One of the things about being a bit of a geek from an early age is that you’re exposed to the notion that other countries have things that are cooler than you can get at home.  When I was a teenager, I used to hunt down British editions of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series of books in used bookstores, I bought Japanese versions of Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo games, and of course I imported the very occasional laserdisc.

As long as I stuck to Japan and other NTSC countries, I was pretty comfortable importing media.  The video game console manufacturers paid a sort of lip service to the idea that they didn’t want you playing games from other regions, but it was never difficult to circumvent; you could always get an adapter or fit a mod chip or some such.  Of late, of course, I’ve taken to simply buying consoles from other regions, which neatly sidesteps the whole issue.

Europe, however, has always presented a bit of a problem, mostly because of PAL.

The first time I imported anything in PAL, it was because the powers-that-be had decided to delay broadcast of the last four episodes of season 2 of Babylon 5 for several months in the US, while airing them on schedule in the UK.  I managed to find a chap on the net who wouldn’t mind taping them for me in exchange for a favor on my side and wound up with a tape that I couldn’t play but that represented me raising a middle finger to regional broadcast decisions.

Another friend tracked down a VCR that could play PAL tapes on an NTSC TV and we had a bit of a viewing night.

The quality was, simply put, dreadful.  The technology to do on-the-fly conversions simply wasn’t quite there.  Nonetheless, it was watchable.

Technology has advanced somewhat since the mid 1990s.  Region locking is more omnipresent than ever, but technology for freeing your media from region locks has kept up.

Even more promisingly, the PS3 was released completely region-free and blu-rays are frequently (but not always) likewise released without the studios bothering to region code them.

Most importantly, the advent of high-def resolutions has freed us from worrying about PAL or NTSC or what have you.

Or so I thought.

When we were in Britain, we bought a batch of media, knowing full well that it would come with some hitches when we got home.  For the most part, these hitches turned out not to be.  The DVDs, well, they play just fine; we have a DVD player that was made region-free with a simple remote control code and our TV is smart enough to understand an incoming PAL signal and display it.

Likewise, the PS3 games I brought back – “Siren: Blood Curse” and “Arcana Heart 3″ work without issue.

It’s this one Top Gear blu ray I brought back that gave me fits.

I was worried about region coding.  I needn’t have been, it went right into the PS3 and spun up, played the studio logo, and then nothing.  A simple black screen taunting me.

It turns out that, yes, 720P and 1080P and such are universal; they cross borders. 1080i at 50Hz, however, that is a different story and that happens to be how this disc was encoded.

I had never had occasion to rip a blu ray before, so I needed to get my toolbox up to date.  Fortunately I ran across a lifehacker article  that recommended a product called HD Decrypter, and it turned out to do just what it said on the tin.  30 minutes to rip, three hours to encode, and I was once again sneering at the thought that I could be thwarted by mere national boundaries.

It strikes me that a good 99% of the world probably goes through their day without worrying about stuff like this.

Some days, I kind of envy them.  :)

I’m not tagging every single file with, say, episode number and title and description, as that would be sheer madness, but getting them sorted by show and season is usually good enough, with the title generally being the same as the file name which almost always contains the episode number.

Anyway, I started with about 2,000 avi files. That’s rather a lot.

I have about 900 to go. That’s rather good progress by any measure.

I’m not running in to too many “problem” files, ones where I need to run them through VirtualDub or mencoder to get them in shape for ffmpeg. I was a bit worried to start, as I hit three or four in the first couple of shows I was converting and that would have meant an awful lot of extra work had it continued.

What I’m running into more often is perfectly well-encoded files that just had some poor choices. For example, avi files with stereo AC3 audio rather than mp3 or AAC.

There’s nothing wrong with AC3, of course, it’s a fine codec. It’s just that I don’t know how to get good encodes from files with AC3 audio. My attempts have sounded like, well, what it used to sound like when you put a CD-ROM into a CD player before CD players got smart enough not to try to play them.

Unfortunately it took me a little while to spot the pattern, so I did need to do some re-encoding of about 30 files, but I got it sorted out. I’m having to feed files with AC3 tracks through Handbrake, which is a little less fire-and-forget than my existing script but which is working all right to a point.

I did also have to make some encoding-quality tweaks. I’ve been doing most of my encodes in h264 with a crf of 19. This makes m4v files that are usually 10-15% larger than the source AVI files. This is a little inefficient, sure, but drive space is pretty cheap.

This breaks down if the source material is of poor quality. For example, we had a folder full of episodes of Time Trax that are in really bad shape. The source appears to have been VHS recordings in 6-hour mode, there’s tons of tracking noise and the VBI data is in the picture area.

Throwing these through libx264 at crf 19 is a BAD idea. In an effort to faithfully reproduce all the noise and snow from the original files, they balloon from 400MB files to well over a GB.

