Seth Kills

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 23:02:25 GMT

I just have to say that I'm ridiculously excited about this.

Art + Glamour

Wed, 05 Dec 2007 07:53:09 GMT

Front Row & Meta-data

Tue, 20 Nov 2007 09:28:33 GMT

So, I've been told a few times that the new Front Row in Leopard supports playing of VIDEO_TS folders. I haven't installed Leopard on my home machine yet to confirm this. All of my effort may be for naught, unless perhaps it doesn't work exactly the way I'd like, in which case I'd have to tweak it using one of the methods I've described anyway.

So, last time I was wondering why Front Row seemed to be ignoring the title attributes of my trans-coded DVD title screens. Instead, it would display the full movie file name, such as “Au Revoir Les Enfants.mp4”, which I found to be really annoying (only because it wasn't 100% perfect). Anyway, upon further thinking I realized that it was probably because I was just using Front Row to display the contents of my ~/Movies folder after sym-linking all of the title screens into it, instead of importing these movies into iTunes where their meta-data would be loaded. It seems likely that Front Row doesn't read meta-data at all, but instead relies on the ancillary programs (iTunes, QuickTime, DVD Player) it uses, to provide this information.

Therefore, in my new script, instead of sym-linking the title placeholders into ~/Movies/DVDs, I call an AppleScript at the end to import them all in place:

echo "Adding movies to iTunes..."
osascript ~/bin/add_movies.scpt "$dvds_path"/*/VIDEO_TS/*.mp4

This script basically just converts its command-line arguments into HFS-style colon-separated paths and then tells application iTunes to add them as aliases. You can get a copy of this script here. Now everything works perfectly.

More Front Row; FFmpeg; DVD Titles

Sat, 03 Nov 2007 08:53:17 GMT

So, I had some time to work on this problem, and here's what I came up with. Transcoding the first 15 seconds of the first chapter in the first title on the disc using FFmpeg and turning it into a MPEG-4/AAC loop works perfectly for about half of the videos. Here is the command I used:

ffmpeg -vcodec xvid -b 300 -qmin 3 -qmax 5 -bufsize 4096 -g 300 \
	-acodec aac -ab 96 \
	-title "$title" \
	-t 0:0:15 \
	-i "$dvd_path/VIDEO_TS/VTS_01_0.VOB" "$mov_path"

The other discs seemed to have one of two problems. One movie, “LA Story”, refused to encode the audio portion of the stream, yielding the error “Error while opening codec for output stream #0.1”. I was able to fix this by special-casing it and disabling the audio stream with -an.

The other problem is that many DVDs have menus comprised entirely of still pictures, which aren't meant to be played back at the normal frame-rate. When I preview them in Front Row, they just flash through all of the submenus rapidly. I haven't come up with a solution for this yet, but it might involve selectively setting the frame-rate to the lowest value possible.

I also still have yet to set the correct meta-data, since using -title with FFmpeg only seems to set the title property in the MP4 portion, and not in the QuickTime wrapper, which presumably is what Front Row and iTunes are using.

Back Row

Sun, 28 Oct 2007 17:25:06 GMT

So, I was hoping that there was a seamless solution to this problem that didn't require transcoding ripped DVDs to H.264, and I'm happy to report that there is. You can use this application, DVD Assist, which is basically an AppleScript with some extre glue. When you play regular movies in Front Row, it looks for a VIDEO_TS directory or ISO file in the location of the movie, and if it finds one, it launches DVD Player.app or VLC in full-screen mode. This actually works pretty well, as Front Row will relinquish control of the screen pretty easily.

This is a really good solution because it saves tons of extra time and avoids the possible loss of quality inherent in transcoding the DVDs, and there are really only two things preventing it from being the perfect solution. The first is that you have to hold down the menu button on the Apple Remote in order to access the DVD menu. Pressing the menu button quickly will cause Front Row to take over again, and you might lose your place on the DVD, depending on your DVD Player.app preferences. However, the fact that you can use the menu button at all while both Front Row and DVD Player.app are running is certainly better than nothing.

