Let’s Get Lost (1988) is a American documentary film about the turbulent life and career of jazz trumpeter Chet Baker written and directed by Bruce Weber.

I saw Let’s Get Lost in Leuven, I guess around 1990. Chet Baker has been a weak spot for me ever since, because I now knew how much suffering was hiding behind that vulnerable voice. I tried to find a DVD of it but apart from a VHS tape (I don’t have a player) I couldn’t find anything. Then the other day I found the whole movie, split in 13 parts, on Youtube:

Now I could watch them on my PC one after the other, but I wondered if I couldn’t join them and watch them as 1 single movie on my Apple TV. And I managed. Of course, the quality is not comparable to DVD, but it’s something. Here’s the procedure:

• I installed Easy Youtube Video Downloader for Firefox.
• I downloaded the 13 parts one by one. Each file was a 40MB MPEG4 video. The format:
  Input #0, mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2, from ‘Chet Baker Lets Get Lost 1988 0113.mp4‘:
  Duration: 00:08:21.2, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 628 kb/s
  Stream #0.0(und): Audio: mpeg4aac, 44100 Hz, stereo
  Stream #0.1(und): Video: h264, yuv420p, 480×360, 30.00 tb(r)
• I transcoded each file to a .VOB (MPEG2, DVD format). Each VOB file is about 180MB. For the transcoding I used ffmpeg: ffmpeg -i [INPUT.MP4] -target pal-dvd -y [OUTPUT.VOB]
  The result:
  Input #0, mpeg, from ‘Letsgetlost01.vob‘:
  Duration: 00:08:21.2, start: 0.500000, bitrate: 2734 kb/s
  Stream #0.0[0x1e0]: Video: mpeg2video, yuv420p, 720×576 [PAR 1:1 DAR 5:4], 9000 kb/s, 25.00 tb(r)
  Stream #0.1[0x80]: Audio: liba52, 48000 Hz, stereo, 448 kb/s
• The handy thing with .VOB files is that you can append them into 1 file and they just play in sequence. So I just did copy *.VOB ONEBIGFILE.VOB and this gave me a 2,2GB video file in DVD format.
• I now needed to transcode it again to a format that plays on my AppleTV, so I used Mediacoder to do that.
  The final result: a 525 MB video file, ready for my bedroom TV:
  Input #0, mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2, from ‘Letsgetlost.mp4‘:
  Duration: 01:54:55.2, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 624 kb/s
  Stream #0.0(und): Video: h264, yuv420p, 640×480, 25.00 tb(r)
  Stream #0.1(und): Audio: mpeg4aac, 48000 Hz, stereo

Now just imagine I could do the following: search for the movie in iTunes, pay for it, let it download and it’s there, 15 min later, on my Apple TV. If it were possible, would I do that? Yes. But the movie industry does not have a solution for the long tail of video, does not want to set up a convenient distribution model for video, certainly not for that funny region called ‘Europe’ and so we need to resort to elaborate and cumbersome methods that, unfortunately, do not make them any money.

The world around the movie companies has changed, the customers have changed, the technology has changed, and if they keep on refusing to adapt, they’ll be like a buggy whip company.

You know, at one time there must’ve been dozens of companies making buggy whips. And I’ll bet the last company around was the one that made the best goddamn buggy whip you ever saw. Now how would you have liked to have been a stockholder in that company?

Larry the Liquidator – Other People’s Money

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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”.

But let me give a concrete example of the resolution of 3 trailers:


The standard resolutions are defined for 16:9 aspect ratio. 1080 divided by 9 times 16 is 1920. When a trailer is produced in a different ratio (e.g. ’scope’ or 2.35:1 – the wide cinema standard), then the full width is used: 1920 pixels, but the height is only 1/2.35 of this or 816 pixels, not the full 1080. If the end result must be encoded as 1920×1080, black borders have to be added on the top and bottom, which is called “letterboxing”. Of course, with Quicktime and other video file formats, a film can be encoded as 1920×816 pixels, and the player take care of displaying as wide as he can, and filling the top and bottom with black.

