozilla uber-geeks that HTML 5 was the future of the web. You used to be able to buy them in the Mozilla online store, but apparently they ran out of them and no one can figure out how to make any more of them. Guys, work this out. It’s like printing money. It should comes as a surprise to precisely no one that it has its own Bugzilla bug entitled, appropriately enough, “Bring back the Firefox plush toy.”
My two-year-old can say “Firefox.” I point at the plush toy and say, “What’s this?” and he says “Firefox!” and clutches it with both hands and pulls it to his chest. I say, “Can I have the firefox?” and he says, “No, my firefox!” I say, “Can you share the firefox?” and he says, “No sharing!” We’re still working on that whole Free Software / Free Culture thing. Apparently it doesn’t apply to plush toys. Or maybe it just doesn’t apply to two-year-olds.
In tech news, Microsoft has announced a brilliant plan to kill the iPod. They won’t actually tell anybody what it is, and it won’t be compatible with anything else, and it has something to do with a creepy guy stroking a bunny. It’s like I don’t even need to be here. This stuff just writes itself. Although, I have to say that trading my freedom for a bug-riddled, closed source bunny player was the Best Decision Ever.
In personal news, we have a poltergeist in the house. He’s two. Can you say “Poltergeist?” “Poke da eyes.” Yeah, that’s close enough.
Google Labs recently announced a new search prototype that ranks websites by how accessible they are to blind and mobility-impaired visitors. I’ve been saying for years that Googlebot is just another blind user with 100 million friends. The only thing that’s really changed is the number of friends.
Let’s see… searching the main Google site for “accessibility,” we have the W3C’s accessibility working group, Microsoft’s accessibility site, Adobe, and a little tutorial that sounds vaguely familiar. Switching over to the AccessRank results, we have the W3C at #1. I’ve moved up to #2, so I must be doing something right. Hey, where’s Microsoft? Surely they must be in the top 20. 30? 40? 50? 60? 70? 80? 90? Oh look, there they are on page 10, right above the accessibility statement for Princeton University.
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So I download the large version on my MacBook Pro (2.16 GHz, 2 GB RAM), and try playing it as is.
Jerky jerky jerky! Frames skipped all over the place!
Then I change the file extension from .3gp to .mp4, and suddenly everything decodes like buttah. Apple, how much processing power does it take you to draw text to the screen?
— Jeffrey 
Love the video. Thought the post was good. Then watched the video. The video made me laugh out loud. Same words… must be the delivery. [wink]
— EM Sky
I don’t like these video blogs. You’re no Ze Frank; he’s entertaining. Your content is worthy of reading, but no more of the videos for me.
— Admiral Juan
Whatcha using for video editing on Linux? (nice comment preview!)
I do not what Admiral Juan is on, but I like the videos. It is “simple” in its design – one man sitting, talking to the camera, interspersed with well-timed screenshots and photographs – but that may be why I like them.
— Martey
I enjoy the videos; I like your style of humor. But I’ve got to second Jeffrey, there’s something going on with the large version video. An Athlon 3700+ (2.2GHz) and 1GB of RAM ought to be plenty good enough, but the video runs horribly and the CPU is pegged. If I change the extension to .mp4, the subtitles disappear and the video runs fine, with 30-50% CPU usage. I’m using Media Player Classic 6.4.8.4, ffdshow 2005-10-18, and quicktime alternative 7.0.3. It looks like the .mp4 file gets run through DirectShow, while .3gp gets run through QuickTime, according to the MPC settings. I don’t know enough about video codecs to draw any definite conclusions, but that difference seems suspicious. I’ve definitely played video at least this quality level with subtitles before with no problems, so I’ll bet there’s something you can change to fix this. I’ll see if I can find out more.