The other thing is that you have to use an unrelated stand-in QuickTime movie in order for Front Row to have something in the Movies list, and so DVD Assist can hook the playback of that movie. The movie that ships with DVD Assist is a typical start pattern, but I'd like to replace it with a 5-second clip from the menu title of the disc. And of course, it would also be ideal if the meta-data of the video file matched the DVD. I could do this pretty easily using HandBrake, but since I've nicely automated the rest of the process using trivial shell scripts, I'd like a more automatic solution. I've started playing with FFmpeg to see if I can procure the right options to do this. I'll let you know how it works out later.

Back

Sun, 28 Oct 2007 08:02:51 GMT

I'm going to try to return to my journaling in the form of unfocused technical rambling. I have vowed, over the past many months, not to write any journal entries composed entirely of complaints about my life, my job, or the world in general. This has had the unsurprising effect of me ceasing to write altogether. As the age-old mantra goes, “If you have nothing good to say, don't say anything at all.”

I'm also going to start with this post by tagging everything I write appropriately, and hiding gory levels of detail behind tersely descriptive cuts, so that those of you who aren't interested can easily filter it out as you scroll down your friends list, and we'll all remain on speaking terms.

So, human computation is really interesting, and although many parts of it are quite straightforward in concept, there are a bunch of interesting nuances. If you watch this Google tech talk, there's a question at the end from an audience member about the relationship between doing boring, repetetive work and playing addictive games. And if you take those ideas to their logical extension, we could all be playing human computation games while teaching machines how to do the unpleasant or difficult (from the perspective of machine learning) tasks, and arduous labor being done by humans would become a thing of the past. The only people required to do “real work” then, would be those converting human computational tasks into fun games for others, and since this is a creative art, they would probably enjoy it anyway.

As an aside, one thing that Paul pointed out to me recently is that it makes sense to watch some online content, such as Google Tech Talk videos, faster than realtime. You can watch someone's presentation at 1.5 x for instance, with pitch-shift compensation, and it will sometimes make up for the fact that the person punctuates their speech with “um,” and, “uh,” and other thoughtful pauses. He also points out that the people in these videos mostly just seem more excited about what they're presenting when you play them back at higher than normal speeds, as if they just can't expound this knowledge upon you quickly enough. If anything, it will make you pay better attention. You should try it (but possibly not with the above video on human computation, because Luis Von Ahn already talks pretty quickly). You can do this in QuickTime in the A/V Controls window. Finally, the solution to getting more time out of life.

Leopard, Blade Runner

Fri, 26 Oct 2007 22:14:01 GMT

So the new MacOS 10.5 “Leopard” seems to have an interesting launch-on-demand feature, whereby if you try to read from a specially-named directory, it can trigger an application launch. For instance, even without launching X11.app, my $DISPLAY variable is already set to /tmp/launch-3DxFQw/:0. This file exists as the typical named-pipe, just as it would in /tmp/.X0-unix/ on XFree86 systems, but there's nothing on the other end of it until you try to open it, at which point it automatically launches X11.app. That's pretty neat, although it causes my startup scripts to go crazy because they assume that if $DISPLAY is set, you're already inside X11.

Also, it looks like Blade Runner: The Final Cut is playing in the city at the end of November. I'll probably go see it, if I can remember to. Calendars are my enemy.

Mon, 23 Oct 2006 19:05:50 GMT

Is anybody else thinking of going to Devo / Bow Wow Wow / A Flock Of Seagulls / When In Rome / Animotion?

Mon, 28 Aug 2006 08:17:55 GMT

Damn, PLANETES keeps amazing me with how deep it is for such a simple premise. Basically, the main character is an astronaut in his mid 20's who works with a squad of space-debris collectors. It's about his attitudes towards living and working in space, his interactions with his coworkers, and his aspirations of one day owning his own spacecraft.

I've been watching the animé and reading the manga concurrently. The focus of the manga is a little bit more on Hachimaki's preoccupations and internalizations of his everday circumstances, and the animé deals a lot more with his human relationships. That's not to say that the supporting characters are just “satellites” for him to play against. They are all very rich and interesting too, although completely different from him.

