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Alive in Joburg is a science fiction short film directed by Neill Blomkamp, released in 2005 by Spy Films. It runs approximately six minutes long and was filmed in Johannesburg, South Africa. The film explores themes of apartheid, and is noted for its visual effects as well as its documentary-style imagery.
Alive in Joburg is being remade by into a feature-length film called District 9 that looks like it borrows heavily from Transformers.
This weekend I went up to Downieville to race in the Downieville Classic which is the biggest mountain bike race in CA. It was so much fun! I’m happy to report that I still have all 4 limbs that I started with and they are in their proper place the last I checked. I shot the video above of the River Jump championships which happened after the cross country race on Saturday. I didn’t do that. These guys were nuts.
Pink Saturday was amazing.. there were at least a trillion people there!
Peliom took this picture of TikiTV VJ’ing on the main stage at Castro and Market:
The Knack is a surreal British comedy from 1965. I hadn’t seen it in a long time, and stumbled upon it on Hulu:
Playin Donkey Kong with you:
I went to bed at 2am last night. The alarm went off at 6am this morning . It was waaaay too early to do much other than check the internets, so that’s what I did, and found inbflat.net. This site is magic.
Eventually I realized I had to stop playing with it and do some work, but I wanted to keep listening. So I made the Bb Buddha Machine.
It probably doesn’t work in IE. It brings linux machines to their knees. But I listened to it for at least eight hours today. Enjoy!
2011 update:
Some awesome people have taken the Bb Buddha Machine and modified it to make new versions! Check them out:
Also, I have put the code on github for easier collaboration.
Thanks for making the Buddha machine. Today I released a derivative work of your machine to make a noize Buddha machine. Code is released under the same licence. I made a lot of enhancements in configuration, volume control and changing the videos during the play. Again thanks for making the Buddha machine.
Thanks Peter! noiZe vieW is wonderful! I’m happy that you were inspired to make all these circuit-bent recordings!
via reddit.tv
hilarious! and very creative, too!
i finally found the magic dead chicken to use
with flowplayer + lighttpd + mod_h264_streaming.
it turns out one needs to download and use an additional
.swf file to get the scrubber bar to send the
(already working) “?start=610″ (to start 610 seconds in)
parameter to our litey on archive.org
phew! yay!
OneEighteen, a ship pilot in Houston, has posted this beautiful timelapse he took during a six-hour run through the Port of Houston:
More info about the timelapse. CC by-nc licensed. Part 2 below:
(More …)
This is Auto-Tune the News #2. It gets awesome at 1m 23s:
Here are some old pics of Sam and Peliom vj-ing with the open source TikiTV software at the Timothy Leary Archives event at 111 Minna. Way fun!
These are not your average Transformers fans:
I’ve already made most of you watch this video of Maru the Cat, walking around the house with a bag on his head. It is maybe the most awesome video on the internet:
Well, here is the hedgehog version, via reddit:
Also, here is a video of Maru playing with a box:
Why are cats totally insane?
Here is a video of a cat using what bob calls “the noisy petting machine”:
What the hell? I can’t post embedded videos in comments anymore? Stupid blog.
Take two:
First, I <3 tuxedo cats. They seem nice.
Second, hilarious video!
But yeah, cats = insane.
btw, am i the only one who has noticed / been irked by the fact that wordpress “oh so helpfully” rearranges things like “clean” and working
dunno if that would relate at all to any issues w/ embedding videos in comments (maybe if you edited a comment it broke then?)
crap i should have said clean [embed] HTML tags and it breaks them into broken [object] tags
When I was working on ChatBubble I found WordPress was taking my valid xhtml and turning it into *invalid* xhtml. ugh.
I found the WP-Unformatted plugin, to help with that. It’s kinda wonky to use, though.
Stupid wordpress.
ok so i finally watched the vids.
over lunch.
which i highly recommend not doing.
i think i just had an aneurysm watching maru in the bag.