— David
I swear to God, QuickTime is such a fucking albatross on this industry. I know this will be an unpopular opinion among a certain vocal community, but it’s a quantifiable fact. Its codec support is ridiculously limited, and even in the codecs it does support, it doesn’t support many advanced features. There are so many encoding options I had to turn off just to get the damn videos to play in QuickTime in the first place. (Don’t believe me? Check out SharkTooth’s H.264 profiles.) Those unimplemented features translate directly into lower quality and larger file sizes. Meanwhile, its decoder is slow — and many of you have experienced firsthand — and its encoder is poor. (Don’t believe me? Check out a side-by-side comparison.) Its only allegedly redeeming quality is that it comes preinstalled on Macs, but frankly that’s more of a hindrance than a help, because it means that people are less likely to install better players that exist — even on Macs. It did amazing things back in the day, but on modern hardware QuickTime is just a “lowest common denominator” that has long since been eclipsed by open source alternatives.
— Mark
Maybe I’m just stupid but I can’t seem to find an RSS feed for the video blog posts. I’d love to have one so I could just put it into Democracy Player and watch it from there.
— Brent
If you trust me to stop changing the name of the show, you can subscribe to http://diveintomark.org/tag/diveintomarkshow/feed/
Either should work fine in Democracy Player (I test it myself on both Mac and Linux).
— Mark
Funny, when you said Mozilla you pronounced it “Mah-zilla.” Is this an accent, or actually how the ubergeeks pronounce it?
Speaking of, can you give the elevator-pitch for HTML 5? I’ve read so many positive things on this blog about XHTML 2.0, that I’m surprised you would be supporting another standard.
Let’s see: how to give an elevator pitch for a standard that competes directly with the standard my employer supports, without getting myself fired…
Briefly, (X)HTML 5 is an *evolution* of existing (X)HTML. It aims to add things that *actually matter* to people who have already run up against the limits of the current (X)HTML standards. It aims to document and standardize a number of undocumented or underdocumented *de facto standards* such as document.write, XMLHttpRequest, and error handling of improper markup. It is spearheaded and trafficked by a number of people who *actually write* browsers and browser-based applications, and thus is guided by a sense of *practicality and implementability* (not to mention an instinct to create *comprehensive test suites*). It is a *sane* step forward in improving existing markup languages in a *largely backwardly-compatible* way that *degrades gracefully* in existing browsers.
I won’t bother comparing it directly to XHTML 2 because I have confidence in your ability to search-and-replace words with their antonyms.
— Mark
> Funny, when you said Mozilla you pronounced it “Mah-zilla.” Is this an accent, or actually how the ubergeeks pronounce it?
I asked around on the Mozilla IRC channels, and apparently I’ve been mispronouncing it all these years. It is officially pronounced “Moe-zilla”. How terribly upsetting.
— Mark
All right, I’ve made yet another change. The large versions are now published with a .mp4 extension. QuickTime won’t display the captions unless you download the file and change the file extension (AND THAT SUCKS, PLEASE FIX IT). And, as noted above, playing the large video in QuickTime Player, with captions, requires a completely unreasonable amount of CPU power compared to playing the same video without captions (AND THAT SUCKS, PLEASE FIX IT).
The long and short of it is — I’ve given up on the idea of being able to watch captioned video in my browser with QuickTime. Which, you know, kind of negates one of the main selling points of QuickTime, but never mind that. I suppose I could offer the *small* version with a .3gp extension instead, but iTunes won’t sync that to the iPod (AND THAT SUCKS, PLEASE FIX IT). I suppose I could offer 4 versions — two small, two large, two with .3gp extensions, two with .mp4 extensions — to work around all of Apple’s bugs simultaneously, but at this point I’m inclined to think that people who need captions should give up on QuickTime altogether and download a more full-featured player that respects their needs.
— Mark
> I won’t bother comparing it directly to XHTML 2 because I have confidence in your ability to search-and-replace words with their antonyms.
Lol — got it, thanks.
I prefer mah-zilla. I’ve always pronounced it mah-zilla. I’ve only ever heard it pronounced mah-zilla. But I only know one or two other people who have ever had occasion to speak the word.