In concrete: 480p defines a canvas of 848×480 (852 pixels would be closer to 16:9, but for some reason Apple uses 848 as width). 720p means 1280×720 (for Witless Protection, Apple uses 1248×702 – God know why), and 1080p translates into 1920×1080.

If the trailer is not in 16:9 or 1.78:1 aspect ratio but wider, then the used width will stay the same, but the number of used lines (what gave the standards their name in the first place) changes. So for ’scope’ trailers, 480p means 352 lines, 720p would actually have 544 lines and 1080p levels out to 816 lines. Hence: 720p isn’t always 720p.

Some proof:

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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.

3) Crop black borders away
ffmpeg -i [input file] -r .05 -croptop 74 -cropbottom 74 -s 1024x428 -y [output name]%%03d.png

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.

Why did I need to figure this out? Well, guess what movie is running on my LCD photo frame:

Windows batch script

For those who like a ready-made script (for Windows machines), here it goes:

set FFMPEG=C:\Program Files\ffmpeg\ffmpeg.exe
set SOURCE=e:\video_ts
set TITLE=[movie name]
set DESTIN=%CD%

pushd %SOURCE%
for %%F in (*.VOB) do (
  call :vob2img %%F
)
popd
goto :end
:vob2img
set FNAME=%1
set NAME=%FNAME:.VOB=%
set NAME=%NAME:VTS_=%
set NAME=%NAME:01_=%
set NAME=%NAME:_TS=%
set NAME=%NAME:VIDEO=%
set ROOT=%TITLE%_%NAME%
"%FFMPEG%" -i %FNAME% -r .05 -croptop 74 -cropbottom 74 -s 1024x428 -y %DESTIN%\%ROOT%.%%03d.png
:end

Which will give, for a 90 minute movie, 270 images called like V4Vendetta_1.NNN.png.

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“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!

3. Do you ever play 1080p content?

A regular DVD gives you 480p, so nowhere near 720p or 1080p. If you play it, it will be upconverted by your TV, but since the source was only 480 pixels high, you’ll never get 1080 different pixels, right? You will need some kind of BluRay/HDDVD content, or a recent Xbox or Playstation to get full 1080i input. If you don’t, maybe having Full HD does not make a lot of sense.

4. Will you see the difference?

Now there’s a good question! Let’s take this article as an inspiration: “1080p does matter“. While it focuses a lot on the ‘larger sized’ home cinema (a 123″ screen means: 3,12m diagonal, or a screen of 153cm high, that’s right, almost as high as a person), the calculations are interesting.

Let’s say you buy a 40″ LCD TV (diagonal: 101cm). The THX norm -used a lot in home and ‘real’ cinema – would want you to sit no further than 191cm from the screen, and preferably 136cm, regardless of the resolution. Do you typically watch your TV from that close? If I used to sit that close to the TV, my mom would tell me I’m ruining my eyes. What I’m saying is: you normally sit quite far from your TV.

Carlton Bale’s calculator says that you will only notice the difference between a Full HD and a HD Ready when sitting closer than 223cm. If you sit closer than 158 cm, you might actually need a higher resolution than Full HD. Yes, it exists, there is 1440p (WQXGA) on the horizon (HDMI 1.3).

Conclusion

Go for Full HD if

• you can spare the money
• you have some source of 1080i/1080p content
• you normally sit close enough to the screen
• none of the above, but you want to impress the neighbours

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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”
• The JPEG committee announced that they would (consider to) adopt HD-Photo as a standard, with as a working name JPEG XR. Provided that, of course, …
  

  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.

Competition

JPEG XR/HD JPEG tries to fill the gap between JPEG (small files, widely accepted standard, but compromises quality) and RAW (huge files, proprietary in a lot of cases but the highest possible quality).

In 2004 Adobe launched DNG (Digital Negative) but this is more an effort to have a ‘unifying camera raw file format’ (uncompressed and compatible between different brands).

