And He Blogs

I haven’t had a lot of time to watch much hockey this season. Honestly, if I can’t watch the games in high-definition, there’s even less motivation to watch. Also, the “real hockey season” (the playoffs) is fast approaching, and with the announcement of more HD channels from my local cable supplier, I will be taking in more games.

But this isn’t a post about Hi-Def TV, HD-DVD vs. Blu-ray (that fight is over!), or even hockey per se. It is about a well written post entitled Fighting words. As most of the serendipitous discoveries come from my connections to colleagues on Twitter, this is no exception. It’s another remarkable benefit of the Internet as community.

So, how I got to the post. First, a tweet from Jon Udell about finding good restaurants in his community. Next, I visited the page displaying downtown Keene N.H. dining options. Then I took a quick visit to the home page of this interesting project, and then to the photo page featuring pictures from some of the Keene residents. One picture caught my eye, a simple picture of two hockey players embroiled in fisticuffs, and it generated all kinds of complex emotions. Some of the emotions I felt were very personal. I only need to see a quarter of the Boston Bruins logo to have thousands of memories flood back of my earliest days watching hockey. Bobby Orr, Phil Esposito, and Johnny Bucyk, were the gods I prayed to in the early 70’s. There were plenty of fights in those days too.

Other emotions I had were universally human, however. Two people fighting, both repulsive and thrilling. What were they fighting about? What was the cause? Was someone going to get hurt? Will there be blood? How much blood? Thankfully, the link behind the hockey photo went to Lorianne DiSabato’s blog post about a recent Bruin’s game she attended a couple days before St. Patrick’s Day.

Who needs green beer when you can watch an honest-to-goodness hockey fight?

Her post is as good an argument for keeping fighting in the game of hockey as I’ve ever seen, but that’s a minor argument. She goes on to compare the fights in hockey to the dust-up over recent controversial comments involving Barack Obama’s pastor, Jeremiah Wright.

You don’t have to agree with or even like [the] comments . . . though, you have to respect his right to make them.

People will argue whether there is any truth contained in the statements that Wright has made. No doubt that what Obama said is true, that they are divisive. So let’s go, everybody get it out of their system. Say what’s on your mind. I would argue that if Barack Obama wants to be president, he can’t defend Wright’s remarks, even if he believes even a little of what he said. He should however defend without reservation, Wright’s right to say those words. Let’s all then agree to disagree and get back to the game.

She ends her post with:

We all want to live in a society where we are judged by the content of our character rather than the color of our Zambonis, but still: without the ability to speak freely and even fight, how will we ever learn how to all get along?

How can you argue with a statement that combines the words of Martin Luther King Jr. with a reference to the machines that clean the ice surface at hockey games? That’s right, you can’t, and don’t even try or we’ll have to throw down! Thank you, Lorianne.

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The world of video sharing websites is changing rapidly. YouTube and its competitors are trying to distinguish themselves by constantly improving their services, so we should see great progress in terms of quality of video and features that these sites offer. My recent quest has been to find the best options for hosted screencasts. The makers of my screencasting tool of choice, Camtasia, offer a (pay) service to host the videos at a site called screencast.com. Here you can host the higher quality, and higher resolution (larger), SWF files that really make screencasts look their best. You also can host those high quality screencasts on your own hosting service, provided you have that little extra know how to get them up and streaming. There is an SWF version of the screencast represented in the above photo available.

The latest version of Camtasia also gives the option of outputting a blog-friendly version of the screencast that works well for embedding into a blog post. However, if you want to give your screencasts a wider audience, you may want to consider YouTube or other video sharing services. Here are a few things you should know about sharing your screencasts online.

The Secret High-Quality YouTube Hack

This really isn’t a secret any more, but YouTube is experimenting with higher quality videos. YouTube announced that it would offer higher quality versions of video, one reason being so that they can accommodate the Apple iPhone and Apple TV, which don’t play Flash video. The video format that is used is a variant of MPEG-4 known as h.264. Adobe recently upgraded their Flash player to play h.264 video in addition to Flash video (FLV). The h.264 versions of the video will give the Apple TV users a more TV friendly experience because it is higher resolution.

To see the higher quality version videos on YouTube you need to add an extra little bit of text to the URL of a YouTube video. Whatever the URL is, add &fmt=18 to the end of the URL. If that doesn’t work, you can try &fmt=6. To see the screencast represented by the photo above at high quality resolution, go to:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=O-W-3OIrJKg&fmt=18

Compare that with the low quality version that is located by using the traditional URL (without the &fmt=18):

http://youtube.com/watch?v=O-W-3OIrJKg

The obvious benefit to the high quality version is that the text is much sharper. The downside is that it will take longer to download to a user’s machine (it’s roughly twice the size). You also lose a bit of the “instant seeking” ability. With a standard YouTube video (the Flash version) you can start watching at any point by moving the play head to the position that you wish. You won’t be able to do that with the h.264 version until it downloads entirely to your computer.

You can click on the images below to compare side-by-side screenshots.

Other Video Sharing Sites

I experimented superficially with some other video sharing sites, and I can recommend two that give good quality encoding of screencasts. One is Blip.tv, which is my personal favorite video sharing/TV channel service. Blip.tv’s selling point, besides the myriad of options to publish, cross-post, distribute, advertise, etc., is that they use the higher quality On2 codec for Flash video. I can also customize a player to match a given blog, and maximize the window to fit in the space that a given WordPress theme provides.