Drive space ain’t that cheap. I’ve had to go down to crf 22 for these and a few others.

My last problem is dealing with files with AC3 audio and external subtitle files, since Handbrake doesn’t like to burn SRT titles into video. That only affects about a dozen files though.

My bigger nightmare is mkv files with stylized subtitles, because my conversion process for those was reliant on some versions of mplayer and ffmpeg I compiled myself for OSX and I’m not sure I can reproduce them for Windows.

But that is for another time. For now, the heady glow of progress.

ffmpeg is a tool that I’m scarcely scratching the surface of what I COULD do with it. I look at the documentation and I can’t actually fathom why I’d want to do some of the things it has to offer, but the thing I DO need – take a file in formats a, b, c, or d and convert them to format z, which is a format that our AppleTV can handle, it does quickly, reliably, and generally without complaint.

When it DOES complain, however, the error messages can be a bit… obscure.

For the record:  ”big_values too big, Buffer sizes too large” usually means that the mp3 audio track is corrupt in some fashion, and that I need to throw the file into VirtualDub – another fantastic tool – and re-encode the audio before passing it through ffmpeg again.

Which is OBVIOUS, I mean, it spells it right out right there.

I have one of those, too.  It was cheap after all and it does a lot more than the old one.

Anyway, it’s a great unit for playing back 480p and 720p video, with some frustrating limitations on format.  It will play pretty much anything that iTunes will take as input, and the nice thing is that anything you can make plan on an Apple TV should also play on an iPad or iPhone.

iTunes doesn’t actually take that many types of video files as inputs.

Anyway, a year or so ago I sorted out a way to convert mkv files into a format that the AppleTV would handle, with subtitles included, and I converted a few things just to make sure that it would work and then I more or less put that aside.

Recently, though, I decided to get serious.  A few months ago, I upgraded my gaming PC to a 6-core AMD 1090T processor with the justification being that a six core processor, while not really any advantage for gaming, is a beast when it comes to video encoding.

So, last week I found a tool that would look at every single media file on my server and spit out a list with the included codecs and bitrates and sizes and so forth.

It turns out that I have about 3500 video files on there, with about 400 of them being in formats that an AppleTV can play.

That’s when I decided to get a little less serious.  Starting a project of “well, I have a little over 3000 files to convert, let’s get to it” is insane.

Starting a project of “Well, let’s start by getting rid of the avi files because most avi files are encoded very poorly anyway” is a little less insane.

I whipped up a quick & dirty DOS batch file that iterates through a folder and feeds all the avi files in it to ffmpeg, and it works pretty well.  I’ve been able to encode folders with 20 or 25 avi files in them at once, and I’m getting 4-5 times realtime encoding speed which is nuts.

Now, then, flush with victory, I’ve just copied all seventeen seasons of Top Gear into a single directory and I’m letting the batch file go nuts.  That’s probably a 36 hour encoding job.

I’ll get back to you in a couple days to let you know if I still have a PC.

Update: Total run time before the encoding stopped was about 6 hours, encoding 33 episodes.  Some of these were extra-length specials, so call it 35 hours of video.  It didn’t precisely crash in any way I would have expected, ffmpeg was just sort of paused.  Let’s see how it does with the remaining 105 episodes.

We just finished winter break here, and now everyone is grudgingly heading back to school.

Winter break is just about three weeks long, so it’s a nice break from classes.  My wife and I had intended to take a week off and go visit family, but I wound up scheduled to work and she had to travel alone.

That meant that, well, I was left alone for eight days with nobody to tell me that I was crazy to start new projects.

So, I did.

A while back, I inherited a eMachines EL1209.  This is not exactly a high spec machine; it’s a single core 2.4GHz Athlon with an Nvidia 8200 on-board chipset.  I put it in the closet for a time when I had a project that needed it, and then promptly forgot about it.

That is, until I got the bright idea to spend winter break setting up an XBMC box.

I didn’t remember it at first, though, I was browsing Newegg trying to decide if I could whip up an XBMC box on the cheap and had come to the conclusion that it was going to cost about three hundred bucks that I really couldn’t justify before something jogged my memory and I decided to see if I could make use of the hardware that I actually already had.

Turns out that the new build of XBMC supports hardware-accelerated h.264 video playback, and that the Nvidia chipset on the board was actually beefy enough to decode and play back 1080p video with no problems, which was pretty impressive.

On the other hand, it couldn’t upscale 720p video to 1080p without getting rather choppy, so I set the box to boot into 720p resolution and all was well.

XBMC is pretty easy to set up these days. I don’t know if it was always so; I suspect that I’m getting to avoid a lot of early adopter pain by waiting until version ten to jump on the bandwagon, and I’m fine with that.  My days of experimenting with betas and being on the bleeding edge are well behind me for the most part. 

