Tag: video

Avoidance behaviour, or, wanted: video RSS feeds

I’m avoiding doing paper work for work, and chapter edits for the MythTV book by writing a video aggregator. I have Media RSS feeds working, and normal RSS 2.0 with enclosures working. I have two questions:

  • Are there any other feed formats I should worry about?
  • What are some good (as in not horribly boring) feeds that I should now watch?

That’s right, I built the aggregator, before I had anything to aggregate. Now I have this hammer, and must hit things with it… I’ll talk more about the aggregator itself when I’ve done a little more testing, but I think it’s pretty cool.

ScobleShow only available as MP4?

I’ve been playing with a new video aggregator (more details later!), and wanted some content, so I headed over to scobleshow.com. I’m disappointed to see that the videos only appear to be available as MP4s, and that the feed doesn’t use anything but enclosures — I was hoping for something nicer like Media RSS which would let him have content in lots of other formats.

It just seems silly to me that if I watch a video on a laptop or a television, that it has to be encoded for an iPod… Especially if he’s using a nice high resolution camera, and then throwing all those extra pixels out…

Transcoding using MythTV and the PSP

I’ve been working on getting nuvexport to transcode my MythTV recordings to PSP in my spare time for the last couple of days and I think I am getting closer. I had to hack some of the nuvexport perl, and at least I now have all of the packages installed (would you believe that nuvexport doesn’t tell you what packages are missing?). I think that my final problem — which is that the video doesn’t work on the PSP. I suspect it has something to do with the ffmpeg command line. Check this out:

    Starting ffmpeg: /usr/bin/nice -n19 ffmpeg -f rawvideo -s 720x480 \
-r 29.9700298309326 -i /tmp/fifodir_24287/vidout -f yuv4mpegpipe - \
2> /dev/null | /usr/bin/nice -n19 yuvdenoise 2> /dev/null | \
/usr/bin/nice -n19 ffmpeg -threads 2 -y -f s16le -ar 48000 -ac 2 \
-i /tmp/fifodir_24287/audout -f yuv4mpegpipe -s 720x480 \
-aspect 1.33333333333333 -r 29.9700298309326 -i - -aspect 1.3333 \
-r 14.985 -deinterlace -croptop 10 -cropbottom 10 -cropleft 14 \
-cropright 14 -s 320x240  -b 768 -bufsize 65535 -ab 32 -acodec aac \
-f psp -title 'The Simpsons - The Sweetest Apu' \
'/data/psp/The Simpsons - The Sweetest Apu.MP4'

I’ll keep you posted on when I get it working.

The What-If-Microsoft-Did-The-iPod-Box video done by Microsoft

Microsoft spokesman Tom Pilla on Tuesday confirmed with iPod Observer that his company initiated the creation of the iPod packaging parody video that was first reported last month. “It was an internal-only video clip commissioned by our packaging [team] to humorously highlight the challenges we have faced RE: packaging and to educate marketers here about the pitfalls of packaging/branding,” he said via e-mail.

I originally mentioned the video here, but that version of the video has gone away, and you can now find the video here.

Tomcat first flight tribute video

A tribute video to the Tomcat, which will be retired from the US air force in September this year. Highlights include: footage of the first flight (December 21 1970), the first hydraulic failure (December 30, 1970), the first ejection (December 30 1970) and the first crash landing (December 30 1970). It seems December 30 was a bad day to be flying.