1. Open up iMovie
2. Go to “File > Import from Camera” or the click big camera button under the Project Library pane
3. Click the “Archive All” button beside “Camera: Sony HDR-XR150″
4. Choose a location to save the entire contents of your camera (I use portable hard drives)

After doing this, you’ll have a “Camera Archive Folder” where you can import movies into iMovie for your editing pleasure.

Screenshot of iMovie and the Archive All button

I remember a couple years back when people scoffed at the idea of SVG 1.2 containing a <video> element. The argument went something like “SVG is for Vector Graphics so that’s ALL it should do – how dare you!”. Meanwhile, Macromedia had been expanding its reach in areas of streaming media and HTML was stagnating.

Now, thanks to the WHATWG, HTML is undergoing a rejuvenation of sorts. Version 5 of everyone’s favourite HyperText markup language is likely to contain a <video> element, an <audio> element, a Canvas object and other non-hypertext related things.

Anyway, those guys at Opera have released an experimental build of Opera 9.5 that supports not only HTML video but SVG video too.

What’s fascinating about video inside SVG is that you can do a lot with it. It’s just another region of graphics to the “SVG engine” so you can scale it, shear it, flip it, apply filters to it, put graphics on top of it, etc. Some of their demos are really cool. Like this reflect one. And oh yeah, this Trace Edges one (check out the greyscale too). Can Flash do that? (I honestly don’t know).

I’d like to make a screencast of this so that the truly lazy among you could see the effects without downloading it – but that requires me to re-install the screencasting software – and you really should just go and download it for yourselves anyway.

Now I’ve noted some problems just with these two demos yesterday: In one instance, I couldn’t get the video to stop playing, even though I had closed the tab or navigated away from it (in other words, the audio was still audible) However, I’m sure these kinks will be worked out before the final version of Opera ships.

Go Opera!

Chad Vader Season 1

• Episode 1
• Episode 2
• Episode 3
• Episode 4
• Episode 5
• Episode 6
• Episode 7
• Episode 8

Chad Vader Video Blogs

• Vlog 1
• Vlog 2
• Vlog 3
• Vlog 4

Chad Vader Music Video

• “Chocolate Rain” Video

I like how the last episode of Season 1 and the video blogs set up the major plots for Season 2. I’m looking forward to it!

Below is the results of pointing Opera 9.5 Alpha 1 at my Web Statistics page that I made a year and a half ago with SVG and JavaScript. The SVG features several layered path elements of more than 650 data points each with slidable and sizable scrollbars. The performance of Opera 9.5 is about the best there is. If you can put up with the crappy resolution of YouTube, here’s an example of me playing around:

Of course, I’m pretty happy with Opera 9.5′s improved SVG support – it now surpasses all other SVG viewers out there in terms of SVG Test Suite pass/fail scores. There are some more interesting SVG features included (SVG as CSS background-image, SVGT 1.2 features) that I’ll likely be playing with in the next little while.

Note that this is still an Alpha build and such, should be treated as such. While the rendering and scrolling of pages seems really snappy, I’ve noticed when running through the SVG test suite that occasionally pages would “stick” (can’t think of another word for it – they wouldn’t finish loading). Sometimes the loading would eventually finish (a PNG or SVG object would finally load) after some time, but other times I would have to force a reload of the page a couple of times to get it. It’s one of those wrinkles I expect will get ironed out before final release.

And yay, finally ALT-D will focus the Location Bar in all four browsers (IE, Firefox, Safari and now Opera). Guess those guys do listen!

Caught a whiff of this from Robert Scoble. Go watch some vloggers in a contest to make a music video and then vote for your favourites (each IP address is allowed 2 votes). My favourites:

• Irina’s Deathmatch Rap
• “Video Killed The Radio Star” spoof
• “Ironic” spoof
• “Anarchy In The Uk”
• Stepcats

And if you’re one of those who aren’t sure what a “video blog” is supposed to be or do, go watch this awesomeness and tell me you aren’t fired up about it by the end…

Dev Opera Article #3 up

Go read my latest article about SVG on Dev.Opera. It deals with SVG filters so I recommend using the Opera Web Browser (or recent Firefox 3 Trunk builds). You can comment here.

