video of Curtis and me rambling
Ok, here’s hoping that my web host is smiling on me today and that I don’t gobble up too much bandwidth by posting this…
Here is a 30 sec video clip of Curtis. Enjoy seeing the kid, and don’t mind me blabbering in the background.
For those of you who care about the nitty gritty of how this video got to be on the web (and for those of you who don’t care but are bored enough to read my blog), I will give a bried explanation of how I did it.
My digital camera is nice enough to record up to 60 sec of live video and audio. It saves the video as an Apple Quicktime file. Inside the Quicktime “wrapper” are uncompressed motion JPEG (MJPEG) video and 8-bit PCM audio. What this translates into is that a 60 sec clip winds up taking up about 12-13MB.
Since I don’t have the bandwidth, and most users don’t either (and thus, the patience), to deal with files of such a large size, I needed to find a way to convert the video from the Quicktime-MJPEG-PCM format to something compressed.
Since I am a nerd who doesn’t have the money for professional video conversion software, I decided to see what was available in the open source/Linux world that would suit my needs. After some searching on the net, I found a sweet program called mplayer. mplayer is a video player for Linux that also happens to come with a video encoder (mencoder).
Bingo.
After messing around with mencoder for a while, I came up with this “magic” set of options:
mencoder -of avi -oac mp3lame -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=msmpeg4v2:vbitrate=128 <input.mov> -o <output.avi>
That command basically converts the Quicktime-MJPEG-PCM file to an AVI-MSMPEG4v2-MP3 file - which results in <output.avi> being about 10% of the size of the original Quicktime file. Playing around with the bitrate setting can change your filesize while also affecting image quality. I actually encoded the video of Curtis at 256kbps and it wound up being 10% of the original file size.
Next on my list of programs to write (after the parenthetical blog parser) is a GUI front end for those like me wishing to use mencoder to convert their huge digital camera Quicktime files to something easier to email or put on the net.
My project to follow that one up will be a distributed hand bell program. A “conductor” PC will direct a choir of other PCs in beeping out songs. Tell yourself that won’t change the world.
nite.
November 13th, 2003 at 7:10 pm
Ok, here’s my comment. Sarah told me about the Curtis video, he’s so cute! Of course you know that. I’m not sure why I’m posting this here, I could just email Sarah, but I never talk to you, Christian. So you like being a father, good to hear:) Well, I’m glad that Curtis is getting chubby and that you like not sleeping. Have a great day!