[tracey goes and looks for a brown paper bag to stop hyperventillating]
why are cats on the internet so much more interesting than cats in real life? maybe i haven’t spent enough time with cats…
ffmpeg v0.5 just came out. it’s the bomb. it’s got tons of fixes and massive amounts of new codecs that it can read. for example, it can now decode my professional filmmaker brother’s “DVC ProHD” highly proprietary (and massive bitrate!) format! it can also decode flac and 24-bit flac. (encoding flac is disappointing though).
at any rate! macports is a great way to get it installed on your mac.
the current way of setting up macports and then doing
sudo port install ffmpeg
works fine on my PPC at work (oddly — pretty old computer now) but not my Air (intel x386)
So I set out to find the fixes needed to make it work. Here they are:
step 1: install macports — see http://www.macports.org/install.php
sudo port install x264 +noasm # for i386 (not needed for PPC)
sudo port fetch ffmpeg
sudo port checksum ffmpeg
sudo port extract ffmpeg
sudo port patch ffmpeg
remove “–enable-shared” from /opt/local/var/macports/sources/rsync.macports.org/release/ports/multimedia/ffmpeg/Portfile
sudo port install ffmpeg
(and “ffplay” is pretty cool now! i am considering using it over mplayer, hmm….)
I’m sure all of you have seen the amazing Trip Down Market Street, shot on a cable car in 1905. And you’ve probably seen the same route shot in 1906 after the earthquake (skip to middle).
But have you seen this footage shot from a Barcelona street car in 1908?
amazing
We had a fantastic live action demo of TikiTV last night at the reception party celebrating the launch of the Timothy Leary Video Collection. A lot of great people were asking about TikiTV, how it works, how to use it, how to get involved. This is the start of a good thing.
I saw TikiTv tonight at the HackerDojo grand opening, and my I was stunned. This thing is super cool!
Mixing multiple video streams! It’s a MUST have for your next party. Super fun, and never the same. I just downloaded TikiTV and I can’t wait to mix in some of my family videos with emotional backgrounds.
Any plans for windows or linux version? Also midi input support would be nice, like to use my korg nanokontrol to fade layers.
Hunter and I travelled from CA to D.C. to watch Obama’s Inauguration.
We stood in the very cold historic day for 5 hours (after 3 hours getting from VA to DC) but were THRILLED!
We watched from The Mall, at 12 Street, about 2/3 of the distance from The Capitol to the Washington Monument.
I made a 7 minute short video of our 70 hour trip 8-)
glad you had fun. thanks for sharing!
:)
TikiTV is an awesome open-source video mixing application for Mac OSX, developed by peliom and VJ Science. If you are a video nerd, you should check this out:
Wait for it…
i admit that i seriously underestimated this guy at first…won’t make that mistake again. ;)
Daft Punk vs. Adam Freeland – “Aer OBAMA”
The following is a mixed-media stop motion music video and celebration commemorating the election and inauguration of Barack Obama as the forty-fourth president of these United States. Audibly showcasing Adam Freeland’s remix of Daft Punk’s “Aerodynamic” and the imaginative stylings of forward thinking toy artists Dalek, Bill McMullen and Kubrick to name just a few. Independently animated and directed by the progressive minds of the directing team GOLD, the piece is a labor of love that invites everyone to join in or create their own celebration this coming Tuesday January the 20th.
dunno how I missed this until now! via Laughing Squid.
This is a great video that a Kiva volunteer made to document the path that a $25 microfinance loan made in London took to reach a rice farmer in Cambodia. The $25 loan is paid back in 12 monthly installments of $2.08, and one of the repayments is captured in the video. It’s awesome to see the connection between the people in London who made the loan, the Kiva employees in SF who brokers the loan, the microfinance institution in Cambodia who processes the loan, and the farmer who receives it. Yay Kiva! Our next Amazon check should go towards a microloan!
A Fistful Of Dollars: The Story of a Kiva.org Loan from Kieran Ball on Vimeo.
I love this little talk Clay Shirky gave at Supernova 2007:
“The Imbe Priests would totally get Linux!” via reddit.
