Actually, this blog started somewhere else, was moved here, and now it has moved to yet another site.  I haven’t heard of any problems with blogs running through the wild Internet untamed, but it seems this blog is quite illusive and difficult to catch.

Ok, seriously.  I started using Blogger way back before it was bought by Google. It sucked.  It still kinda sucks, but I have no doubt Google will make it better.  Then, I moved to WordPress.com.  Well, WordPress.com has its own limitations, which are rational and logical limitations — the way the software is designed, individual bloggers can’t do certain things individually because it would end up affecting everyone. That makes sense, but only in the “we sorta painted ourselves in a corner” kind of sense.  However, I do enjoy the WordPress interface; it is super-friendly and ultra intuitive.  So, I decided to download the Open Source version of WordPress(.org), and host it on my machine at home.  This is where you’ll find the rest of this blog.

After hitting a huge snag with my transcoding videos (after only getting about 90+ out of 300+), I stopped for a bit while I troubleshot and regrouped. The issue was that for every new video I transcoded, there would be no audio in the music video. After quite a while of poking around, I found out that the ffmpeg utility I was using wasn’t built with an MP3 encoder — usually Flash video is encoded with MP3 audio. So, then I had to download the source for ffmpeg, and rebuild with the helper libraries (libmp3lame, etc.).

Now, I’m back on track, and almost to the ‘T’s. ~230 music videos in the library as of now.
Here are some of the artists I have:

3 Doors Down
Black Eyed Peas
Bon Jovi
Britney Spears
Celine Dion
Cher
Collective Soul
Duran Duran
Eminem
Enigma
Fergie
Gwen Stefani
Heart
Hillary Duff
INXS
Jamiroquai
Jennifer Lopez
Kelly Clarkson
Kylie Minogue
matchbox twenty
Paula Abdul
Pussycat Dolls
Red Hot Chili Peppers
Rihanna
Roxette
Santana
Shakira
Shania Twain
Spice Girls
Stacie Orrico
Sugababes

ACDC
Damn Yankees
Eric Johnson
Evanescence
Golden Earring
Green Day
Journey
Linkin Park
Motley Crue
Rob Zombie

JPop
Aya Kamiki
B’z
Eri Nobuchika
Foxxi misQ
Heartsdales
Kumi Koda
LISA
m-flo
Namie Amuro
Orange Range
Shanadoo
SOULHEAD
Southern All Stars
trf

I even have a song named “Anti Hero”, which was a collaboration between Rin (JPop) and Lisa Loeb.  Excellent song. Good video, too.

At the rate I’m going now, as long as I don’t add a large number of videos to be transcoded, I should be done in a few days.

Total number of times I’ve watched a few music videos via the gallery: ~30

Total number of videos left to transcode: gobs

Ability to enjoy my music video collection over the web: priceless

The transcoding of videos from whatever into FLV format is slow going mainly due to the fact that each video is so unique and requires a bit of attention — if you see the gallery you’ll understand what I mean; there are different sizes, quality, bitrates, etc.

I think once I finally finish the transcoding of the music videos, I’m going to begin to tackle the massive amount of home videos I have. I usually keep quite a bit of home movies of the family around as sort of “stock footage” for inclusion into whatever DVD I’m editing to mail to someone. Instead, it seems like a wonderful thing to just be able to point them at the gallery instead of tossing together a DVD menu, editing the movies, burning a DVD and then mailing it to them. We’ll see how that goes, but the music video collection thing was more or less just to see if the system can handle that much… stuff. Stuff being the sheer amount of thumbnails, videos, and people watching things at random times. So far, it has held up rather well, but there are only 88 videos. I can’t wait to see what happens when I have the entire collection in there!  At some point, I’ll probably turn on the ability for people viewing the gallery to be able to upload their own.  That seems like a dangerous thing that will need to be kept in check, but who knows…  it could be worth the effort.

Hey!  I have my own YouTube!!  yay!!

I never realized that my collection is so cluttered.  Its a mish-mash of videos of different sizes, different formats, encodings, and oddball bitrates.  I was originally thinking I could just go through all 300+ files and transcode them en-masse.  Nuh uh.  Some are AVI files which transcode rather cleanly.  Some are Mpeg in DVD format, which means I have to crank down the bitrate so its playable over the web.  Even then, some are MOV files, which could be mpg4, mov, mp2, or various other encodings.  Still yet, every MOV file I’ve come across is using an odd bitrate and sample rate.  While *most* videos use an audio sample rate of 44,100 or even 48,000, the MOV files I have are sampled at something really wacked like 16,000, for some odd reason.  To say the least, it makes transcoding them a pain in a big toe.