Slacker vs. Geek vs. Cool Chick

The PC vs. Mac commercials are probably the most parodied series of commercials ever, now here are some from Novell that add a twist. Many may have already caught these videos on the Novell site, but I thought I’d post the YouTube links because they’re a little easier to get at (and the audio has less of a hiss to it):

• Clip 1
• Clip 2
• Clip 3

Putting the hardware vs. software comparisons aside for a minute, my wife and I both liked these commercials (especially since I was watching them on a OpenSUSE 10.2 box). It figures that Linux would be friendly, savvy and somewhat hot chick.

Character Map on OpenSuse

Speaking of Linux, I was typing up some genealogy information on my OpenSUSE 10.2 box and could not find the equivalent “Character Map” application that Windows has at Start > Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Character Map to copy some characters like é and ï and to my clipboard. Can someone put me on the clue train? If there is no such application – how do people type those characters on a standard US-English keyboard?

[Update: Rob let me know below about the Gnome Character Map (Suse package in YaST is "gucharmap") and I've now installed it]

Snowstorm in April

It’s snowing today in the north-west Chicago suburbs. On April 11th, 2007. And not just a little flurry, more like the everything is covered in snow and it’s still coming down kind. What is up with the weather?

Winer on Graham on Microsoft

For the most part, I agree with what Dave Winer says about Microsoft here. Maybe not “dead” but largely “irrelevant” for a lot of people. On the other hand, I think Paul Graham is living in a little too insular a bubble if he rarely comes across a Windows box. And if you’re a web developer you still have to deal with the fact that most of the deployed browsers out there are Microsoft browsers, despite all the other great, standards-comforming, free browsers available.

I’ve set up a Myth box (acting as both backend and frontend). Currently I’m running Suse 10.2 and I have my video and audio cards connected to my entertainment center (TV and stereo receiver) via a long string of S-Video and AV cables. It’s not the best setup – I actually need the cables to be about 6 feet longer to actually be something I could permanently use without clotheslining people who walk into my office. But that’s not the problem I’m trying to solve right now.

My two primary problems are:

1. I want to be able to control my PC from the family room. I want to be able to use the mouse, arrow keys and the Enter key at a bare minimum – but any solution that offers a full keyboard would also be cool. The solution absolutely must must must support Linux. Now the hard part: The computer is out of sight in another room about 30 feet away. Any solution will have to be able to connect to that box from that distance. For instance, standard IR solutions would require the IR receiver (mounted on top of the entertainment center) to be able to reach my PC in another room – that’s one long USB cable! Bonus points if I don’t have to use a soldering gun…
   [Update 2007-03-02: As noted here, I ended up purchasing the SnapStream Firefly PC Remote which so-far works beautifully.]
2. I’m having an audio sync issue with MPlayer. The video starts out playing normally and then eventually the audio drifts away from the video within a minute or two. I think it only happens on videos that I captured from my VCR and turned into MPEGs. I’ve found that adjusting the -fps option can help, but this has to be done with every file, and I’m not sure it’s a permanent fix. Also, if I backup or fast-forward in MPlayer, the audio immediately gets back in sync with the video. Anyone experience this? Anyone know an easy fix? Anyone know of another command-line video player that I can hook Myth up to? This problem does not happen to me when I try PowerDVD in Windows…
   [Update 2007-02-19: I installed Xine and used that - I haven't seen an audio-video sync issue yet, so this problem is now solved!]

Though I don’t relish another device that must be powered on 24×7, I think a basic, networked front-end PC using a entertainment center form-factor would probably be the best match for my ideal setup (solving both the cabling and remote-control issues, to a degree). But it would have to be almost an order-of-magnitude cheaper than this, quiet and green-friendly. Any suggestions down that route would be appreciated also.

MythVideo uses MPlayer to play its videos. The command-line option for MPlayer to play a M3U playlist is -playlist <file.pls>. The trick here is to convince MythVideo to invoke MPlayer with this option when referencing a playlist file.