I did my last big race of the cyclocross season on sunday and it was super fun! I’d never done any kind of racing before this year so I’m happy that I survived it. Here’s a video I shot of the day out at coyote point. (my team is the one decked out in crazy floral skinsuits. We won the prize for wearing the “most offensive cycling attire this guy has ever laid eyes on.” woot!)
The most important prize though was the bacon!
Tired of screen-scraping the output of ffmpeg and/or mplayer to get the parameters / clip info for a media file?
This hook attempts to remedy this by printing simple information about the passed in video from the cmd line.
It will also print out whether or not the clip is using “rectangular pixels”.
Well, the easiest examples are DVDs. You only want to buy a DVD if it says one of two standard phrases on it — “Enhanced for 16:9 TVs” or “Anamorphic widescreen“. They both mean the same thing — namely that the video on the DVD disk is wider than 4:3 aspect (pretty much all films are ratio 16:9 or even wider like ratio 2.35:1) *and* that it didn’t *waste* any DVD bytes by encoding “top/bottom black bars”. (If it doesn’t say those code phrases, it’s an older, crappy/low budget produced, or worse a “pan-n-scan” chopped film (where they lop off the left and right sides of each frame to fit into a 4:3 TV!) Worst yet, if the DVD only says something like “widescreen version”, though it sounds good, it means while they didn’t cut off the picture, they wasted 25% (or more!) of the pixels encoding “black bars” on the top and bottom. So you have less pixels in the DVD encoding the picture compared to an “anamorphic” version of the same thing. Hello crappy quality!)
Now look at this:
4:3 video == 1.33 ratio == 640×480 pixels image
16:9 video == 1.78 ratio == 854×480 pixels image
so what is 720×480? it’s almost perfectly in the middle of those two — math: 720/480 = 1.5
So the “encoded transport image size” is neither 16:9, nor 4:3 — it’s right in the middle, capable to encode either a 4:3 video (like non-high def TV, many computer screens) or 16:9 video (high def TV, some digital video). I like to think of it as “how the formats that came out right before HDTV took off, compromised to hedge there bets to be between 4:3 and 16:9″.
The final critical bit of information about a DVD is the “aspect ratio” (not of the overall image, confusingly, but of each encoded *pixel*!) This says “wait, this pixel isn’t square, literally, like you’d think if you just read the image — it’s actually supposed to be stretched to make the *overall image* either 640 pixels wide (squoosh down from 720) or 854 (stretch wider to 854). So the video track is “flagged” with a “pixel aspect” (often referred to as PAR (Pixel Aspect Ratio), SAR (Sample Aspect Ratio), or DAR (Display Aspect Ratio) — some of those have some slight nuances/differences, but that’s digging too deep). Anyway, neat, huh? Your anamorphic DVD is a changeling! (maybe “anamorphic” makes more sense mnemonically now 8-) (PS: “DV” video — the most common format that digital camcorders that write to tape use — is similar. 720×480 pixels/image plus a “flag” for what each pixel “shape” is).
This hook I wrote will output information about the clip (like “ffmpeg -i” will do, but in a format easier to parse) as well as information about the pixels (unlike ffmpeg). So you can then know more about a clip if you are going to do things like pull single frames/thumbnails from it or convert it to another format. We have been using this at Internet Archive for our movies for over a year and a half now and it works great!
