One of the best places to look for high-quality movie trailers is Apple Trailers. They have lots of bandwidth and a large selection (altough they don’t have e.g. the new Indiana Jones 4 trailers, which are exclusively on Yahoo HD trailers).
Apple typically offers its HD trailers in 3 formats: 480p, 720p and 1080p. The “p” stands for “progressive” i.e. not interlaced, every frame is a full picture instead of only the odd or even lines. The 480 in “480p” stands for the number of lines in the image. 480p is roughly equivalent with DVD quality, 720p is “HD Ready” and 1080p is “Full HD”.
I’ve been playing around a lot with video conversion lately and one of the tools I use often is the Swiss armyknife for video manipulation ‘ffmpeg‘. It does format conversion (MPEG1/2/4, Quicktime, AVI …) , rescaling, recompressing, frame rate conversion … almost everything. It exists for all flavours of Linux/Unix, and also for Windows.
To give you an example: this is a script I wrote to extract screenshots of DVD files, straight from the disk.
1) the naive version ffmpeg -i [input file] -r .05 -y [output name]%%03d.png
This does indeed extract a PNG image every 20 seconds (framerate = 0.05), but it does not take into account that the DVD image material is stored anamorphically. What you get is this:
Natalie Portman looks really thin, but that’s because the image dimensions (720×576 pixels - PAL standard) are for 5:4 aspect ratio, and whereas the actual image should be 16:9. So let’s make the image wider while keeping it the same height.
2) Rescale to 16:9 ffmpeg -i [input file] -r .05 -s 1024x576 -y [output name]%%03d.png
The result looks better:
As you see, there are still black borders on the top and bottom. This is because a feature film is made in ’scope’ format, with an aspect ratio of 2.39 instead of 1.78 (the decimal equivalent of 16/9). So, while the full width of the image is used, only 428 pixels of the height are actually in use. Let’s crop those black borders off.
4) old 4:3 movies
The older movies used a 4:3 aspect ratio, so when you extract them as 16:9 they look like a weight feel on them:
In those cases, you can use the ‘naive’ version above, which will give you:
Here also, the actual 4:3 image is ‘letterboxed’ to the 5:4 DVD image.
I get the question a lot, so I thought I might write a post about it as a ready-made answer to the next few.
“I’m gonna buy a new (LCD) TV, should I go for HD Ready or for Full HD?”
1. What’s the difference?
Full HD is (at least) a 1920 x 1080 pixels (also called 1080i or 1080p, depending on whether the signal is interlaced/not as good or progressive/better) resolution. An HD Ready TV will typically only have a 1366 x 768 (WXGA) resolution, but it will still accept 1920×1080 input (that’s why it is ‘ready’).
2. What’s your budget?
You will have a hard time finding a TV that is “Full HD” under the 1000€ mark (Pixmania now has 1 Hitachi of 975€). If you want to spend more like 600€, that solves a lot of difficult choices!
While reading the specs of the PackardBell Store & Play, I fall upon “Foto formaten: JPEG, HD JPEG” As I am working with several aspects of HD (High Definition) video all the time, I am of course intrigued. There is a standard for HD JPEG? Wow, tell me more!
HD JPEG = HD Photo = JPEG XR (my guess)
Well, it’s not that easy, actually. When you do a search for “HD JPEG” on Google, all you see is promo talk. Vendors like Philips and Panasonic use it as a feature on their devices, but there is no official definition of what it stands for. What I think happened is:
Microsoft developed a standard “HD Photo” (formerly Windows Media Photo) that corrects some of the disadvantages of JPEG:
It can store color information at 32 bit per color instead of 8 or 12. (In current JPEG, “24-bit colour” means: 3 x 8 bits for R, G and B.)
All encoding steps of the algorithm are lossless (except for quantisation). So it has a true lossless mode (all coefficients = 1). JPEG does not have this (at least, not implemented).
All kinds of tech mumbo-jumbo reasons (read the Wikipedia article)
“HD Photo offers image quality comparable to JPEG-2000 with computational and memory performance more closely comparable to JPEG”
One important aspect regarding the standardization of HD Photo is Microsoft’s commitment to make its patents that are required to implement the specification available without charge. Microsoft’s royalty free commitment will help the JPEG committee foster widespread adoption of the specification and help ensure that it can be implemented by the widest possible audience. The JPEG committee hopes and encourages all participants in its meetings to consider this royalty free approach when offering patented technology as a candidate for standardization.
The hardware vendors didn’t like the “JPEG XR” name (it doesn’t really show clearly that it’s an upgrade from JPEG), so they combined it with an acronym that consumers know and associate with “better” and “more expensive”, so was born “HD JPEG”.
in short: Technically, it does not exist. Practically, it sells flat screens.
I want to mention a little tool that helped me out twice in the last week, and that I find very little info about online. It’s a Windows command-line MP3 file tagger and renamer called id3.exe. Since I forgot where I downloaded it from and Google doesn’t give me a clue either: here’s where you can download id3.exe.
ID3.exe can do several things, of which I will just cite the things I actually used:
it can obviously set ID3 tags in MP3 files (that is, ID3v1 and v2). The first time it adds ID3v2 tags which are stored in the beginning of the file (necessary when you need the info right when you start reading the file, like with streaming), the whole file has to be rewritten, but subsequent modifications are really fast. id3.exe -1 -2 -g [genre] -c "[Copyright notice]" -l "[Album name]" "%OUTPUT%"
set the ID3 tags of one file to those of another. I needed this when I transcoded MP3 files to a lower bitrate with LAME. LAME does not copy the existing ID3 tags to the new file. So I used ID3.exe to just copy those from the source file. id3.exe -D %INPUT% -1 -2 "%OUTPUT%"
Rename the file according to the MP3 tags. I had a big collection of MP3 files called “01 Track01″ without any MP3 tags. I first set the ID3 tags based upon the folder structure (the folder name was the Album name), and then renamed them to “[Artist name] - [Album name] - [Track N°].mp3″. id3.exe -2 -f "%%a - %%l - %%t.rbs" "%OUTPUT%"
Id3 can also deduct album names, artist, song titles and track number from the complete filename + path.
And this is what YouTube is developing as a new ‘beta’ version:
they got rid of the large banner (” Use Quicklists!”) which was basically a waste of space.
all clip info is now under the video instead of to the right. All info on and action on a video are now in one place. I like it.
Youtube likes you to check out other videos. Most newly freed space is dedicated to thumbnails of other (’related’/'promoted’) clips: you now see 13 of them on the frist page instead of 5.
I’ve had a number of requests from attendees of the Barcamp Brussels 3 event. “The speeches were recorded on Nokia N95 phones, right? How come we haven’t seen them yet on Youtube/Google? What’s taking so long?” Well, here’s the answer.
The reason is purely me. I received the N95 video’s (3DVDs, about 12GB in total) from Fré quite soon after the event. At the time, I was ‘just going to throw them’ on Google Video, maybe with a title image before the movie that included a Barcamp and Nokia logo. How hard would that be, right? Well, slightly harder than I thought. The files were huge, so had to be transcoded to something smaller, there were too many files to do things manually, so I needed to start scripting, and the tools I used for it, ImageMagick and FFMPEG are powerful but tricky. That combined with my tango activities, a holiday, a girlfriend abroad and the non-negligeable fact of having a day-time job made for this delay of over a month. Mea culpa. But the wait is over.
These are the first videos. Feedback on video, sound and other details are welcome! I will then proceed with the conversion of the other ones. I will also do a post on what tricks I used to do the video rendering of the title, the transcoding and the merging of video files.
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