There aren't enough hours in a day... I've been poking with video editing, which is surprisingly quick, but still slow to do the actual splicing together of files. I guess I probably shouldn't be editing video and authoring dvds over network file systems, but I needed more disc space, and my laptop's the one with the editing software (and definitely not enough space for video on here). Maybe once I get more stuff out to dvd and have the space on one machine... Speaking of which, I ordered a 200 pack of DVD-Rs. They even play in the xbox, which is cool since apparently that has problems a lot. My test disc has played in every player I've tried it in...

So, they type of video editing I want to do is actually easier under linux than Windows. I'm rather happy about that. I found this cool program called GOPchop which basically allows you to visually edit an MPEG2 file. You can use a slider for big jumps, and when you get close use next and previous buttons to jump between GOPs (generally the I-frames). Then you just specify whether it's a start or stop point, and once they're all in the list of clips export and you have an edited video. I took an hour long recording of music videos from TV, and had a specific video pulled out and saved in about 2 minutes. Combined with the fact that authoring DVDs is extremely easy too, I just need my burner supported under linux now. At least I just have to select the .iso and choose burn and that's it... Now to just get all these other recordings edited and burned to DVD... Tonight I watched the rest of Speed 2 since the DVD was incomplete last time. I'd have to say that movie is OK but not all that great. Speaking of recording DVDs though, I found a decent blank which seems to be compatible with every drive I've put it in. Now to just make a bulk order...

Long, but actually rather relaxing day. Got up barely in time to make it to church, and then afterwards the family went to Applebee's for Father's Day lunch. After that my dad and I played with my projector and mounting options to the ceiling upstairs in the living room for next weekend. There ends the useful stuff. I spent most of the afternoon/evening watching tons of recorded from TV stuff, including many shows of Star Trek: TNG, The Simpsons, a Knight Rider, and skimming through a few movies that didn't look interesting enough that I even remember what they were anymore. Then for some reason pulled out The Net and watched that. Pretty decent movie I guess. VCD (yes, it's legit - you can buy them legally from Malaysia, or at least you could a couple years ago as they were the equivalent of VHS there) definitely isn't DVD, but still blows away VHS and compares to TV. Especially if it's real one that's the full quality, and you don't kill it by non running component video... Now I think it's time to go to bed before I find out if NIS+ is gonna stay up tonight... Tomorrow it's time to see about the temperature of the server. Apparently it starts flaking out somewhere about 80F (it's an old machine that's been meant to be replaced for a few years now), and the server room's been getting close to that lately (we're trying to figure out why the AC can't keep up - it's set for 68F and seems to be running continuously, but we're told it's working right). Might need to take the cover off and try to get more airflow around it...

Been trying to figure out why the dvd authoring programs were ending early. It turns out that apparently if you put tcexctract and mplex at too low of a priority they get upset and just abort early. I now have a 3.4GB iso that was 1.95GB before. I think the movie ended sooner than close to the end too... Been tweaking a bit too. Going off current figures, it also looks like I can push up the average bitrate from 4.5Mbps to 5.5Mbps and still fit a 3 hour movie on a DVD. I'm sorta questioning how accurate this listing of bitrate is as well - I think it's using a semi-vbr over a few seconds and actually uses a slightly lower rate. Anyways, hopefully that'll help high motion a bit (the only place it seems to run into problems that degrade it from cable quality anyways, and artifacts are pretty easy to spot since my screen is so big)... Unfortunately changing bitrate currently requires a driver recompile so I can't bump it up. I'll have to look at how long most of my recordings are now that I'm not planning on keeping them on the local drive for very long even if I don't get around to watching them quickly (they'll go on either DVD or DDS tape). Maybe I can bump up the bitrate even more...

So NIS+ took a nosedive again... Only this time it took NFS with it. Which took any other server which was trying to do stuff over NFS down with it. And some of those servers didn't want to let me in, so I had to be a little more persuasive with them... I'm sleeping in tomorrow, so I hope everything is working right now, or we'll find out tomorrow afternoon - two nights in a row is enough without adding in another morning too. Otherwise the day went pretty well. Chipotle for lunch, enough different things throughout the day, and then went over to Jeff's to watch Tears of the Sun - it's an OK movie. So the day was going well, just unfortunately ended rather poorly. And to top it off I'm very tired. Oh well, there's always tomorrow...

Well, I thought today was going pretty well... Great China for lunch, Dave and left early and went to go see the $3.75 showing of The Italian Job. Then I get home and drop in a DVD of Speed 2 I recorded off TV. Turns out either the burner machine hit the 2GB file limit or I didn't actually have a full recording, since it cut off near the end... So I wander back over to the computer to discover that Bethel's NIS+ server crashed again (taking down pretty much every unix service). And the guy that knows how it works is two states away and his cell phone is off... And I'm sorta the backup person, but since we're getting rid of NIS+ very soon and I'm just starting as the backup person, I wasn't gonna even bother to learn it/get trained on it... I guess I got a crash course taught by myself since everything's up now (I think). Email servers are struggling under the load a bit (the load spiked at over 200 on one - you can't expect to effectively shut off email to a college for 2+ hours and not have a huge flood when you turn it back on), and I had to manually give MIMEDefang a kick in the butt on one of them. Of course that machine was the one that's normally stable, and I had been given a warning that the other one may give me minor hastles since it has possible hardware issues, so I wanted to get the "good" box back on it's feet rather than depend on the redundant box. Not exactly the way I expected to spend my night... Oh well, Jeff is back from Canada so we're going to lunch tomorrow, which will force a bit of a break no matter what the fallout from the nscd bomb ends up being...

