BunkBlog

The following is somewhat reformatted from a recent discussion on Cnet about DVD camcorders.

I know many people are considering a digital camcorder for the first time, as their old 8mm and VHS-C cameras start to die. Many people think that a DVD camcorder is a great idea, because it’s so simple: just record to the disk, hit the “finished” button, and play it on a DVD player (although you’ll be recording about 20 minutes on that disk, not the two hours you expect from a full-sized DVD). That works great if you want the exact same capability you had with a simple analog video camera. If you want to produce nicer video, though, the story is quite different.
There are some people who don’t edit their videos, who don’t mind that their home videos look amateurish and contain fingers over lenses and heads blocking shots and poor audio. For those people, a DVD camcorder is a great fit. They neither want nor need the editing quality they are denied by recording in a lossy format; they need and want, however, the ease of taking their videos and dropping them in nearly any DVD player and watching them.

Recording to a DVD in DVD-standard formats means lossy compression and the joys of MPEG formats that anyone who has tried to edit an MPEG can understand. The MiniDV camcorders can dump uncompressed video to your computer, where you can delete the scenes that look bad, you can punch up the color balance and contrast, you can add a music soundtrack if you like. All these things are wonderful, and I do them with all my home videos, producing slick DVDs with titles and transitions and menus for my relatives. That niche is where I want to be.

DVD is a great medium to VIEW video with. It’s even a great medium to shoot video if you understand its limits.

DVDs and MiniDV and hard drives and flash memory all record digitally. So, talk of capacity should include RAW storage in bytes, not just in minutes. Any talk of minutes gets you embroiled in compression issues.

A MiniDV tape holds 13 gigabytes of data. An 8cm DVD (the smaller ones used in camcorders) holds 1.4 gigabytes. An expensive SD card holds 4 gigabytes. A hard-drive based camcorder holds (as of today) around 30 gigabytes. That’s the actual storage capacity, folks. Now, how much do each cost? Well, the best price per gigabyte is the tape, as it has been throughout digital media history.

The cheap nature of tapes convinced the DV forum to make DV standard very close to uncompressed. This makes it easy to edit without losing quality.

The low capacity of 8cm DVDs, and the need to make them compatible with DVD players, means that DVDs have the worst video quality (among hard drives, DV tape, and DVDs at least – some of the flash recorders are toys). The compatibility of DVDs is their greatest asset. Hit “done” on that camcorder, and two minutes later you can be watching your home movie on a big screen. Not so with tapes.

DVD format does have an inherent flaw – lossy compression.

Tapes still exist for every high-capacity recording system in use today. High-end video recorders use tape. High-end data backup systems use tape. The reason is simple: high density at low cost.

If the video was recorded to the DVD as an uncompressed video file (like the DV standard used on tapes), you’d swap disks every six minutes. Also, the DVDs would be DVD-ROM format, and wouldn’t play on your DVD player – which is the selling point for most DVD recording camcorder users.

When you export a DVD format video to edit it, you are taking an MPEG (with I, B, and P frames) and editing it into a different compression scheme for whatever your target system is. If it’s DVD again, you compress an MPEG to MPEG, each generation producing another set of MPEG compression artifacts.

So, you can get high capacity and high quality on tape. You can get easy compatibility with DVD. You can’t get both. If you want DVD-player compatibility, then the DVD camcorder format has an inherent flaw – MPEG.

The hard drive recorders, at least those that you see marketed for typical consumers, use compressed video because they don’t generally have removable hard drives. With a fixed disk, you want more capacity than a single tape, obviously. So, the JVC Everio and others have MPEG-compressed video and the same issues with editability as the DVDs.

To me, the DVD camcorder is to video what the point-and-shoot camera is to photography. Just because we geeks want the best quality and ease of editing, doesn’t mean that “good enough” matched with “really easy” is a bad thing. So, if you know what you want to do with your video, that makes all the difference in the world for what type of camcorder to buy.

Dear people who change the resolution at work:

LCD monitors have one resolution.  That is all.  It is not debatable.  There is no judgement call, no opinion, no possibility of misunderstanding.  LCD panels have one fixed resolution.  Yes, they will sync up at lower resolutions (and sometimes higher, which must be seen to be believed).  But they will look like crap at anything but their native resolution or an even divisor thereof.  So, a panel of 1600×1200 resolution could look decent at 800×600.  But, a panel with resolution of 1280×1024 will not look good at 1152×864, no matter how much you may wish it to be so.

Thank you for not being a tool.

So, anyone else see the slightest bit of similarity between the new ABC Family show Kyle XY and the dearly-missed Fox show John Doe? They both have no memory of themselves, fantastic abilities, woke up in the forest, set in Seattle but probably shot in Vancouver… Of course, in keeping with the usual way of doing things lately, ABC had to slap together a viral marketing campaign too. Like the Hanso Foundation from Lost, we have the Mada Corp, a shadowy group that claims to be all about doing good and yet has a secret blog hidden in the job search link where someone writes that “they” are coming to get him. With the implication of freaky experimentation, maybe there’s a dash of Dark Angel in there too.

