Today has been one of those days at work where I look at the state of my savings account, look at my frequent flyer miles, and try to calculate how long my wife and I could live in a capsule hotel in Osaka if we ate at gyuudon restaurants and combini for every meal.
Right now, the answer is about six months.
But, they don’t take cats, also the whole student loans thing.
Oh, well.
A co-worker waylaid me with a question this morning.
Pointing at her computer monitor, she asked me “Can you read German?”
I looked at the screen, and it was plainly in German, but beyond that basic conclusion it was pretty incomprehensible.
So I said, “I’m sorry, high school German was a long time ago.”
and this didn’t seem enough, for some reason, so after a pause I added “in high school”.
this I thought was a little bit ridiculous, so after another pause I added “which was a good time to take high school classes I suppose.”
I don’t think I helped my case at any point.
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. 🙂
It’s only been a few days since I got the mad idea to wage war on the AVI format by converting every such file on my server to nice AppleTV-friendly .m4vs and then importing them into iTunes to add art and do some basic tagging.
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. 🙂
It’s not exactly news by now, but Sony is in the process of moving its current flagship fantasy MMO, Everquest 2, from its strictly pay-to-play (with a side server on f2p) status to a fully f2p game, allowing the Unwashed Masses on the same servers as the Loyal And Long Suffering Customers Who Are Being Slapped In The Face Or Punched In The Gut, At Least If You Believe Forum Posts.
This is pretty good news if you happen to want to try out a massively fleshed-out MMORPG with huge freaking swathes of content, and sets the bar pretty high for future entrants into the f2p marketplace. It should also be great for the population; right now the game is hopelessly top-heavy on most servers and I would be hesitant to recommend it to anyone starting from scratch. F2P should mean lots of lower level people for new players to group with, and even if 9 in 10 of those quit before making it past 50, that’s still a influx of new blood that the game hasn’t seen in ages.
It’s less good for long-time players who are decrying the Impending Noob Apocalypse or doing the math on what it would cost to convert their accounts from month-to-month billing (what Sony calls “Gold” membership) to the pay-as-you-go “Silver” or “Free” plans.
For example, I have three characters and only one of them is a class/race combination that’s available for free. I’d need to pay $5 to unlock all the races and $5 to unlock all the classes so I could log the other two characters in. Fortunately, the Silver membership that I’m getting as a perk of being a current subscriber gives me three character slots, so I’m good there – nothing to buy!
Then, well, I’m kitted out in rather a lot of raid gear of the sort that you can’t equip as a free player, so I’d need to spend 30 cents per item for about 20 items.
So, after paying 16 bucks, I’d be able to use my current primary character for free from now on, and another few bucks would get Most Favored Alt up to speed, and after only a couple of months I’d actually start breaking even.
Now, if I wanted to switch main characters to Most Favored Alt, who just happens to be both a free race AND a free class, I’d only be out a few bucks to equip his few pieces of raid gear and then good to go from there.
I’m actually in a pretty good spot to consider this. If I happened to have 7 characters all kitted out in high end gear… Well, but I don’t and that’s a good thing. This plan definitely isn’t for those folks. 🙂
The other thing is that this is reminding me that I really ought to give DCUO a shot now that it’s F2P. It’s got to be worth at least an evening’s mucking about.
…but even having said that, there was a distinct problem with the “Classic Movies” category available on my recent United flight back from overseas:
I’m going to rank this somewhere between “faith in humanity failing” and “well, civilization has had a nice run, don’t forget to turn off the lights and lock up when you leave”
This blog has been a bit anglo-centric of late and I’m not making apologies for that; my wife and I spent a very enjoyable two weeks in the UK and it was a trip that consumed a lot of our attention for several months beforehand.
That said, I ought to get one big rambly post out of the way and then get on with what people really want to read about if my referral links are to be believed, which is mostly Pokemon characters in compromising positions.
That is tarring my readers with a rather wide brush, so I will relent a bit. You may be perverts, but you have a much wider range of interests than simply Pokemon.
But I digress.
Anyway, the first week of our trip was spent in London and I’m very glad for that. It’s probably the city that I’ve been in with the greatest sense of History-with-a-capital-H; Kyoto is just as old but doesn’t go in quite as much for slapping dates on everything. There’s something about wandering through Westminster Abbey, for example, and looking down to see that the memorial slab you’re standing on has a barely-visible date in the 1500s, and for a guy who went to college to study languages, there’s a particular impact to walking into the British Museum and coming face-to-face with the freakin’ Rosetta Stone.
Then too, if you happened to be a member of the idle rich and wanted to spend every night of your life attending operas or plays or concerts or what have you, London would be an excellent city to do it in. The buses and subways are lined with posters for upcoming events and performances, and even if some of them are in questionable taste there’s something to be said for quantity.
…OK, perhaps there are SOME lines humanity was not meant to cross…
But, putting aside the history and the culture, the great thing about London is that it’s full of all the things that you really want to see when you visit the UK. You’ve got your red double-decker buses, your black cabs, your Changing Of The Guard, takeaway fish and chips, a Big Damned Clocktower, a Biggest Damned Ferris Wheel, Piccadilly Circus lit up in neon, Harrods covered in lights, the Tube, Forbidden Planet, congestion fees, economical Vauxhall saloons, the occasional Reliant Robin still running about in the wild, the rare thrill of seeing an Aston Martin gliding by…
…It is possible that I have watched too much Top Gear.
