As you can see, I installed WiFi in our current temporary home in the city of Hilversum and named it appropriately. LOL. This way I can at least enjoy the comfort of the garden with my Macbook Pro on batteries. Next week we’ll be moving to the city of Zeist, where we found the most gorgeous place. F and I immediately fell in love with our new house, which has a superb garden and a place where we can store our car too! Quelle luxury! These are the searches that have brought people to my blog, according to Lijit. Interesting. Seems like there’s also an increase of spammers, both to my email and my blog. But it’s not much of a problem. My blog is protected by Akismet, which blocks out almost all spammers (8293 as of today, since I installed it!) and gmail has super great spam protection too. I briefly glance over my spam sometimes, to see if gmail errs on the safe side (happened only once or twice), and there are a lot of Chinese spam messages in there these days. A trend…., mmmmaybeee?? Anyway, if you don’t have proper spam protection, I highly recommend getting a gmail address. You can even bring in several other email accounts and spam protect those while you’re at it. And for your WordPress blog: by all means do activate Akismet. Awsum.
Technorati Tags: spam, akismet, gmail, google, wifi, lijit, wijit, wordpress, zeist
Here’s an interesting thing from the rumor mill, according to Ars Technica: Amazon could be the next major name to dive into the world of unprotected music sales. Various rumors have been picking up over the past couple of weeks that the online retailer was readying itself to launch an MP3 download store in May, which some see as one of the only retailers that will be able to truly challenge Apple’s ubiquitous iTunes Store. [more…] Also a very interesting read from Peter Gutmann, A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection. I especially think this is very true: “[…] there’s only so many things that you can do with (say) a word processor, and at some point you’ve made the last meaningful change and the only thing left to do is repeatedly tweak the eye candy and bump the version number every few years. Windows has the same problem. If you take an eight-year-old PC running Windows 98, put it next to a current PC running Windows XP (with the Fisher-Price colour scheme turned off), the typical user won’t be able to tell you what’s changed without a point-by-point comparison of system features from one machine to the other.” [more…] Powered by ScribeFire.
Technorati Tags: drm, amazon, itunes, apple, windows, vista.word.microsoft
This week we did three trailers for BNN at Park Post using the amazing voice of Don LaFontaine. This is the voice of 5000+ movie trailers, so I’m sure you’ve heard him lots of times. You wouldn’t believe the price tag on this guy…! At any rate, if you live in The Netherlands, check out those BNN trailers these coming weeks.
Technorati Tags: trailer, voiceover, donlafontaine, bnn
We’ve come a long way since dial-up modems. Right now, when I’m living here and there and nowhere with my trusted Macbook Pro, WiFi is such a blessing! In my temporary home in Utrecht there’s an open WiFi network. Here at work in the Mediapark in Hilversum there’s of course a staggering amount of WiFi spots: I wonder when we’ll be all reaping the benefits of municipal WiFi, WiMax and satellites, trains, roads and airplanes equipped with hi-speed wireless networking. I can see a future where you see people everywhere emerged in Second Life, Skype video chats, wearable internet… 24/7, at every street corner. I already love the 3G network which means I can check my email just about everywhere I go. This online zine has more about all this technology.
Technorati Tags: wifi, wimax, secondlife, airport
…is not only a quote by Ghandi, but also the name of my latest song which I finished last night. You can play it below, or if you’re subscribing to this site’s feed with your podcatching software, you’ll find it there too of course. “Be the change you want to see in the world” took me over five years to complete (gasp!), which is kinda weird for me. I started programming those beats on March 20, 2002, in the middle of the night, a mere two days before my current relationship started. So this song has always been something special to me that I just had to finish. It’s 80 beats per minute and a bit on a dark tip, but hope you enjoy it!
Download Be the change you want to see in the world
So you’re a Google Earth fan like myself? Then this site is good for hours of mindless fun! You just gotta wonder why, if everything is always denied about Area 51, someone somewhere insisted it should look like this on Google Earth:
Technorati Tags: area51, google, googleearth, censorship
Okay, I admit it, my previous experiment failed miserably. For two reasons: 1) It didn’t show up on my iPod and 2) it looked horrible with those horizontal lines. Let me first hark back to where this experiment started, which is a mail I got from Apple. Nothing personal, just because I’m registered in the iTunes store as a podcaster:
Recommendations for Formatting Video Podcasts
1. If you’re encoding your video podcast at 320×240, please increase the resolution to either 640×480 or 640×360 (depending on the aspect ratio of your source files). Why? Because video podcasts at this resolution look great on Apple TV and still port to video iPods. Lower resolution podcasts might also work on both platforms, but they don’t look nearly as good on a widescreen TV. As always, make sure to test any encoding changes you make to ensure device compatibility. QuickTime 7.1’s “Export to iPod” function will ensure that a video file is encoded at a width of 640 and is iPod-compatible.