I’ve added the URL to the list (on the right side of this page) for future reference.

I’ve also locked down the access so the DRM/copyright police don’t come to lock me up (and so that I can limit access to people all over the world looking at my music videos).  To view any of the videos, you have to first register (with an email confirmation) and then login.

Well, I’m off, then.   ….back to transcoding.

Gallery 2!!

Man, this thing ROCKS!  It is mainly designed to host photos and images — and it does that VERY well — but there’s also a Flash video plugin that will handle FLV files and even allow you to play them from the gallery/albums.

So, I’m in the process of transcoding my videos while I find just the right quality to not lose too much of the video/audio quality but so that they still play smoothly over the network.

My thinking is this:

• since I have about 300 or so music video files in AVI, MPG, and MOV formats, I’ve always just burned them to DVD whenever I want to watch them away from the computer. This is a cumbersome thing when you consider that, on average, only about a dozen or so music videos will fit onto one DVD disc (plus menus and DVD overhead).
• I don’t really look forward to carrying around so many DVDs on the odd chance that I want to watch a few videos from a computer, or the fact that whatever computer I’m using might not even have a DVD drive.
• I don’t really want to spend the time and energy involved in uploading this massive collection onto a service like YouTube, etc. not to mention the entire set of DRM/copyright issues.

I was initially under the impression that the current state of CMS (content management systems) like Joomla/Mambo or even Xoops or Drupal would give me the ability to simply scan a directory (or upload a video) and have it instantly available to me on a webpage a la Google Videos or YouTube.com-style. This doesn’t seem to be the case. There is hardly anything out there for the hobbyist that enables someone to have a video collection. I suppose everyone just uploads their videos onto those services and tolerates the loss of customization and control.

Current Linux tools seem to be able to handle this type of need. ffmpeg will transcode just about any type of video into FLV (Flash), though that’s it — you get a Flash-encoded video, with no real way to view it even if you have a Flash plugin in your web browser — you still need a player. Of course, there are quite a few Flash players out there, but then you still have to embed the player into your website and then toss FLV videos at it in order for you to see anything.

There seems to be a large gap in pre-made web applications that do this well. One candidate is PIVIA. However, getting this thing to work in an automatic way has been rough at best. It doesn’t seem to want to encode videos on the fly like it claims to do. My workaround is to manually transcode videos, but I have over 300 of them and that could take a while… Also, using PIVIA, the filenames have to be mangled in such a way that the format, tags, and any meta-information are written into the filename, but most of that information is then written into a database. I’m not convinced this thing was written efficiently, but it seems the author didn’t really design it to do video but photos instead. I’m sure it does photos VERY well, but that isn’t what I need it for — and there are hundreds of other photo gallery applications out there to choose from.

Having said all this, I’m not even going to touch on the fact that I’m also downloading TV shows via RSS/Bittorrent as I posted about before. It would be REALLY nice to view those shows whenever/wherever, but alas I’ll probably still be transcoding videos until/when someone makes a major breakthrough in hosting video for the home-hobbyist.

[Ed. It seems that I already have all the tools necessary to make some sort of automated video file processor with a web-y frontend.

• ffmpeg transcodes video.
• flvtool2 will add meta tags so that you can skip to parts of a video before it has fully downloaded.
• PHP, for scripting the process on the web server.
• Apache, a web server.
• There's also a free FLV player than can be embedded into a web page.

All I need now is the time to toss it all together in some sort of sensible way.]

It is made by Urwerk, and is a 2nd generation timepiece from that company that makes watches solely by hand.  Its rumored that this is the type of watch that Michael Jordan wears.  At $10,000+ each, I’ll probably never be able to afford a watch like this, but I SOOOO want one.

Personally, I like the dance remix (done in 4/4 time) much more than the original (2/4 time, half the tempo of the remix). It seems to fit nicely onto my playlist lately since I’ve been listening to a bit of Electronica and JPop lately.

M is the name of the song and supposedly stands for the initial of the first name of a biblical figure (which is quite uncommon in a Buddhist culture), Maria (The Virgin Mary). Keep in mind that the remix has slightly different lyrics in that a few verses have been removed.

