A good quote

"The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt."

--Bertrand Russell

Transcoding video under Ubuntu

I've only recently started playing with transcoding my MythTV MPEG2 recordings down to smaller files while still running Ubuntu. Normally I'd reboot under Windows and use something like Auto Gordian Knot or Dr. Divx to do so. But hey, while in Rome. Plus that way I don't have to reboot just to transcode an episode of Teen Titans or Yu-Gi-Oh G/X.

So, I started playing with Avidemux, and it's a pretty nice program. You can mark and delete commercials quickly, there's a lot of available filters for cleaning up the video to allow for better compression, and it's pretty zippy on the AMD64... at least now that I've stopped using the version that ships with Ubuntu. I found the Avidemux wiki site (link below) that describes the newer version of Avidemux, only available by downloading the SVN source and compiling it yourself... that's what gives you the ability to access multiple processors. I followed the compile guide and it works! Now I've compiled in support for x264 so I'll see if I can get versions that are iPod compatible...

Main Page - Avidemux2

Kong packed-in with 360 HD-DVD

So, supposedly the Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive has been announced for a mid-November release date, a $199 price, and it'll include a remote AND a copy of King Kong on HD-DVD! Not bad. I agree that the combination of the $400 360 and $200 HD-DVD drive does in fact make for an expensive HD-DVD player, but think of it as getting a $500 HD-DVD player and a $100 game console.

Opposable Thumbs: 360 HD-DVD dated, priced. Now with pack-ins!

Heroes -- complaints

I still haven't gotten through my MythTV recording of Heroes (the new NBC series on superheroes) yet. I had better get a move on as I'll have Ugly Betty to watch after tonight, plus I'll have to study up for the season premiere of Lost next week.

Unfortunately, I have primarily complaints so far about Heroes. Which could explain why I haven't been more eager to watch the rest.

It started with the opening... a bunch of text describing people with extraordinary abilities or some such junk. Who set that type? It looks like they spent all of 5 minutes creating it. Horrible, boring font. Then, for the text listing the cast and crew over the opening scenes, they used some horrible, ugly, scripty font. Is that because that's how they write in India or something?

The sets? Awful. The lack of effects to show people with their superpowers? Annoying. The guy's supposed to be flying. Show him flying already. Oh, and I know Manhattanites are supposed to be jaded, but don't you think they'd notice some guy flying around in the sky?

What else? Oh, the Japanese guy. Why give him a clock with Japanese characters on it? Are we supposed to NOT realize he's Japanese, when he speaks Japanese, looks Japanese, and all his co-workers are Japanese? I think we'll get the idea even if his clock has Arabic numerals on it, or even NO numerals.

Then, the Japanese space-time continuum guy has a screensaver. Some Godzilla-like monster. Oh, look, the smart kid with the hot mom in Vegas is reading a comic book with the same monster on it. Ooooh, wow, connections. Except Lost did virtually the same thing in Season 1 (with Walt and the polar bear), but did it better.

OK, I'm done complaining. I'll give it another chance or two. At least until I get a new episode of Iron Chef America.

Weather report (belated)

I recorded Anna while we were wandering around the Outer Banks surveying the flooding caused by Ernesto at the end of August. Sadly, I should have included a nice lower-third graphic and her credit as a meteorologist. I think she has a fine on-camera presence, but I'm not the most impartial of observers. :)

Chroot chroot chroot for the home team

More on Ubuntu and my new AMD64 X2... I finally got Firefox working again with Flash audio/video and all, thanks to this script. It's not actually using chroot, I just like saying "chroot." I've tried a chroot script howto for Dapper, and it seemed to work for what was listed, kinda, but I couldn't get Democracy Viewer to work. Oh well.

Hm, the Wii60 is a smidge pricey

The mighty Nintendo revealed the launch details on their Wii today, and the good news is that you'll be able to play a game right out of the box... they're bundling Wii Sports with the console. The bad news about this is that as a result, the launch price is $250, instead of the $199 that a lot of people were hoping for.

Wii Launch Center - Gamespot

The sad state of American broadband

Sad indeed. This summary from Ars points out that the Japanese get 100Mbps of both upload and download speed for $35 a month... which is what I pay for 6Mbps of download and something like 512Kbps of upload. Even Verizon's FiOS (which is reportedly coming soon to my area) doesn't improve those speeds that much.

The sad state of American broadband

Ubuntu and I have kissed and made up

A new set of compiz updates cleared out my dependency problems, and a little bit of reading on the forums got me back in business with Xgl and compiz, so now I'm feeling a bit better about Ubuntu again. In fact I'm using it right now. Oooh.

It's the Wii60 for me

After Sony announced its ridiculous $600 price for the full-featured version of the Playstation 3, I was pretty sure I wasn't going to get one. Then they announced that the worldwide rollout in November was going to be limited to 400K units in the US and 100K in Japan, with Europe and Australia getting dissed altogether until the spring. It was then clear that, even if I'd wanted one, I wasn't going to get one.

Now they're saying 80% of the PS3s available for purchase will be the $600 version and not the $500 one. That's just a convenient news article to use to post this mini-rant to my blog. I'll probably get a Wii60 (i.e. the Nintendo Wii and a Xbox 360, adding up to the same price as the PS3) this holiday buying season.

Sony: 80 percent of PS3s will be higher priced models

Ubuntu -- honeymoon's over

Won't make this too long, but it turns out that a lot of things that worked just fine for me when I installed Ubuntu 6.06 on my old system, don't work just fine for me now that I'm using the AMD64 version of Ubuntu. In particular, you have to jump through even more hoops to get Flash to work in Firefox, VLC is busted when playing Xvid video (as in when I try to stream a recorded program from my MythTV backend), there's all kinds of wackiness you have to do to get Wine running, and I can't even print to my printer.

Then, one of the repositories pushed an update a few weeks ago that broke the X server.

THEN, another repository just pushed an update to compiz that broke it too. I might be able to fix it, but I also might have just lost interest in fixing all these broken things.