2. It’s best not to create two different podcast feeds for different resolutions. By doing so, you dilute the popularity of your podcast and reduce exposure in our charts. It’s better to have one feed high in the charts than two that are lower.
3. If your source files are 16:9, stick with that aspect ratio. Don’t add letterboxing to make them 4:3. By doing so, you prevent the video from expanding to fill a 16:9 widescreen TV and instead end up with black space on all four sides. Also, your original source files should be at least 640 pixels wide.
Of course these are just recommendations. We understand that there are good reasons for 320×240 (bandwidth bills) and 720p (looks fantastic). Do whatever makes the most sense for your show. For more information on formatting video, see the recently updated spec:
http://www.apple.com/itunes/store/podcaststechspecs.html
To see a sample of excellent podcasts that also look great with Apple TV, check out the Apple TV Podcast Showcase.
So with that out of the way, I was endeavouring to create my own 16:9 widescreen movie that would a) be a valid video podcast, b) play well on a video iPod, c) look good on an Apple TV too and d) contain elements of both real world video and animations. Making a valid video podcast is easy enough. Just add an enclosure to your blog posting. That part always works. To play on a video iPod, the bitrate shouldn’t be too high (I guess I went wrong there in my previous experiment). In such cases, where the bitrate is too high, you can only see your video podcast on the web in a player or in iTunes, but it won’t transfer to a video iPod. It is all described in detail in this article. To look good on an Apple TV, it should be 640 x 360 for widescreen, according to Apple. My biggest gripe though were the ugly horizontal lines that showed up in the clip when I exported it directly from iMovie HD to the iPod. It didn’t matter much whichever m4v or mp4 setting I tried… it always showed those lines. I’m not sure what the source of those is, probably my JVC MiniDV cam that isn’t HD? I don’t know. But what solved it was a two way export. First to DV stream progressive (that was the key), and then a QuickTime Pro export to iPod. In the latter case, there’s nothing you can adjust. But the net result is a clip that’s 640 x 360 widescreen which still looks awsum on my iPod. I don’t have an Apple TV (I don’t even have a tv right now, I just watch Joost and video podcasts!), so I can only hope it looks good there too. Below you can find the movie which describes the process a bit. I’ll set the PodPress player to 450 x 252 so it won’t mess up this blog posting, but rest assured the movie is 640 x 360.
Download Jelle the dog 2
Now that my podcast has an official sponsor, I should start taking my metrics more seriously! It’s interesting how there’s a ceiling around 1500 downloads right now, where episode 6 peaks for some reason (its quality, I dare wonder…?). People are still downloading all episodes, sure, but at the current rate it’ll take quite a few weeks for episodes to be downloaded over 1500 times. Addendum: episode 6is way over1500 downloads as of April 20, 2007. And this week the rss subscription count has crossed the mythical 500 threshold according to FeedBurner. Feeling a bit exhausted today. Worked until midnight yesterday and had to get up really early to import/mix/edit and dump-to-tape an item for “Klasgenoten” (a Dutch program), which incidentally takes place in the city of Groningen… where I will travel today to see F again and go to a horror party which is totally Evil Dead style. Like, a little shed in the middle of nowhere, chainsaws, the works.
Technorati Tags: metrics, podcast, blubrry
Just wondering what video podcast export format should work best for both Apple TVs and iPods. This first stab at it uses iMovie HD’s internal export to Apple TV option. My biggest worry is size. This 0′54″ clip is already 28 MB.
Download Jelle the dog
Hi! Just wanted to say that the last podcast about presets was one of the best shows so far. Thank you for making me enjoy working with Logic again. It’s a tricky program to learn and sometimesI feel likeI get a little bit stuck and not learning anything more. That’s where your podcast comes in and helps.
Technorati Tags: podcast, logic