Hachimaki seems to embrace the unforgiving vacuum of space, integrating it into his overly serious demeanor. He doesn't seem to really enjoy anything besides the struggle to survive in such a harsh and unnatural environment. I'm on the 4th graphic novel and the 4th DVD, and the existential themes are finally starting to really converge between the two.

ZOMG Geek Meme!

Sat, 05 Aug 2006 00:04:45 GMT

I am 43U tall. How tall are you?

Fri, 28 Jul 2006 22:31:00 GMT

The next girl I date needs to have a lot of upper-body strength. That's all I'm sayin'.

Sat, 15 Jul 2006 06:42:04 GMT

Hey ya'll. I'm probably going to go surfing again this Sunday, being that it's my latest resurgent hobby, and boy is it an awesome one. If anybody wants to come with me, renting a surfboard and wetsuit will probably run you about $20 each for the whole day, depending on how early we get started, and whether you want the super-beginner “Floaty” longboard, or the wild and dangerous fiberglass shortboard. We can also share boards, because upper-body stamina dictates that I can only paddle my way through waves for a few hours, and I'm still a little sunburnt from last time.

Right now I'm house-sitting for my parents in the Berkeley hills, which is ideal if any of you East Bay people want to carpool with me. I would like to go back down to Santa Cruz, since it's the warmest, but if I have to drive, then I'll probably want to go somewhere North of Berkeley, like Stinson Beach, just so I don't have to double back when I drive home to Mountain View.

If you've never tried surfing before, then I highly recommend it. Riding waves is much more exhilarating than it might sound. It's not just for bleach-blond airheads like me, and the gang-like activity that happens in the water when there are turf disputes and people attack each other with box-cutters is pretty exciting. Just kidding.

Movies I Want to See

Sun, 16 Apr 2006 01:42:56 GMT

I just went to see Thank You for Smoking. It was really good. It's the best kind of totally evil, make you feel sympathetic for the bad guy, kind of film. When you read personal ads and the person is like, “I'm totally open minded and open to new ideas and especially new experiences!!!” what this really means, is that you can take them to an Ethiopian restaurant without them trying to order a PB&J. What I wish it meant, is that you could take this person out to a movie about a really cunning tobacco lobbyist, who meanwhile is trying to be a good role-model for his son, and they won't make horrible faces at you in the dark. You should all see it, and we'll compare notes later.

Some other movies I want to see soon are:

Hard Candy
American Dreamz
Some Italian or French thriller about blackmail that I can't remember the name of. I saw a review of it, but I can't remember the name at all now. Can anybody help? Probably not. Nobody else I know goes out of their way to watch foreign or independent films.

There was another one that I saw a preview for today, but I've lost it.

Tue, 14 Mar 2006 21:51:20 GMT

Happy π day everybody!!*!

Inane Paradox

Thu, 15 Dec 2005 04:50:23 GMT

We both think the other person thinks we know something that the other doesn't know.

And we're both wrong.

Oldboy

Tue, 13 Dec 2005 03:24:26 GMT

Over the weekend I watched this South Korean movie Oldboy, and let me tell you, it was fucking amazing. I recommend that none of you ever watch it. I don't know a single one of my friends, with the narrow possibility of an exception for delonix who would tolerate seeing the whole thing through. This movie is brutal on both the senses and the sensibilities. It has an IMDb rating of 8.3/10 stars, putting it at a ranking of #112 overall, although this is most certainly skewed by the low number of votes.

Even after abusing myself with years of rotten.com patronage (Note: do not follow link), there were still several visuals in this film that, amplified by the context, formed a lasting impression of the holy shit this is fucked up variety.

Here's a IMDb comment for it which I hope is a joke, but is probably actually genuine, and a good example of inverse negative reviewing (emphasis mine):

(1/10 stars) “proof”

I watched this movie and am sad to say that I have wasted precious moments of my life doing so. A friend of mine , Dukefrukem, said it was good so I was all like cool. I rented it and now I won't be speaking to him again. I can make a movie better than this. How hard is it to get some fake blood and lame dialogue together and pay off a director to say he liked it at canne? A small note, Just because Quentin Tarentino says it's good does not make it so. The movie simply does not make any sense. I am betting the remake in 2006 will be better but somehow I am really doubting it. You cannot polish a turd no matter how hard you shine it...it is still a turd.