I did find that its “scrape” functionality was, well, I’d say it was a bit lacking but in all honesty I threw a whole lot of video files at it that weren’t very consistently named and I shouldn’t really be surprised by results like this:

…yeah.  Puts a whole new light on Tonari no Totoro, I’m telling you.

I wound up creating a lot of .nfo files from scratch, one for every movie in my library, and then I spent some time renaming TV episodes so they matched up with thetvdb, and then I had a library that looked, well, it looked pretty good.

It was only a first step, though.  After I had the video library knocked into shape,  I installed a MAME launcher, which wasn’t too bad to set up, I installed Hulu Desktop and got XBMC and Hulu Desktop co-existing on the same box, which wasn’t at all trivial and took installing Eventghost to get working, and I decided that I was going to figure out a way to get our photos to display through XBMC.

At this point, you are probably thinking “what’s the big deal about getting photos to show in XBMC? you point it at a directory, you’re done”

I keep photos in iPhoto.  It’s a nice piece of kit and I have few complaints about it, but one of its charming little foibles is the way it stores your photos.  Rather than being kept in a folder structure under, say, ~/Pictures, they’re hidden in a photo library (honestly, not a bad thing inasmuch as it keeps them safe from manual user twiddling).

Unfortunately, it makes it tricky for third party software – like XBMC – to get at them.

Fortunately, I was saved by Google, in two ways: First, the rather common way in that I used it to search for a solution, and second in that the solution I finally found was authored by a Google engineer during his 20% time.

Phoshare let me export the entirety of my iPhoto library into a nice directory structure split up by events, and moreover it lets me synchronize the iPhoto library to the exported copy at any time and only export photos that are new or that have been changed.

It’s rather nice.

Anyway, the end result of all of this was that I had a home media PC set up with all manner of movies and TV shows and emulated arcade games and family photos and life was good and then it was just about time to go back to school so I couldn’t actually wear a groove in the couch enjoying the fruits of my labor.

Oh well.  Three months and I’m done!

Big changes this time around: I mounted rails behind the desk and then mounted my monitor to those rails with a monoprice VESA mount.  I also added a shelf to the left tower so I could lay my PC flat on one shelf and then have a second shelf just for external hard drives and a NAS.

Overall view:

Left tower (computers, mostly).  Dig my high tech laptop docking station.

Center (the “desk” part)

Right tower (Routing & printing)

I am momentarily content with the state of things.

See, we run a mixed environment here, a handful of PCs and two macs. Mostly the PCs are used for gaming, except for one laptop my wife uses for her VPN access to work, so the macs get used for media serving and my classwork.

I’ve only had one hard drive blow out on me in the last two decades, but it was enough to make me glad that I’d been backing up regularly and hence backup has remained a priority. This hasn’t been too hard to set up; both Vista and OSX come with capable backup tools, and we have a 1TB Time Capsule that makes the Mac side of things a set and forget affair.

There’s been just one little problem – the 1.1TB of, well, stuff, mostly video files, on an external drive hooked up to one of the macs, that hasn’t been regularly backed up because a) I didn’t have a second drive big enough to hold in and b) Time Machine, while a fine backup tool in many regards, isn’t designed for “put the stuff from THIS volume onto THIS backup device, the stuff from THAT volume onto THAT backup device”.

So, it hasn’t been backed up and that’s been annoying.

The other weekend, however, I noticed that Costco was selling 2TB external drives for $119, which is pretty crazy, so I bought one and now I had a backup device but no method of automatic backup.

Enter rsync. This humble little command line tool is the darling of lifehacker, and while I’d never used it I was fairly sure it would work.

This is where I realize that I’ve painted myself into a corner, writing-wise, because I don’t have much to say. I rsynced one drive to another, I added some files to the first drive, ran rsync again and it copied over the new files without doing a full copy again, so it pretty much worked without drama.

My only problem is that I can’t seem to make the –delete switch work; if I understand it properly it should remove files from the second drive as they’re removed from the first but I don’t seem to be able to make it happen. I’ll figure it out eventually.

So, when she made me read a blog called “Hyperbole and a Half”, it was a pretty unusual thing, and it was even more unusual when I found a post that made me decide that I should actually get off my butt and get some stuff done before school starts (in a week).

So, today I managed to get all the stuff from the “shred this” bin shredded (and, I will admit, there was stuff in there from 2008 that still needed to be shredded, and that had actually been MOVED twice), called not one but TWO banks to get assorted financial things sorted out, paid the car insurance, did some address updates that should have been done when we moved four months ago, and dove into the closet in my office and did some organizing.

Then I made a BIG decision, which was to find a place where the shredder could be plugged in permanently and then to get rid of the “shred this” bin.  It doesn’t make any sense to have a bin to hold stuff that needs to be shredded when I could just be shredding it as needed and avoid having to destroy nearly 2 years worth of paper at once, especially because I burned out one shredder halfway through the project and had to go spend $40 on a new one.