My point? I don’t have one, just thought that Kyle XY was strangely reminiscent of other shows.

I can quit any time I want. It’s a good thing most of the programs on my MythTV box are set for “autoexpire when the drive gets full.” Here’s the latest status line.

297 programs, using 242 GB (246 hrs 31 mins) out of 345 GB.

Now, to be fair, I have a truly stupendous number of cartoons for the Boy, as well as a significant number of DVDs ripped to the hard drive (no need to mess with the disks, which is good if you’re six years old).

JJ Abrams is going to deliver the next Star Trek movie. This one is set not too much before the Original Series, since it stars a younger Kirk and Spock. We’ll see.

This video has to be seen if you want to truly understand how long it will take to rebuild New Orleans.  It’s 22 minutes long, 82 megs in size, so don’t be impatient with it (or use dialup).

As ikilled007 has said, years – not months – years to bring it back, if ever.

Exactly why is it that nobody in The Unit wears a uniform while in garrison? Sure, when they’re in the field, they wear a mishmash of military and civilian attire. But, when they’re supposedly doing their homebase training, they hang out in t-shirts and jeans. Yeah, right. Well, there is one guy who stays in BDUs (the Colonel), but he doesn’t wear insignia of any kind, name tapes, patches, nothing.

Some of you may say, “But the US Code says that you can’t wear an accurate uniform.” That is actually not true for actors. Oh, it was true once, but it’s not true now and hasn’t been for years.

Larry the Cable Guy tied Basic Instinct 2 this weekend. That’s gotta hurt.

I read the graphic novel a while ago, and the movie version of V For Vendetta
is true to the source material and yet quite different.

The Commander’s review pretty much covers the material, so I won’t be redundant.  The most striking difference between the novel and the movie in my mind was the final scene.  I don’t recall a scene like that in the novel (the above ground bits, that is).  Makes the movie more hopeful than the book, which is not nearly as dark as most Moore stuff.  Might explain why he screamed to take his name off it.

Several people have recently asked why in the world I would need 350 gigs of storage space, when that equates to hundreds of hours of video footage – way more than I could watch in a reasonable amount of time.

So, here’s the explanation for those who haven’t drunk the DVR koolaid yet.

I don’t record things to watch them at a specific time (except for a few shows that I look forward to talking about at work), but to have them for whenever I feel like watching them. Say I feel like watching a cooking show.  Six months ago, I could flip over to the Food Network and hope one of the shows I liked was on, or deal with watching the Al Roker barbecue special again.  Now, I just see which Good Eats or 30 Minute Meals episode I feel like watching. And Alex has three episodes of every one of his shows on tap, for whenever he wants to spend his 30 minutes of screen time per day.

Although I’m still opposed to the idea of tuners being not part of an industry standard and therefore being held hostage to a cable or satellite company for digital signals, I can see the utility of a dual-tuner HD box sometime in the future. The bigger problem is that whole DRM nonsense. As the consumers get more educated and begin to revolt against all the copy protection crap the MPAA and RIAA want us to encumber our media with, they continue to plan even more.  France has legislated the first step toward making DRM illegal, and yet the US government opposes the measure.  It’s astounding.

As Cory Doctorow says, nobody wants to do less with their media today than they did yesterday.  Yet, that’s what the MPAA want to force on us.  Why?

I swear, Family Guy is written just for nuts like me. Just in the first seven minutes of tonight’s episode, the references included Mytzlplk, 80s children’s television, John Cusack movies, the Disney versions of Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin, and the war in Iraq.

The other obscure references that I noticed include the Dukes of Hazzard, Punk’d, the psychotically vague Second Amendment verbiage, a particular Burgundy wine (or restaurant in Tribeca), Planet of the Apes, Woody Woodpecker, Fatal Attraction, Less Than Zero (or maybe Bright Lights Big City – I’ve only read the books not seen the movies), and zombie movies.

There was also a reference to a movie that doesn’t seem familiar – ancient language-speaking forestdwelling people who are apparently reincarnated soul mates later in history. Anyone know that one?

Remember the new hard drive? Well, I decided to stop the separation of the various media files between hda4 and hdb1, because it causes issues that require me to manually move recorded movies to the video share in order to free up the space on hda4 (which was the original purpose of the extra drive). So, I spent a few hours today moving 140 gigs of files around from drive to drive, so as to get the system up and running using the Logical Volume Manager system. Now that it’s up, it’s sweet and future maintenance will be crazy easy.

Previously, the df command showed

/dev/hda1 /
/dev/hda3 /cache
/dev/hda4 /myth

/dev/hdb1 /myth/video

Now, the df command shows:

/dev/hda1 /
/dev/hda3 /cache
/dev/mythvg/mythlv /myth

Physically, that /dev/mythvg/mythlv device is a logical device, spread across two physical devices, with a combined total available space of 365 gigabytes. Now, instead of having 120 gigs free on the video drive and 80 gigs free (and falling fast) free on the main myth drive, I’ve got 206 gigs free on the logical myth drive. And, if I decide to be a bigger packrat, I can grab a SATA drive or two and extend the logical volume group across the new drives as well. I’m gonna get a terabyte, babay!