Step By Step

• Bring up the Myth front-end (run “mythfrontend&”)
• Navigate to Setup > Videos Settings > File Types:
  
• Select the “New” button
  
• Enter “pls” as the new extension and select the “Create new extension” button
• Navigate to the Command box and type in “mplayer -fs -playlist %s”. Make sure you uncheck the “Use default player” checkbox
  
• Select the “Done” button

Now escape back to the Myth home menu and go to “Videos”, select “Video List” and find a playlist file (this is a plain text file that has one video listed per line and ends in .pls). Once it’s selected, your playlist should start playing in order.

This thing is kind of nice if you’re a movie-goer freak and, for instance, want to set up a “movie night” such that a cartoon and/or comedy short is played before the “main feature”. It would also be worthwhile if you’re into music videos or maybe you want to watch all the Lost or Twin Peaks episodes in chronological order without ever having to touch your remote/keyboard/mouse. By the way, to skip ahead one video file, press the “>” key (on my keyboard I have to press Shift and the period key to do this),

Shuffling A Video Playlist

Now I wanted to take this a step further and actually randomize the playlist every time it plays.

A ways back, I wrote a quick awk script to shuffle a playlist file. Nothing fancy or terribly efficient, but it works:

Save the above file as /usr/bin/shuffle and ensure it has executable permissions (“chmod +x shuffle”). You’ll need to be root for that.

So to make a playlist that shuffles every time before playing, I followed the same Myth directions I gave above but I created a new File type (“.spl” for Shuffled PlayList). This time, the Command I want MythVideo to run for a Shuffled PlayList is:

Rename your playlists to have the .spl extension and MythVideo should randomize them every time they are played. WARNING: Backup your playlist files and use a copy if you decide to do this, since the shuffled playlist overwrites itself with every play there’s some minimal risk that a burp in the system could cause you to lose your playlist.

Update 2007-02-18: To use xine instead of MPlayer (which I now do), you have to use a slightly different command:

On the next page, for the curious, I’ll describe how the above works in more detail (for those interested in learning about the power of Unix).

My main system at home is Windows 2000. I have been fairly happy with Windows 2000. In my experience it’s the best OS that Microsoft has made thus far. I’ve had the same install for about 6 years (I have not had to re-install or re-format my system in all that time). While this says good things about stability, I don’t think I have to convince anyone that boredom has long since set in. Additionally, and perhaps more practically, support for Windows 2000 will be ending sometime on the horizon (presumably when they deploy and entrench Vista), so I’ve started to consider my options.

It’s interesting that 6 years of a fairly good OS install with plentiful applications and games has not instilled a lot of Microsoft loyalty in me. Of course I’m influenced by the other things going on around Microsoft (legal battles, questionable practices) so that has obviously tainted my view towards them. Another factor is my recent involvement with some open standards like SVG and browser-based development (where Microsoft has stagnated for a good 5 years until recently).

And yet, I think another factor must be that when I bought my current custom-built computer, the retailer threw in Windows 2000 professional with the system. In other words, the OS never cost me anything. To upgrade to XP or Vista, I’d have to shill out some money.

One big thing to consider in a move like this is how entrenched I’ve become with the things that I do and the data that I keep on the system (some might call this “locked in”). The things I need to do involve:

• Office-type applications. I’ve experimented enough with OpenOffice to be confident I can move almost seamlessly.
• Platform development, C++ coding. I am fairly confident that I could move from Visual Studio to Eclipse CDT with some effort, but a greater effort will be in learning how to code to Linux instead of to the Windows API. My work with SDL will aid this transition, but my time spent with DirectX can be considered lost.
• Photo editing. I’m familiar enough with GIMP that it shouldn’t be a problem.
• I also like to play the occasional game in my spare time. Hm, maybe it’s time to give Microsoft some of my money in a different direction
• Web Browsing. This is not an issue, my two favourite browsers, Firefox and Opera both have versions for Linux.
• Web Development. I use TextPad so I’d need to adapt to a Linux text editor. So far it looks like Kate will do until I find something better.
• DVD burning. Most Linux distributions come with applications that do this.
• Video editing and encoding. I use some non-FOSS software for capturing video and I use TMPGEnc to encode from raw to MPEG2, I’d need to find a suitable replacement for these. It’s possible that VLC Media Player might help, but I haven’t gotten it to work well enough in Windows yet, so I’m not confident about its level of functionality in Linux. I use mplayer to rip from my DVDs to my hard drive, but I have yet to play with mencoder to see if I can get the same level of flexibility as TMPGEnc (TMPGEnc is very easy/intuitive to use). As for video editing, again I’ll have to investigate alternatives because I actually bought Pegasys’ TMPGEnc DVD Author and I’ve had no complaints.