But I did see a Reliant Robin, though it wasn’t in the process of being shot into space by three guys with more explosives than common sense:
On the other hand, it is a staggeringly expensive city to be a tourist in, there’s no two ways about it. I have spent a fair bit of time in Tokyo, which people call an expensive place to visit, and there is no comparing the two. It is unfortunately very easy to look at a price tag, think “well, that’s not too expensive”, and order, say, a 2.50 diet coke before you do the mental math and realize you’re paying 4 dollars for 8 ounces of cola, and a taxi ride you pay for with a single 20 pound note likewise seems quite reasonable until you do the maths.
It is also tremendously inconvenient if you are out for a day’s shopping and have no place to put your parcels, as there seem to be no coin lockers anywhere. To be fair, coin lockers have largely disappeared from the American landscape as well; the usual excuse given is “terrorism” but I couldn’t help but notice the plethora of “left luggage” services who would be happy to hold your items at 7 pounds per bag per day.
That, and the city shuts down almost entirely at 7 o’clock at night. That’s not an exaggeration; the shops and attractions close their doors and bring down the metal shutters at just about the time where things are getting going in, say, Los Angeles.
This is probably a boon if you happen to live in London and want to get off work at 5 and go down the pub by 6 and stay there the rest of the night, but if you are a tourist visiting London you should be aware that you will not get a full day’s worth of London out of any given day.
Also, the Tube, while very cool, tended to have a bad history of having stations out of order or down for construction or possibly on fire over the week we were trying to make use of it.
So there were some bits that were less fun than others, but I’m still going to give the city as a whole a B+. Do something about the shop hours and the general reliability of public transport and that’s looking more like an A- which is a pretty good place to be in my book.
My war on AVI is going astonishingly well, thanks to a piece of software called ffmpeg and a few minutes spend writing batch files.
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 do apologize in advance; this is the sort of childish humor I don’t normally like to lower myself to but it made me giggle like, well, a child seeing something a little naughty when I saw it and I am now going to share it with you.
Westminster Bridge spans the Thames in London, with Big Ben and Parliment at one end and a whole mess of touristy stuff at the other. I like to imagine that the railings were designed by a very serious man, who took great pride in his work and was thoroughly satisfied to see the bridge completed.
Then I like to imagine him walking across the bridge at just the right time of day, looking down, and then smacking himself on the forehead.
Many years ago, when I was a small child, I remember watching and enjoying episodes of Dr. Who on PBS. This was episodes from the Tom Baker years, with the improbable scarf and the robot dog and sets made from the finest cardboard. I loved the robot dog.
I have never gone back to re-watch these episodes, because I think that it’s probably one of those shows best experienced through hazy childhood memories, or by actually being a child.
So a few years ago, when I became vaguely aware that there was a new Doctor Who series on the air, I didn’t exactly run out and start watching it. I did catch an episode late one night while riding a stationary bike in the exercise room of my apartment complex, and it made no bloody sense whatsoever.
For the record, it was “World War III”, and I came into it about 10 minutes late. If you are a Doctor Who fan, I recommend going back to that episode, fast forwarding to about 10 minutes in, pretending that you do not know who any of the characters are, and trying to follow along.
Some while later, a friend gave us the first four seasons of the show to watch, and I made it through the first two episodes before putting it aside for later. I had the vague sense that I should probably watch it eventually because it was getting an awful lot of attention, but I didn’t have any real motivation to do so.
Then, we started planning a trip to the UK and were trying to plan some touristy things to do, and my wife ran across a mention of a Dr. Who-themed attraction, which sounded neat in a geeky sort of way but that also didn’t sound like it would make much sense without actually seeing the new stuff, so we went back to season 1, episode 3, and started watching from there, putting in a couple of episodes a night.
This meant that we caught up to the currently airing shows with only 3 episodes left in season 6, which was pretty good timing inasmuch as our departure for the UK was only a week after the end of season 6 was to air. This is a pretty good way to watch the show, in my opinion, because while it turned out to be quite fun to watch when taken as a whole it does have some terribly, terribly bad episodes. If I’d been watching it week-to-week, I’m not sure I would have made it through the Daleks-meet-1920s-showgirls episode, just as a for-instance.
What genuinely surprises me about Dr. Who is not just that it’s quite popular in the US, but that it seems to have become the king of the hill when it comes to science fiction. Part of this, I think, is that Paramount did its level best to run Star Trek into the ground before giving it some well-deserved time off, the Star Wars franchise is under the thumb of a maniac who is trying to run it into the ground and shows no sign of giving it any time off, and Stargate, well, Stargate had a good run and then the producers looked at the numbers the new Battlestar Galactica got and we got Universe, which was one of those shows where running it into the ground might have been a mercy had it happened sooner.
That’s not to say that there are no good sci-fi or fantasy shows from this country. Fringe and Supernatural come to mind, but Fringe is, for all its weirdness, relatively grounded; alternate Earth may have dirigibles and buildings trapped in amber but it’s still modern Earth and Supernatural started off as a monster-of-the-week show and has gone on to dance a merry jig through the weirder bits of the Old Testament.
When it comes to flying about in space, meeting aliens and blowing stuff up, the mantle seems to have been, well, ceded rather than formally passed I suppose, but passed to a quirky British show about a man in a blue box abducting innocent bystanders and trying to get them killed.
Or, in the case of Rory, turning them from a helpless geek into concentrated Awesome.
PS: The robot dog has been back a couple of times and I cannot properly express how annoying he is now, which is just another indication that I should not go back and try to relive my youth by watching the old stuff.
Baud Attitude 