Officemax had a deal on a 300 Gigabyte Baracuda drive this week, so I grabbed one to replace my secondary drive on the Windows machine (which was a 160 GB Maxtor).  Then, the 160 went into the MythTV box, to serve as a storage place for ripped DVDs or movies I record from TV but don’t want to erase for a while (if at all).

The default structure used by Knoppmyth is to make four partitions on the primary drive (hda), with the fourth being the /myth directory and using the vast majority of the space on the disk.  With a 250 GB drive, I ended up with 160 GB used within six weeks of starting this project.  So, I added the 160 GB drive as /myth/video and away we go.

New partition structure:

hda1 – / (user files and operating system)
hda2 – swap
hda3 – /cache (for live tv)
hda4 – /myth

hdb1 – /myth/video

And now I’ve got over forty gigs used of the hdb1 partition, and down to less than half used on the hda4 partition.

When I bought some blank CDs this week, I ended up with a free 128 MB USB thumbdrive.  Anyone want it?  What the heck will I do with this thing?  I’ve already got three SD cards of varying capacity, an old CompactFlash microdrive (340 MB), and a spare 128 MB memory stick.  Like I need more solid-state storage?

Well, I’m so glad you asked.  Since I have two MPEG-encoding tuners, it’s amazing what my poor little Sempron chip is capable of.

Right now, 60% of the CPU is being used by mythtranscode, which is going through the movie Road to Wellville and removing all the commercials while compressing it to MPEG4 instead of the default MPEG2 (about half the size with equivalent video quality). Another 22% of the CPU is being used to transcode the movie LA Story from DVD to MPEG4, so I don’t have to find the disk to watch the movie whenever I want to (and just to prove I can). Meanwhile, both tuners are recording shows (Surface and Stargate, I believe) and I’m watching the Simpsons from last night.

I’ve really been abusing the recording features, and I’ve got 66 programs saved, using 68 gigs of my 212 available. After removing commercials and transcoding to MPEG4, a 30 minute show fits in 360 megs.

I’ve finished the MythTV install, and posted a quick description for your edification.

I didn’t do any work on the MythTV box Wednesday, but I got a borrowed monitor to help me set things up Thursday.  Looks like I’m in business, although I need to get a cable to split the speaker output from the sound card into RCA jacks to get to the TV.  Then, I’ll push a tunnel through the firewall so I can program my PVR from work.  Oh yeah.  That’s the stuff.

I promise to post a full review and more pretty pictures soon.

And the hardware is installed.  Tonight, I have completed my mother’s federal tax return preparation and then finished installing the hardware in my MythTV box.

The only tricky part has been finding somewhere to tuck all the power cords. The PSU I chose has a lot of cables attached to it, very generous compared to most power supplies. Unfortunately, I only need two of them to power the drives and front case fan – the rest are just in the way.  Fortunately, I have a spare 5 1/4 drive bay that I am not using, and it’s placed perfectly to hold the cables.

Strangely, neither the motherboard (which has onboard sound) nor the DVD drive included an audio cable, so the optical drive won’t be pumping any CD audio for the time being.  Good thing that’s not a big issue for me, eh?

The case now contains all the components I intend to install. The only other parts that are not connected are the mouse, keyboard, and remote control.  Whew.

For photos of the progress so far, check out the gallery.  Good night.

I just spent an hour putting the first pieces into the case. The LC13 case is quite roomy and built like a tank. The Sempron processor is easy to install, as has been the case with every ZIF-style chip in the past decade. The heatsink was equally easy to install, although they sure have grown since the last time I installed a processor (that was a K6-200, if I remember correctly). The pre-installed thermal paste is a nice touch and worth the extra few bucks for the retail package, in my mind at least.

I’ve got the hard drive temporarily placed, as I have to pull its cage out again in order to install the DVD burner (which arrives via UPS tomorrow). And, that’s enough fun for tonight. My pile of hardware has dwindled considerably, with the tuners and video card being the only parts left to install (after that burner, of course) tomorrow night.

By this time tomorrow, I’ll have the last piece of my MythTV kit in the house. I will probably not assemble it until this weekend, but ya never know. The initial hardware will include a 250 gig hard drive, two analog tuners, and a wireless keyboard and mouse to assist the remote.

Photos and details as I complete the project. This should be fun. 🙂

Boy, those congresscritters really don’t seem to get it. Nobody outside the MPAA and RIAA wants a broadcast flag, no matter what you call it. As always, Cory Doctorow’s analysis is fantastic.

Under the DCPA proposal, digital media technologies would be restricted to using technologies that had been certified by the FCC as being not unduly disruptive to entertainment industry business-models.

Unduly disruptive? Hey, folks, the disruptive technologies are the ones that drive us forward and upward to ever-higher levels of economic and creative success. Phonographs, automobiles, computers, compact disks, radio, television – all disruptive technologies in their time. There is no Constitutional right to protect existing business models, and isn’t Congress supposed to be in the business of protecting the Constitution and the sovereign people of the United States? Or are they instead in the business of protecting campaign donors against their own customers? Yeah, that was rhetorical, thanks.