Sweet real-time comment preview, by the way. Useful JavaScript, and it’s not even AJAXish! yay. I guess it’s a WordPress plugin?
— Chris Burkhardt
http://dev.wp-plugins.org/wiki/LiveCommentPreview
— Mark
> I swear to God, QuickTime is such a fucking albatross on this industry.
Totally agree. I was just talking to someone today about this very fact. He was wondering why QuickTime wasn’t using his (dual-core) CPU at full capacity when encoding MP4. After we eliminated the possibility that it was I/O bound, we determined that their encoder is probably single-threaded. He was surprised. I wasn’t. These days it’s a fallacy to assume that QuickTime does anything well.
How amateur is it to write and ship a codec without designing in multithreading in from the ground up? Apple has been shipping multi-processor Macs for ten years now, and has had terrific out-of-the-box SMP for five years.
By the way, one of these days I’m going to find the person who wrote the code that makes Safari freeze with a SPOD for several seconds when starting to view an MPEG from a slow server, and I’m going to smack him. Or her. I’m an equal opportunity smacker.
I asked around on the Mozilla IRC channels, and apparently I’ve been mispronouncing it all these years. It is officially pronounced “Moe-zilla”. How terribly upsetting
Yeah, I felt the same when I discovered about ‘Deb-Ian’.
— Arthur
At work I “borrowed” from Dive Into Accessibility too. It was darn useful in creating an accessibility statement, which I think I did the week that DIA came out. ;) Seriously? Thank you for creating the resource.
By the way, apparently the live comment preview does not work at least one perfectly valid A HREF tag. I saw it earlier when this link broke the previewer:
<a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Macintosh_9500″>quotes<a>
It could be the trailing digit that is making it fail. Adding a non-digit after the zero makes it work, except of course the URL is no longer the one I want. Weirdly, if you remove the quotes and provide invalid HTML then it previews correctly. So this apparently works:
<a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Macintosh_9500>no-quotes<a>
I’d report it to the author myself, but I couldn’t get an email address and you have to have a WordPress account to open a ticket on the plugin. I don’t care that much. :-) Here are the two links as real links, just to see what happens: no-quotes quotes: quotes
The plush toys are no long sold at the mozilla store, but you can still find them if you know what to look for.
A few questions for our host:
–> If a comment from a previous show provides the inspiration for something in a subsequent show, is that user-generated content? Do you expect this user-generated content to increase your valuation when you inevitably seek investment for things like blue screens, trips to Davos, and a hot special assignment reporter.
–> Sportsracers are to Ze Frank what ___________ are to The Dive Into Mark Show?
–> Are contrived pictures of people having fun at tech conferences an albatross on the industry too? [SHOW IDEA]
— Sander
I wish to complain. It’s an odd complaint, but… the video quality is too good! I am not used to seeing such high-quality on the web. And I downloaded the *small* version! It ran perfectly in Quicktime on my XP machine. Well done Mark! But shouldn’t there be a rougher version about half the file size? Or are you looking to the future when everyone has superfast broadband? OK, so I am not complaining really. Sorry.
BTW, good use of screenshots in the video. But doesn’t this make the original post poorer? It doesn’t have the screenshots. Oh wait, that’s complaining again. Oops.
Great humour too. I look forward to more funny 2-year-old stories!
Lastly, I have always pronounced it “Moz-zilla” as in “lozenge”, or “Godzilla”. (Though if it was meant to stand for “Mosaic-Killer”, perhaps it really is “Moe-zilla”.)
— Chris
> the video quality is too good!
Most people are idiots and/or lazy and/or use graphical frontends that trade convenience for quality. Video encoding is insanely complicated, and insanely complicated tasks reward expertise. I don’t claim to be an expert by any objective measure, but I’ve taken the time to read all of the available documentation on the tools I use and the codecs they implement. I’ve also spent many hours scouring mailing lists like mplayer-users and ffmpeg-user, and forums like doom9.org and videohelp.com, reading the advice of people who have been doing this for a hell of a lot longer than I have.