Oh, and I took out the trash, except for the two bags of shredded paper that won’t fit in it and that will need to go out over the next couple of weeks.

So, I didn’t clean ALL the things, or actually do much cleaning at all, but it was one of those days that made me feel like I’d actually been an adult for a little while, which is not in the least mitigated by having her sit down with me for an hour and a half while we finished Assassin’s Creed II together.  More on ACII in a day or two.

We’re learning that being in a house instead of an apartment comes with all kinds of exciting changes… stuff like dealing with electricians, plumbers, buying a new washer & dryer… fun stuff.  On the plus side, though, we do have a) more room in the new place and b) less stuff since we did some heavy purging before we moved, so the effect is c) things look pretty good on the organizational front.  There’s an organization tip for you:  To make more room, throw out like 20% of your stuff.

Anyway, I treated myself to an Xbox 360 game to celebrate our new digs.

Gamestop had this behind the counter.  I can’t fathom why.

(Thumbnailed for those unfortunate enough to be at work)

Oh, right.  Girls, sausages, unfortunate ice cream accidents, that sort of thing.  No actual hanky-panky, mind you, Microsoft isn’t desperate enough for sales to allow that sort of game to be put on the 360.  It’s awfully suggestive but that’s all.

Anyway, the infamous jubblie mousepad:  It’s actually quite good wrist support if you use a trackball.  I don’t think it would be very good for your wrist if you used a mouse, though, because the effect of it is to trap your wrist in place.

I’ll give the game a shot here soon enough.  What I’ve heard is that it’s a cross of a strategy RPG and a relationship sim, with a touch of a Phantasy Star III-style generation system.  Might be fun.

I haven’t quite got the knack of packing everything I own up into boxes and moving it all in one trip.  This move, like our last, has been a constant stream of boxes being packed, moved, sometimes unpacked and the boxes emptied for another trip.  This is nice because it lets us save money on boxes and because it means that we’re able to take it slow.  On the other hand, it’s not especially good practice for making a Serious Move if we ever have to make one of those.

Our last move used two 10-foot U-hauls, one 14-foot U-haul, and an awful lot of back-and-forth in our little Mazda hatchback.  This move so far has taken one 10-foot U-haul, will probably take one more 10 or 14-foot U-haul for the last couple Big Heavy Things, and will also necessitate renting a van to move the TV.  We’re moving out of this apartment, a year after moving into it, with a lot less stuff, which is a good feeling.

One particular goal I mentioned here about a year ago was to thin out the comics collection dramatically, and I’ve managed that.  We moved into this apartment with 22 longboxes of comics (and three or four shortboxes of silver age or odd-format comics) and we’re moving out with eleven shortboxes worth.  A very very small part of that reduction in space was selling some of the silver age comics to a local shop.  The majority has come from opening boxes of comics, deciding what we absolutely want to keep, and taking the remaining comics out of their protective bags – complete with acid-free-backing-boards – and tossing them into the apartment complex’s recycling bin.  I’m guessing that I’ve sent about 3000 comics off to be turned into tomorrow’s newspaper, and even if we only spent a couple of bucks per it’s still pretty depressing.

Hmm.  That would be blues, I suppose, but it doesn’t properly reflect my mental state.

Anyway, bitching aside, there are a bunch of upsides to moving.  For one, I get to pretend that this time, this move, we’re going to wind up with a place to live in which everything Has A Place and everything is In Its Proper Place.  I know it won’t ACTUALLY work out that way, but for now I can have my illusions.

Also, we’re moving from an apartment into a house.  I got to walk through our new backyard yesterday, after paying some Neighborhood Youths to cut the grass, and marvel at the fact that I was walking through a backyard, with a fence all around it dividing Our Space from Our Neighbors’ Spaces.  It was a pretty neat feeling.

And, it is a bigger place than we have now.  There’s less closet space, I think, but the only reason we need closets is to stick Stuff in them and forget about it, and I’m trying to eliminate that, so it might actually be an upside.

My wife has a great space for her home office, and I have been allocated a room for my mancave that I am turning into a Thing of Beauty.  Once it’s all set up, I will post gloating pictures, and everyone can see them and say things like “what’s the big deal?  It’s just a room full of fanboy crap.”

But it will be glorious.

I’ve also been playing through the Orange Box, starting with Half Life 2.  I first played HL2 courtesy of Valve’s port to the original Xbox and quite enjoyed it, but going through it again on a modern PC in a decent resolution with all the pretty effects is ALMOST like playing a brand new game.

That having been said, the vehicle segments are annoying me more this time; I just want them to end.  I’ve decided that I’m going to play through the Episodes for the first time after finishing HL2, and I’ve been warned that Episode 2, at least, is full of annoying vehicle segments, so I approach it with just a touch of trepidation.