There are some instructions for compiling with an ffmpeg source at the top of the C code. (There is also an ubuntu-on-AMD compiled “.so” at that link by changing the suffix from “.c” to “.so”, FWIW)
ffmpeg -vhook "/petabox/deriver/identify.so oldpresidio.mpeg" FFmpeg version SVN-rUNKNOWN, Copyright (c) 2000-2007 Fabrice Bellard, et al. configuration: --enable-gpl --enable-pp --enable-libvorbis --enable-libogg --enable-liba52 --enable-libdts --enable-dc1394 --enable-libgsm --disable-debug --enable-libfaac --enable-libfaad --enable-libmp3lame --enable-x264 --prefix=/usr/ libavutil version: 49.3.0 libavcodec version: 51.38.0 libavformat version: 51.10.0 built on Nov 30 2007 19:09:20, gcc: 4.1.3 20070929 (prerelease) (Ubuntu 4.1.2-16ubuntu2) Video: mpeg2video, yuv420p, 720x480, q=2-31, 8000 kb/s width: 720 height: 480 aspect: 32/27 fps: 29.97 duration: 00:03:05.2 audio: true Failed to Configure /petabox/deriver/identify.so Failed to add video hook function: /petabox/deriver/identify.so oldpresidio.mpeg
Looks like this is what we have been looking for. I am not entirely sure though how to install it. Just downloaded the ffmpeg trunk (0.5) and it looks like there is no more vhook directory. Can you provide step by step instructions? MUCH appreciated, thanks.
Kai
hi kai! have you been able to build it? if you are using a mac, here’s another post you may find interesting that shows how i built it on both a PPC (work) and intel (home) mac with OS-X…
http://www.dumbbunny.org/2009/04/01/ffmpeg-building-on-mac-intelx386/
at any rate, the great thing about ffmpeg v0.5 is that, so far, in all the testing i have done, it seems to *finally* report the PAR (Pixel Aspect Ratio) for an item that has “rectangular pixels” right on the command line. so we at archive.org should soon no longer need to use this “vhook” and the C code that i wrote, yay!
so, for example, here is the new output from v0.5 ffmpeg on the same video file above now:
ffmpeg -i oldpresidio.mpeg
….
Duration: 00:03:05.71, start: 0.290656, bitrate: 8070 kb/s
Stream #0.0[0x1e0]: Video: mpeg2video, yuv420p, 720×480 [PAR 32:27 DAR 16:9], 8000 kb/s, 29.97 tbr, 90k tbn, 59.94 tbc
Stream #0.1[0x1c0]: Audio: mp2, 48000 Hz, stereo, s16, 384 kb/s
…
you can parse the PAR output from the output, when it exists, to know that the pixels in the video are rectangular.
so, from some PHP code that we use at archive.org:
$filmWidth = round($filmWidth * $parW / $parH);
we would plug in our numbers from the ffmpeg info/output to be
$filmWidth = round(720 * 32 / 27)
which comes out to round(853.33333…)
or 852 (typically want to round to an even number)
archive.org has started to make theora derivatives for movie files, where we create an Ogg Theora video format output for each movie file. after trying a bunch of tools over a good corpus of wide-ranging videos, i found a neat way to make the Archive derivatives.
/usr/bin/ffmpeg -v 0 -an -deinterlace -s 400x300 -r 20.00 -i CapeCodMarsh.avi -vcodec rawvideo -pix_fmt yuv420p -f rawvideo - | \ /usr/bin/ffmpeg -v 0 -an -f rawvideo -s 400x300 -r 20.00 -i - -f yuv4mpegpipe - | \ /petabox/deriver/libtheora-1.0/lt-encoder_example --video-rate-target 512k - -o tmp.ogv; /usr/bin/ffmpeg -y -i CapeCodMarsh.avi -vn -acodec vorbis -ac 2 -ab 128k -ar 44100 audio.ogg; /petabox/sw/bin/oggz-comment audio.ogg -o audio2.ogg TITLE="Cape Cod Marsh" ARTIST="Tracey Jaquith" LICENSE="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain/" DATE="2004" ORGANIZATION="Dumb Bunny Productions" LOCATION=http://www.archive.org/details/CapeCodMarsh; /petabox/sw/bin/oggzmerge tmp.ogv audio2.ogg -o CapeCodMarsh.ogv;
So this will end up working in Firefox 3.1 and greater — the new HTML “video” tag:
<video controls=”true” autoplay=”true” src=”http://www.archive.org/download/commute/commute.ogv”> for firefox betans </video>
This technique above worked nicely across a wide range of source and “trashy” 46 videos that I use for QA before making live a new way to derive our videos at archive.org ( http://www.archive.org/~MY-FIRST-NAME/_/stream.php [sorry don't necessarily want all that crawled by non rajbot robots] )
-tracey jaquith “don’t make me 3:2 pulldown you”
I’ve always used ffmpeg2theora without any A/V sync problems — that would seem to be the much simpler option where it works. Are there certain conditions you’ve found where ffmpeg2theora fails?