My encoding script is here:
http://diveintomark.org/public/2006/07/podcast.txt
I’ve found that ffmpeg produces visibly better results than QuickTime’s H.264 encoder, but only because ffmpeg offers more advanced options and I use them effectively. Without these options, quality suffers and/or file sizes skyrocket. A side-by-side comparison:
http://diveintomark.org/public/2006/07/20060716-quicktime.mp4
http://diveintomark.org/public/2006/07/20060716-ffmpeg.mp4
Any video info tool will tell you that these videos are nearly identical — they both contain H.264 video and AAC audio at the same bitrates (+/- negligible variations). But ffmpeg produces visibly better results, especially in the cutaway shots of static screenshots.
— Mark
Are you going to add an Audio Description (or Audio Described or AD ) sound track?
It might be a bit of a challenge to describe a screen shot that flashes by – perhaps “Screen shot of xyz.com” or “Screen sh’”
The bit rate should be quite low on “talking head” and “screen shot” as there is not much movement. The cut to a screen shot or back to talking head are going to spike the bit rate as everything changes in one frame. I guess fade-in, fade-out, fade-to-black are going to be popular with MPEG encoders.
I’ve used VLC to stream the downloaded file (the large one) to my set-top-box, but quality suffers in the transcode to MPEG2 at 25 fps and the CPU is maxed out on a 2Mbps stream. At 25 fps the audio goes a bit out of sync. The sync. is better at 24 fps, but I get a bit of Dalek voice. I couldn’t find any way to enable the subtitles on the STB, although it supports them on DVB.
— Bobby
Hi, My name is Leo and I’m a Quicktime user (please be gentle). I started, um.. a few years ago and liked it. I thought it was good and it was nice to use something other than Windows media Player. But I didn’t know about its awfulness when compared to other codecs. It’ll be tough, but I’m going to try and break the addiction. Thanks for the alternative players.
— Leo
> Are you going to add an Audio Description
Probably not. It requires much more time and skill than captioning — it’s essentially a second script. I’ve read a lot about AD, and even bought some DVD movies specifically because they had a description track. But I still don’t feel that I could do it well enough to make it worth the effort.
I’ve watched captioned live events, TV shows, and DVD movies for years — some well-captioned, some badly captioned — and after a while you begin to get a feel for when the captioner knows what she’s doing and when she’s just a total hack job. That intuition, combined with some programmatic rules to keep me from doing obviously stupid things (tempered by an understanding of when to make exceptions), gives me enough confidence to caption my own videos. I don’t have that kind of intuition for audio description.
— Mark
Hello again,
I upgraded ffdshow to version 20060526-rev2546 and Media Player Classic to version 6.4.9.0, and now I get two sets of subtitles: one from ffdshow, and one from Media Player Classic.
You couldn’t make this stuff up.
I turned off the Media Player Classic subtitles because they were uglier, although I may swap that because ffdshow’s are slightly clumsier to access. This is with the file using a .mp4 extension, and there are no CPU overusage issues. In other words, everything works fine now.
— David
Re: Audio Description
I have heard second-hand that from a build persons point-of-view (no irony intended) most AD on (soaps, etc.) is so bad as to be useless, but most Feature Films have it done well. I’ve not seen it in action, but our local cinema has AD showings were, I think, a person stands at the side and talks in to a microphone, which is sent to a loan headset.
— Bobby
I don’t think captioning is necessary here. Why not? Because it will be a duplicate of the original blog post. So all the content is right there, accessible. The only reason for adding captions would be if the videos were more likely to be viewed away from the blog, ie: on an iPod, rather than played after you’ve read the related blog post.