-Ruxor PS: Shout out to my homey Plage...What up foo!

What I think he's referring to as a “remake” is Chinjeolhan geumjassi, third in a revenge trilogy by the same director, with Boksuneun naui geot being the first, and Oldboy being the second.

Rough Night

Wed, 26 Oct 2005 02:53:28 GMT

Came home with a headache. Received a letter from the IRS stating that I owe 755 more dollars, as a penalty for paying my 2004 taxes so late. My Best of Bowie and ER: Second Season DVDs arrived, which is good, but the ER box set has two Disc 2s, and no Disc 1.

As expected, the David Bowie DVD is really great. The videos move chronologically from filmed performances of the 70's, which are really good, to even better artsy theartrics during the 80's and early 90's, and then finally become just like any other ADD-bourne music video of the MTV generation. My favorites so far are Absolute Beginners, which is like a mini film noir starring Bowie and some lady in a zebra suit, and DJ, in which David wears an orange jumpsuit and breaks things in an extremely colorful office environment. I can't imagine ever being that happy.

Passive Aggressive or Aggressively Passive

Thu, 20 Oct 2005 06:09:38 GMT

I've already seen this episode of Sex in the City. I feel cheated.

All day at work I was acting out some kind of weird anger issues. I didn't really notice until we were coming back from lunch with the There people and Brett made some comment about it. That Brett, he's always making comments about things. I'm not really sure what's gotten into me. Here are some examples from throughout the day:

Upon arriving at AboveNet, Matt asked if I had a driver's license for the visitor badge. In retrospect, I believe what he was trying to ask was whether I had brought it with me, given that I was neither required to drive nor to purchase anything (lunch was put on the corporate card). But what I said instead was, “No, I've been driving illegally for the last 2 years.” This is in reference to when my last California driver's license expired, shortly after moving to Reno.

On the drive back, Brett and Matt started talking about the name change again. For a few weeks, we've been discussing changing company names, to enhance our corporate image. Everyone agrees that this is a good idea, but it's either too involved of a process, or nobody is actually willing to pull the trigger, because we haven't made the change yet. Brett asked me what I thought of the name change, which has to be the 20th time it's come up in informal conversation. Needless to say, I was incapable of a straight answer. I believe I said something along the lines of “I think we should tell all of our current customers to go screw themselves, and that their support contracts are voided.” Surely you can understand my frustration. Or not.

When we got back, yet another person reported extreme slowness while using our shopping cart system, prompting everyone to try debugging it, before quickly losing interest. After running ktrace on several instances of Interchange and watching the output of "show processlist" on the MySQL server, I determined that the new firewall, which had been installed last weekend, was blocking outbound HTTP connections from the webserver. This was preventing the shipping calculator from contacting one of UPS' CGI scripts. After updating the firewall rules, Matt said something like, “Jeeze, who's idea was it to block all outbound TCP from the DMZ?” As I rolled my chair back to my desk, I replied, in the most sardonic tone possible, ”Well, maybe you should ask Mr. come-in-over-the-weekend-and-break-the-network,” referring to Devon, since he had helped with the network redesign. This was slightly uncalled-for.

Blogging Boggling Bulging Befrogging

Sat, 15 Oct 2005 01:41:36 GMT

I've stopped using IM and IRC altogether, in the name of focus and commitment to my job and other personal projects. According to conventional wisdom, it's impossible to simply remove one addiction from your life without replacing it with another, equally consuming one. So, in this case I'm going to start blogging again, and sending a lot of SMSes.

I've gotten the name sethkills back, from when I first started this whole thing, and I think I'm going to do what several of my friends do, keeping my outside journal separate, as a means of disseminating computer-related information that might not be very relevant for my LJ friends.