absolutely i can find A/V sync issues quite easily, unfortunately.
now, granted, there are likely some issues with the encoding of these videos as inputs to being with — but these aren’t uncommon w/ the stuff that we get uploaded to archive.org.
http://www.archive.org/~MY-FIRST-NAME/_/amoalaura/amoaLauraMTV.wmv
both of these fail to sync A/V:
ffmpeg2theora amoaLauraMTV.wmv -sync -o out.ogv
ffmpeg2theora amoaLauraMTV.wmv -o out.ogv
using my technique above, we sync properly.
it could be just that ffmpeg is more forgiving when dealing with “trashier” encodings…
yow, 3:2 pulldown, sounds humiliating ;-)
Please do not use the above instructions unless you want to be accused of intentionally making Vorbis look bad. The FFMPEG internal Vorbis encoder is not something anyone should actually use. The sound quality is terrible.
I suspect most people (myself included) were unaware of FFMPEG’s internal Vorbis encoder because just about everything else uses the (BSD licensed) Xiph.Org reference encoder.
The above commands should be changed to use “-acodec libvorbis” rather than “-acodec vorbis”:
ffmpeg -y -i CapeCodMarsh.avi -vn -acodec libvorbis -ac 2 -ab 128k -ar 44100 audio.ogg
This is not audio-geek nitpicking: The above “128kbit” FFMPEG produced audio sounds worse than 32kbit/sec output produced from a reasonable encoder.
In order to make this point more clearly I have posted a couple of 11 second examples. First listen to a 64kbit/sec example produced by Xiph.org libVorbis. Then listen to the “128kbit/sec” FFMPEG output (which is really about 64kbit/sec for this input). As you can see, the FFMPEG output sounds very bad in both absolute and comparative terms. Even 32kbit/sec audio produced by a decent encoder sounds much better than the ffmpeg output.
thanks for the info.
couple quick things. the sound is not very good agreed — but i would personally not say “terrible”.
we are looking into altering our technique to use libvorbis, but i thought i should point out that not everyone is using the most recent version of linux as i suspect you may be? archive.org is still stuck on “gutsy” version of ubuntu which is from oct 2007. so even with “–enable-libvorbis” compiled into gutsy-era ubuntu, there is no known codec alternative other than “-acodec vorbis” that can do vorbis.
we are more likely to do an OS upgrade and try to update it at that point.
so i don’t disagree with you, i just think the severity of the warning is a tad higher than need be. likely we’ll disagree about that but that’s ok.
thx for the pointer!
shag, 
may are discussing. 
rajbot, and 
siznax are discussing. 
trish is discussing. 
Kai are discussing. 
tracey jaquith, 
Gregory Maxwell, 
shag and one other person are discussing.
rajbot 6:27 pm on May 15, 2009 Permalink |
Also out today: Jam Wow
rajbot 6:21 pm on May 16, 2009 Permalink |
may 2:57 pm on May 18, 2009 Permalink |
soooo funny :) I don’t know much about autotune – is this something we can play with too?
shag 9:17 pm on May 18, 2009 Permalink |
invade tajikistan wit yu
rajbot 9:35 pm on May 18, 2009 Permalink |
Auto-Tune is a pitch-correction plugin . It’s used in live performances by singers to make sure they are in tune, but you can also adjust the knobs to make it sound like a vocoder.
There are now a bunch of different pitch correction plugins. According to this interview with The Observer, Michael Gregory uses Celemony’s Melodyne software for Auto-Tune the News.
These things cost a bunch of money, but there are some free vocoders we can play with, like VisualVox.
shag 9:53 pm on May 18, 2009 Permalink |