Sorry about my dumb comment before. Of course the screenshots are not in the text, but the links to the sites are. (Mind you, I would like to see the screenshots as well, so I didn’t have to visit each site one by one, but I realise this is asking too much. I mean ideally, you could have grabs from the video as well, so you could see stuff like the Firefox toy without playing the video. Hmmm… maybe not.)
— Chris
> I don’t think captioning is necessary here. Why not? Because it will be a duplicate of the original blog post.
This is dead wrong; let me explain why. Synchronized captions provide a more accessible experience than separate transcripts. Yes, the transcripts do include clickable links, so they supplement the video. But simply posting a transcript is like making a text-only version of a web site. You can do it, but you’re treating a certain segment of your visitors as second-class citizens.
> The only reason for adding captions would be if the videos were more likely to be viewed away from the blog
In fact, many of my friends download the videos using a standalone video aggregator. They never see the separate transcript — typically they see the post title, my name, possibly the summary, and then go right into playing the video. (Whether the captions are available in this environment is, of course, up to the client. I’ve filed bugs against Democracy Player to provide an option to display captions if they are present.) But the point stands — people are *already* viewing the videos “out of context”, and more may do so in the future if I offer the videos in alternative media. For example, I will probably include these videos on my next annual home movies DVD that I send to friends and family. I already know how to convert these .srt files to DVD subtitle tracks.
— Mark
In exchange for dropping the video, could you blog more often? The vlog thing just doesn’t play to your strengths. Leave the comedy to Ze but regale us with your anti-MS jokes in text/
BTW, the irony of a vlog breaking for most people because of the addition of captions for a few is quite delicious
— Brad
Why I’m unsubscribing from your blog
— Mark
Two year olds do a special kind of one way sharing: They expect everyone else to share with them, but are unwilling to share things back.
— Si
> Two year olds do a special kind of one way sharing: They expect everyone else to share with them, but are unwilling to share things back.
Wow, that sounds vaguely familiar.
— Mark
Ehhh, the video doesn’t cut it for me. I finally got it to work, but the live video is actually boring compared to just the text. I had to go through it more through a sense of duty than interest. Do geeks make bad performers or what??
Sarcasm’s sharp edge needs to be blunted when you present it in the flesh, otherwise the presenter just comes acorss as a nasty jerk. So you should loosen up the tense frozen expression on your face or something.
— Nigel
Hey, the VLC preferences are hilarious! There are like 30+ options down in that “FFmpeg” >> “Advanced Options” panel, and I can’t find anything that talks about loops in H([\d\.]+) whatever. Guess I’ve got an older version. The biggest GUI improvement to VLC would be re-labeling the whole “Preferences” menu option “Developer Debugging Options”.
On the other hand, when I click the .mp4 and it opens up in Kaffeine (I’m using Kubuntu), I do get a dialog prompting me to select a captions file, and the captions display properly.
> I had to go through it more through a sense of duty than interest.
Just close your eyes and think of England.
— Mark
The video is very good!
— uasp
Mark, that’s an admirable revision to what must have been your first response. ;)
— Jeremy Dunck
What Nigel said.
— Jason
It looks like your video isn’t deinterlaced. Is this on purpose?
— Dean
“We’re still working on that whole Free Software / Free Culture thing. Apparently it doesn’t apply to plush toys. Or maybe it just doesn’t apply to two-year-olds.”
It can pass.
When I was about that age, the my mom and I (just like other moms and children) had regular visits to a tax-funded nurse/social worker who checks on the development of children. (It is a Finnish system. The Wikipedia page doesn’t have a link to an English explanation—and that’s something.) Anyway, the nurse/social worker asked me to draw a picture. So I did. She wanted to have the picture and put it on display in her office next to drawings by other kids. I declined saying that the picture is mine. She asked me to draw another one. So I did. She wanted to keep that one in her office. I declined explaining that the pictures could not be separated since the second one extended the first one.
I have since learned to share both source code and pictures.
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© 2001–9 Mark Pilgrim
