I learned it by watching you!

Uma's sense of humor is pretty edgy.

Carl Lewis, Olympian

Transcoding Canon SD400 videos for Google Video

Google Video has been glitchy lately when I've uploaded the .AVI files I get from our Canon SD400. Every time I uploaded one, it would just give me 2 silent seconds of grey. I did a little poking around and came up with the following mencoder (part of mplayer) incantation to transcode to MPEG-4 (with MP3 audio):

mencoder -o out.avi -oac mp3lame -ovc lavc -srate 11025 -channels 1 \
  -af-adv force=1 -lameopts preset=medium \
  -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=2048 in.avi

That gets Canon's slightly weird format into something Google Video can handle, at a pretty good quality level. If you've got a batch of files to transcode, you can use the following shell script:

#!/bin/bash

for f in "$@"
do
 mencoder -o "${f/%\.[Aa][Vv][Ii]/.mp4}" -oac mp3lame -ovc lavc -srate 11025 \
        -channels 1 -af-adv force=1 -lameopts preset=medium \
        -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=2048 "$f"
done

That will create X.mp4 from X.avi without altering the latter. As a plus, it will drop the size by about 85% to 90%.

Requiem for a day off

It doesn't have the novelty impact of Shining, but it's still a fine effort. "Lux Aeterna" was a nice choice, if obvious, considering how Hollywood as leapt all over it.

Billy Jean is not my Ice, Ice, Baby

Our Hardy Heron

Google Video finally got their act together.

the midnight golfer

Back when "MadTV" was funny (really, it happened), they aired this classic skit:

twuirrel

A bird-feeder with a twist: when it detects the weight of a squirrel, a motor starts it a-spinnin':



Things didn't go quite as planned, though. They learned to hang on, and they liked it: