wonkablog

Just found this feature the other day, quite on accident.

URLs that are in your Location Toolbar are tab-completable. Hit Ctl-L, and try it.

Smack with me a frying pan, I tell you what.

Things have all of a sudden picked up incredibly in the past week, and I have lots to get done.

Here’s a list of stuff I’m working on right now, either fixing bugs, new features, on my todo list or my mind:

• Planet Larry bugs / features / recruiting / design / backend
• Planet Gentoo bugs
• Writing a Tips and Tricks entry for the GWN (I’m a total slacker, sorry wolf)
• Finding a replacement for my co-worker at my day job (he’s movin’ on)
• Cleaning out crusty media-video bugs
• Stealing someone’s code to parse the portage tree so we can find out which ones need maintainers
• The whole package.use.desc database / webpage / documentation / whatever
• Learning how to write better ebuilds
• The GWN tips and tricks database (gotta find some way to rip out sections of GuideXML)
• Multimedia FAQ (who knows when I’m gonna get to that, though)
• School starting in two weeks

So, yah. That’s about it. So if I’m a little slow in getting to your request, just hang tight .. I’ve got lotsa fun stuff going on right now, and on top of that I’m about 5 blog posts behind on stuff I wanna write about (don’t forget to write those ones about mplayer: the snapshots and matroska).

I really don’t know why I even blogged about this, other than to get the list “on paper” for me. So, just ignore me.

By the way, a shout out to Scott, who stepped up and got my back.  You’re the grandma, beef wheet.

I’ve setup a category in my blog to be pulled to Planet Larry to let users know what’s going on with the development side.

Right now, things are going well, though we still need to add a lot more users.  I know there’s more bloggers out there — don’t be shy.  Get yourself added.

One thing we’re already getting is submissions for blogs in languages other than English.  Right now they are being pulled to the front page, but pretty soon here we’re going to set one up for each langauge.

Something else I’d like to add right away is display where all the users are from.  Not specifically of course, but it would be cool to know what country you are in.  So, e-mail me your country of residence and your province / state as well if you like, and soon I’ll have that be displaying on the front page.

One last thing — if you want a hackergotchi or avatar, go ahead and send them in.  Transparent pngs are preferred if you’re going to make a little bobble head of yourself.  And it doesn’t have to be a snapshot of your head.  Your favorite Tux icon or cartoon character would work, too.

Finally — tell your friends.  Send us their blog address and we’ll add them.  Get the word out.

Thanks, guys.  Feel free to ping me on IRC (Freenode, user beandog) or e-mail (beandog at gentoo dot org) if you need anything or have suggestions.

I thought it was worth mentioning that the feature request to get Matroska chapter support I asked for not too long ago was recently committed into the main MPlayer branch.

Let’s hear it for FOSS and an open development style. More importantly, thanks to Evgeniy Stepanov for coding it and getting into the tree. Hear, hear!

Responses have been positive so far to Planet Larry. I’m pretty excited by the idea, and I’m hoping we can get a lot of users on there. So far I’ve been telling everyone about it, hoping to get more people added. I posted a blurb about it to digg, so if you have an account, digg this baby.

Speaking of blogs, half the images on mine are broken. There’s actually a really funny, long story behind that of how I completely foobed up my mythbox (again). I’ll post that once I get some time.

In other Gentoo news, I’m a full developer now. Yay. Ironically, one of the teams I’m going to work on is a subproject of Quality Assurance.

I’m actually really excited to help out. I started with GNU/Linux back in 2001-2002 I think it was, and I started using Gentoo shortly after that, and haven’t gone back since. It’s going to be nice to finally be able to give back a little more to the distro that I’ve been leeching off of for years.

Introducing Planet Larry, an aggregation of blogs of Gentoo users.

A few of us in User Relations came up with the idea to have a planet feed that pulled subscriptions of blogs from our users that have anything to do with Gentoo. It’s not an official project, but that’s okay, it’s still just as cool. What we’d like to do is get anyone who writes about computer-related stuff and also uses Gentoo onto the feed. It’ll be a good way to see what you guys are up to, and at the same time hopefully bring the community together a little bit more.

So, if you use Gentoo and you blog, e-mail me your name and your blog’s website at beandog at gentoo dot org, and we’ll get you added. It’s that simple.

Man, I almost forgot! Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is playing on the big screen tomorrow night, at midnight, at the Tower Theater in Salt Lake.

I love watching movies on the big screen … especially when they are classics rolled again. I’ve seen such great stuff as “Watcher in the Woods,” “Superman,” “White Christmas,” and “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein” all on the big screen. You just can’t pass up an experience like that. I know there’s a lot more, I just can’t remember them right now.

So, if anyone else goes, just look for me … I’ll be wearing my Starfleet Academy t-shirt.

It’s far from glamorous, but I’ve setup a directory where you can download the latest version of mplayer-resume, in all of its 2.7k glory! Sweet.

I also submitted the “project” to freshmeat, so hopefully that will give it a little added exposure. I searched high and low for a solution, so I know how hard it can be to find something like this.

Downloads are available here: http://spaceparanoids.org/downloads/mplayer-resume/

Oh, and for the record, the documentation is included as comments in the code.

Slashdot has, as far as I can tell, only one redeeming quality: funny comments. I know it’s the only reason I stop by to read it every now and then.

Today I stumbled across a comment thread that was just freaking hilarious.  Every now and then there’s one that just makes me bust out loud laughing and that was one of them. Oh, man.

Anyway, I have this genius idea … someone needs to aggregate the RSS feed of comments on slashdot stories, and *just* post the ones marked +4 funny or higher. Kinda simliar to alterslash.org, but just with funny comments.

So, get right on that, will you?

My cartoons are almost done. I took a look at the queue last night, and there were 99 episodes left…. 97 of them all on one machine. I still haven’t coded it so that you can (easily) reassign the episodes in the queue from one machine to another. All it would really take, though, is moving the files from one machine to another and then a funky sub-select query to update the queue. I’d go into details, but it would be extremely boring. Needless to say, I just need to get off my duff and finish polishing up the frontend admin.

Anyway, since the cartoons will finish encoding today, now I’m left with a completely different beast — live-action shows. The same generic mencoder settings I’m using for cartoons work fine on these as well, but they don’t look quite as nice. It’s probably going to be back to the drawing board for a few days as I resume testing and research.

A while back, I thought I had the perfect solution. Since all I really needed to do to fix them so that transcode could process them was fix the variable framerate, I would just encode them, copying the audio and video, and then forcing the output fps. That actually worked great until you go to encode them *after* that.

To be honest, I’ve only tested that idea on two series so far, and they were both on TV shows from Universal Studios (A-Team and Murder, She Wrote in case you were curious). I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before, but Universal makes pretty much the worst discs out of the entire lot. The Incredible Hulk is the first series I’ve gotten from them where I could actually play all the discs. And I’m not just talking about my computer can’t play them, they send the DVD firmware for a wild loop as well.

Depending on which DVD drive I’m using, some of them might be able to actually pull the entire file off. My Pioneer and Lite-On drives work great, while the Sony one would lock up my computer completely, and I’d have to hardboot it. In fact, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the results with my Pioneer drives. They throw a lot of error messages to the system log, but if it really freaks out, all I have to do is forcibly open the tray, and the drive actually resets itself! Normally when I have to rip a disc out myself, the drive won’t be able to read until I reboot the computer to kind of clear the drive’s head. The Pioneer drives, however, still work. After I take them out, the open/close button still works, and I’m able to keep on ripping. I’m impressed.

So, my sampling of testing the worst discs in the bunch may not be the best approach. When I tried the A-Team one, it worked fine, but you could tell where it was switching framerates. Well, I need to clarify a little bit. The first copy/copy pass where I just used -ofps, *that* video looked great. It was when I transcoded from that that it looked like crap. Part of the problem might have been that I had to reindex the video because the AVI stream was broken.

One thing I could do is do a near-lossless encode on the audio or video so it at least processes the media file, albeit lightly, so the index is working without having to rebuild it. The audio would be pretty simple … just use ‘pcm’ as the output codec, pretty much copying it as a wav file. The video would be a little harder. I suppose I could export it as an MPEG2 stream again, and see what that does. Hmm, I hadn’t thought of that. Another idea is to give up on the AC3 stream and encode to the audio to MP3 or Vorbis or something. Doing any kind of encoding will keep the index intact. I’m just trying to find a solution that will leave it as near the original as possible.

I think that broken AVI index is what’s causing the awful artifacts though. Well, either that or the fact that it’s dropping (or duplicating, depending on what your target fps is) frames on the first encode. What happens though is you take that re-indexed video with the forced standard framerate, and *then* you run it through transcode. Again, I haven’t done much testing at all, just tried a two-pass encode on two different files. On Murder, She Wrote, the second file I tested, it actually looked really good for about the first twenty minutes. Then the entire thing was offset horizontally by about 60%, and there was a nasty green overlay. I wish I still had that original transcode, I could have posted a snapshot.

Whoops … one thing I just noticed is that my little reindex script was outputting the framerate to 29.97 (30000/1001) instead of 23.97 (24000/1001). That definately wouldn’t work well. I wonder if that’s how I was doing it on those first tries. I don’t think I was, but that might explain quite a few things. Time for more testing!

Well, this post ended up much longer than I had intentioned, but it definately got the wheels turning in my head a little bit. I’ve got a few ideas now that I can’t wait to try out. There may just be a perfect solution yet.