The other site that impressed me was Vimeo. This is one of the first sites to offer HD Flash video, and while I didn’t try to upload the video at HD resolutions, the video quality is quite good at the standard setting. You also can view the video full screen and while the artifacts of compression are more noticeable, you get an acceptable quality video to watch. Blip.tv has the full screen capability as well, but I couldn’t get it to work when I embedded the video in a blog post. Lots more testing yet to do, but so far some cool things out there to report. More to come.

Here is the Blip.tv version:

Here is the Vimeo version:

Install Flickr Photo Gallery Plugin in UMWBlogs from Andy Rush on Vimeo.

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It has been this kind of day with machines that I am running Windows Vista on. One of the bugs/problems/annoyances is the strange behavior of copying files. Sometimes it takes too long for Vista to estimate the time it is going to take to copy a given file or files. Other times it’s estimates are wacky (see the above photo). The forth-coming service pack is supposed to improve this behavior. Let’s hope!

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Flickr photo by orangeacid

When I was a kid it was looking for TV shows that were “in living color”. Now finding shows that are in high definition (HD) are the golden ticket. One of my favorite websites, Engadget HD, posts about communities all across the country that are upgrading their cable service or adding more HD channels. Well, now more HD channels are coming to Fredericksburg, VA.

Here are the channels that will be added:

• CNN HD
• Versus/Golf HD
• TBS HD
• Food Network HD
• HGTV HD
• TLC HD
• Discovery HD
• History Channel HD
• Science Channel HD
• Animal Planet HD
• NHL Network HD
• Travel HD
• Cinemax HD (East)
• Comcast SportsNet HD

What this means to me is more hockey in HD with NHL Network and SportsNet. I can almost smell the Budweiser (US) or the Labatts (Canada) in the cool arena. Hopefully this also means cycling in HD on Versus, plus exotic locations, animals, home improvement, news, science, and food, all in wonderful HD. It’s getting harder and harder to tolerate standard definition (lifts nose into air).

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Flickr Photo courtesy of Sellers Patton

I wonder if Fox Interactive/News Corp. had any influence on the policy of Photobucket considering babies in diapers as “nudity”. Their terms of service lists nudity as one of the restrictions when uploading photos, but this is a bit excessive, no? Seems this policy got some attention when diaper company Good Mama Diaper ran a photo contest on Photobucket. When the photos disappeared, questions got asked.

Now I know that pictures of children slightly older than the diaper-set on the Internet is a big concern, but are we incapable of making rational choices? I have to question the intelligence of the people running a service that have such a policy. I obtained a pro account at Photobucket to try out their video editing service a year ago. I just received my last notice asking if I’ll be renewing my pro account. I think not. I think I’ll close my account all together.

I will go on using that ever reliable and oh-so-racy photo site, Flickr. The photo above was courtesy of Flickr. The photo below of the cute little boy in his diaper is courtesy of . . . Photobucket!

UPDATE: Photobucket admits their error.

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It’s a deal I can’t pass up. $30 plus tax for the complete set of Planet Earth in hi-def! “But Andy”, you are saying, “Isn’t HD-DVD that dead format?” Yes, it’s dead. Gone the way of the dodo. Gone the way of Betamax, but wait. It’s not betamax. It’s a digital format. I’m stating the obvious, or maybe I’m not, but it’s an important point to be made now that HD-DVD is dead, dead, dead. I recently picked up something that can help. It’s an LG GGW-H20L Blu-ray burner. It also reads Blu-ray and HD-DVD discs. OK, so no, I will not be transferring my HD-DVD discs to Blu-ray discs. It’s possible, but my time is much more valuable than that. I can, however, place the movies on my hard drive. Just like there are programs that can get the video files off of standard DVDs, they also exist for HD-DVD (and Blu-ray). Now, legally, you can only extract (rip) the video files from un-encrypted discs (copyright is a separate issue). That would eliminate all of the commercially produced DVD, HD-DVD, and Blu-ray discs. Exceptions have been made, but the fact remains that just breaking the encryption of these discs is illegal.

Now that HD-DVD is dead, the DMCA/encryption issue is less of a worry to me. Nuff said. My plan is to play the discs from the existing player that I have, a Toshiba HD-A1. However, I also have the LG drive in a computer that is hooked into my home theater system, so I essentially have a combo Blu-ray/HD-DVD player. In a previous post, I predicted that once the war was over (it is), combo players might be the way to go. It’s looking more like HD-DVD will just vaporize. So back to the digital nature of the HD-DVD format, these movies can be played from your hard drive using the combination of decryption software and player software such as Nero Showtime or Power DVD, and it’s certainly a convenient way to watch movies. So my Planet Earth disc will play, in the near future, on my HD-DVD player(s). In the distant future, the digital file of Planet Earth will play from whatever storage device is current. Terabyte hard drives will be cheap and new storage technology is just around the corner that will be capable of storing hundreds on HD quality movies as digital files. Check out the TeraDisc and the Holographic Versatile Disc for some of the possible successors to DVD and HD-DVD data storage.

Boy, that was a long justification for buying obsolescence.

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