For some reason I've noticed a few kernel panics on my pvr machine lately. Usually when I have the load sitting at 10 or something for a while, but I suppose I should probably go and find out what they are. I have a feeling it's something with the ivtv driver. :( I tested my DVD of the MTV Movie Awards on an iMac at work today, and it works nicely. That means that the cheap media seems to have no problems being played on any player I'd use, which I'm not gonna argue with. I also may end up with a DDS2 drive and a whole box of tapes for free, which would be a pretty cool way to archive video stuff (a DDS2 tape is rather similar in uncompressed size to a DVD). DDS tapes are pretty small, and a ton of them could be stored in a tiny area. They have a cool mechanism that effectively seals them up when they're out of the drive (covers both sides of the tape, the sprocket holes, pretty much everything), which means you don't really need cases either. Too many tech toys...

I took apart my DVD player and upgraded the firmware of the DVD drive in it, and now it reads DVD-Rs. It still doesn't like DVD-RWs, but as long as the DVD-Rs work well I'm happy. Seems the DVD I burned didn't work in a DVD/CD-RW drive in an iMac at work, but that might be something with that specific disc. I converted a couple quicktime movies from my dad's camera to a DVD on a DVD-RW since he wanted to show some people a couple races from the state track meet. Those people were all over for some sort of party that my sister was throwing (I'm not sure there was a reason). It was sorta weird to come driving home and wonder why there are cars lined up on both sides of the street around the bend, and realise that they go all the way to your house and in front of your house looks like a parking lot... Anyways, the whole thing means I got to play with DVD authoring software a bit. Hopefully that means tomorrow morning I'll have a nicely edited DVD of the 2003 MTV Movie Awards waiting for me... Gotta love technology. :) I need to find better tools though. If you know of any let me know... I'm pretty sure there's a GUI tool for linux that does what I want, I just need to track it down (I can already author the DVD and do chapters and stuff if it's just an mpeg file or multiple mpeg files). Basically I need a splicer to strip out commercials and also accurately find places to do chapter breaks. The problem with most of the DVD programs is they re-encode, which since I already have compatible MPEG2 coming from the hardware encoder is a waste of time and also looses quality. Oh well, I got a lot done. Now I just need to get up on time tomorrow morning...

DVD-R "sample pack" arrived today. I discovered that the mpg output of the PVR-250 hardware encoder isn't quite right for encoding to DVD however. Luckily it's not a problem with the encoding itself, so pulling apart the video and audio streams and remultiplexing them is enough to fix it. I now have a script using tcextract, mplex, dvdauthor, and mkisofs to take any input mpeg file and build an iso file which I can then burn to DVD. I also discovered there's some incompatibilites with my DVD burner under linux, so the burner itself is now in my dad's machine. Our network can easily handle streaming the DVD iso though, so it's not really a big deal. And I'm sure he'll appreciate the fast CD-R burner that he can use for a while too. So far I burned a recording of Back to the Future III to DVD-RW and threw it in my parent's DVD player and it was awesome. It's only a 32" TV but the quality still looked pretty good. My player doesn't like DVD-RWs, so it's now burning to DVD-R and we'll see how it goes. Maybe if these keep going well I'll bump up the average bitrate again too, to eliminate a bit more of the MPEG compression artifacting. Now to just find a quick and easy way to edit out the commercials and pick good chapter break spots...

The graduation went OK, and I didn't have to video too much of it. We had to do pictures once we got home though, and I don't think my dad liked the fact that I took like 100 pictures in a few minutes so he had to download them all to the computer before going to hit the graduation parties. I skipped those even though I was invited to a few, since I didn't really know the people (although apparently they invited me specifically - seemed a little odd). Instead I redid some of the coax in my room to eliminate one run of coax down the hall and instead use some of the stuff I fished through the ceiling/walls a few weeks back. I managed to make the raw non-computer video look decent on the projector too - I think there might have been a very slightly loose connection somewhere in there. I watched the second half or so of the MTV Movie Awards, and while they were sorta funny, I have to agree with Gollum's "MTV Sucks" quote. I also jumped through the first half (I love digital video and jumping through an hour and a half of video in a way you can see what you're doing in about 2 minutes) and watched Yoda's speech which was funny but didn't have quite the um, impact as Gollum's. Then my brother and I broke out the Courage Under Fire laserdisc as somehow neither of us had actually seen that movie before. Good story, good effects. They did some odd cuts though - it was weird for him to be in the middle of an interview that's quiet and stuff, and you feel the impact of the helicopter rotors and gunfire right before they cut to the war footage as a memory since they cut the sound before the video. Kept you in suspense until the end though - I guess I'd have to recommend it.