Here is the actual remixed song: Ayumi Hamasaki – M

The lyrics are below in the following format:

kana
romaji
English

M

‘MARIA’　愛すべき人がいて
‘MARIA’ Ai subeki hito ga ite
“Maria” There is someone I should love;
キズを負った全ての者達…
KIZU wo otta subete no monodachi…
every person who has ever been hurt…

周りを見渡せば
Mawari wo miwataseba
As I look around,
誰もが慌ただしく
Dare mo ga awatadashiku
everyone busily
どこか足早に通り過ぎ
Dokoka ashibaya ni toori sugi
hurries on by.

今年も気が付けば
Kotoshi mo ki ga tsukeba
I noticed that this year, too,
こんなにすぐそばまで
Konnani sugu soba made
the signs of winter have
冬の気配が訪れてた
Fuyu no kehai ga otozureteta
come very soon.

今日もきっとこの街のどこかで
Kyou mo kitto kono machi no dokoka de
Again, somewhere in this city today
出会って　目が合ったふたり
Deatte Me ga atta futari
two people will meet and fall in love;
激しく幕が開けてく
Hageshiku maku ga aketeku
the curtains are violently opened.

それでも全てには
Soredemo subete ni wa
必ずいつの日にか
Kanarazu itsu no hi ni ka
終わりがやって来るものだから
Owari ga yatte kuru mono dakara
Even so, everything eventually,
someday, has an end.

今日もまたこの街のどこかで
Kyou mo mata kono machi no dokoka de
Again, somewhere in this city today
別れの道　選ぶふたり
Wakare no michi Erabu futari
two people split apart;
静かに幕を下ろした
Shizukani maku wo oroshita
the curtains are quitely dropped.

‘MARIA’　愛すべき人がいて
‘MARIA’ Ai subeki hito ga ite
“Maria” There is someone I should love.
時に　強い孤独を感じ
Toki ni Tsuyoi kodoku wo kanji
At times I feel very lonely.
だけど　愛すべきあの人に
Dakedo Ai subeki ano hito ni
結局何もかも満たされる
Kekkyoku nani mo ka mo mitasareru
But my needs are all filled
by the person I should love.

‘MARIA’　愛すべき人がいて
‘MARIA’ Ai subeki hito ga ite
“Maria” There is someone I should love.
時に　深く深いキズを負い
Toki ni Fukaku fukai KIZU wo oi
At times I bear very deep wounds.
だけど　愛すべきあの人に
Dakedo Ai subeki ano hito ni
結局何もかも癒されてる
Kekkyoku nani mo ka mo iyasareteru
But my they are all healed
by the person I should love.

‘MARIA’　誰も皆泣いている
‘MARIA’ Dare mo mina naite iru
“Maria” Everyone is crying.
だけど信じていたい
Dakedo shinjite itai
But I want to believe.
だから祈っているよ
Dakara inotte iru yo
これが最後の恋であるように
Kore ga saigo no koi de aru you ni
So i’m praying now
that this is my final love.

理由なく始まりは訪れ
Wakenaku hajimari wa otozure
Beginnings come at random,
終わりはいつだって理由を持つ…
Owari wa itsudatte wake wo motsu…
but endings always have meaning.

You might’ve read about my previous find in the quest for yojijukugo in which I found something interesting and a bit of history while I was at it.

As far as I know, this next yojijukugo has no real samurai history behind it, but is similarly interesting and enlightening. This idiom is essentially a Japanese trait, as anyone who has spent any time in Japan would recognize its part in the non-individualistic society, unlike that of Western culture .

不言実行

Fugen Jikkou (foo-gen jee-koh)

不 = fu = denial
言 = gen = to say
字 = jitsu = in practice
行 = kou = to do

“Fu”, when placed together with “gen” to make “fugen” means ‘to say nothing’. Appending “jitsu” with “kou” makes “jikkou”, which translates into ‘to do something’.

The two words together eloquently describe a common Japanese virtue, even though some Japanese people don’t naturally refer to the phrase directly:
“to not complain and do what should be done”.

Read My Result
Take the Test

That’s a load of crap!! I’m not like that at all…

Now, I remember why I don’t do these stupid tests…

[Ed. This goes way deeper. In my "results", it says to PURSUE: The Stiletto, The Peach, The Nymph
But, in the profiles of each The Stiletto, The Peach, and The Nymph... it says: ALWAYS AVOID: The False Messiah
I feel like I've been ostrocized!]