This last item takes up a good deal of space (>200 GB), leaving not a lot of room for a dedicated partition for Linux, especially if I’m not sure that the OS will work on my hardware and meet my needs. I’ve experimented before with OS emulation, but it really requires the next step to make the final call.

The “next step” is downloading and burning some ISOs of LiveDVDs. LiveDVDs allow you to boot up into the OS just as if it was installed on your hard drive. You can test how the OS works on your hardware, but it doesn’t require you to reformat hard drive partitions. You can download and install software while running from a LiveDVD to test things out. I think the only thing you can’t do is use your CD/DVD player, since that’s where the OS is installed from and the device is “in use”. Anyway, I’ve been enjoying playing around with Ubuntu, Kubuntu and OpenSUSE, but it STILL took some figuring out (in other words it didn’t work straight “out of the box” so to speak.

In the beginning, all three LiveDVDs did not work for me. They would boot up properly, but when it finally got time to show me the GUI login screen things would completely fail (freeze or dump me to a command-line prompt). While I have a fond recollection of my MS-DOS days, to live in an operating system nowadays requires a proper GUI. I tried manually configuring my X-server to no avail.

I believe my system is fairly atypical for a desktop platform. I have an aging nVidia GeForce4 Ti4600 card made by the now-defunct Visiontek, the motherboard is a server-grade motherboard from Tyan with SCSI drives attached and there are dual AMD AthlonMP CPUs. From my Linux experimentation years ago, I worried that any one of these things or a combination of them could be causing some unknown hardware problem that I’d have to experiment and tweak… At this point, I kind of threw up my hands and ranted inside my head:

“You mean to tell me that the average user still experiences these kinds of hardware problems when trying to install a modern Linux distribution?!? Linux has no hopes of succeeding on the desktop front if it can’t even bring up a basic windowing environment!”.

Several days later, I finally decided summoned the energy to debug the issue a bit by looking at the X-Server log files that were created right after the boot-up from the Ubuntu LiveCD when the X-Server failed. In there I found the curious line that the graphics adapter found was an ATI Rage XL (not nVidia) and that no screens could be configured.

Then I remembered: in additional to on-board SCSI and network adapters, my motherboard also has a nominal 4MB ATI display adapter.

I went and downloaded my motherboard’s manual and looked at the specs. Sure enough there was a jumper to disable the display adapter.

I opened up my box. Sure enough I had not put a jumper on those pins to disable the display adapter.

I installed a spare jumper to those pins and tried to boot up again using the Ubuntu LiveDVD. Sure enough that was the problem: All Linux distributions had been finding my on-board display adapter and assuming that it was my primary adapter. Because I have no monitors attached to it, invoking the X-server was failing.

I question why the installers don’t do more comprehensive jobs looking for other adapters when the first one found fails. Surely I’m not alone in this problem? Here’s hoping that at least this blog entry will serve some other folks like myself who are experiencing this frustrating problem.

Anyway, I’m now happily typing this in Firefox 2 Beta 1 using OpenSUSE 10.1 running from the LiveDVD. I’m liking the eye candy that I see in KDE. That’s not to say that I haven’t investigated all the other items above, but at least booting up into Linux is no longer going to be a problem for me. Once I applied that jumper, boot-up was completely painless for all three Linux distributions, detection of my video card, sound card, network card, etc all took place automatically without the slightest need for me to do anything. They just need to fix that display adapter detection/scanning logic…find out which display adapters have monitors connected first…