OpenEXR is a file format for HDR images (High Dynamic Range), created by Industrial Light & Magic (George Lucas’ company) in 2003. It has lossless compression, and most importantly 32-bit floating point per pixel/color. It is used as a storage format for CGI, that saves as much dynamic detail (dark vs. light) as possible, until the scene is finally rendered onto a more classic format (JPEG2000, JPEG …)

JPEG2000 is the standard developed by the JPEG group in 2000 to allow for higher quality still and moving images. It uses wavelet compression and has excellent image quality. Unfortunately it is also rather slow for both compression and decompression, and most importantly, no on uses it for images. Motion JPEG 2000, on the other hand, is the standard for digital cinema.

PNG (Portable Network Graphics) was developed from 1996 onwards as an alternative for the patent-undermined GIF format. For photos it does not compress as well as JPEG.

TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) is a container format that can store multiple images in 1 file, can do CMYK as well as RGB, but due to old compression algorithms, creates huge files.

Who uses it?

That’s an even better question. Windows Vista can read HD Photo files, some flat-screen TVs can read them from memory cards, some media centers can display them but within popular consumer applications, only Adobe Photoshop can create them. For as far as I know, no camera saves its pictures in the HD Photo/JPEG XR format. So I wouldn’t let this feature decide on what TV you should buy, yet.

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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.

This is the complete usage of the version I used:

id3 0.78 (2006080)
usage: id3 [-1 -2 -3] [OPTIONS] filespec ...
 -v             give verbose output
 -d             clear existing tag
 -t <title>     set tag fields
 -a <artist>
 -l <album>             (i'th matched `*' wildcard  = %1-%9,%0
 -n <tracknr>            path/file name/counters    = %p %f %x %X
 -y <year>               value of tag field in file = %t %a %l %n %y %g %c)
 -g <genre>
 -c <comment>
 -D <filename   duplicate tags read from filename
 -f <template>  rename files according to template
 -q <format>    print formatted string on standard output
 -m             match variables in filespec
 -R             search recursively
 -M             preserve modification time of files
 -V             print version info
Only on last selected tag type:
 -s <size>      set tag size
 -E             only write if tag already exists
 -u             update all standard fields
 -rTYPE         erase all `TYPE' frames
 -wTYPE <data>  write a `TYPE' frameReport bugs to <squell@alumina.nl>.

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This is one of those videos you just have to keep watching to the end. The hand drawing the image belongs to a photographer called Chris Fenner who has been a friend of director Dan Lowe ever since they met at university. Dan designed the image we see at the end using pictures found on the internet and ideas he got from the band. Then after rehearsing and rehearsing all day, Chris drew the image, and would have got it all in one take if the pen hadn’t run out. Drawing the picture took 27 minutes and by the end of the shoot Chris could barely move his hand for cramp.
from britishcouncil.org

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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.

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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.

Jeroen De Cock – “Online communities & offline events”

Will Moffat – “Introduction to Freebase”

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The source: mobile video

The source file I used was recorded with my Nokia N91 phone at a concert of Billie King in the Ancienne Belgique (Brussels), at the end of their set. The cute girl you see hitting the cymbals is Isolde Lasoen, Belgium’s finest female drummer. The equally cute lead singer is Tine Reymer.

The input file is:

• video format: MPEG-4 (compressed), 352 x 288 pixels, 15 fps
• filesize: 7.817.226 bytes
• duration: 0:01:54 (114 seconds) – so around 550 kbps bitrate

This means that (a) the source material was already compressed and comes from a consumer-grade, low-quality camera, so it was no DVD quality to start with and (b) the source dimensions (352 wide) are smaller than most embedded players(400-480 wide) so the movie had to be upsized, which adds some more distortion.

Video hosting services

Youtube

Size: 425 x 350

___

Google Video

Isolde on Google Video
Size: 400 x 326
___

MySpace video

Get this video and more at MySpace.com
Size: 430 x 346
___

Dailymotion

Isolde Lasoen – drummer of Billie King
Uploaded by pforret
Size: 425 x 364
___

Vimeo

Vimeo actually shows the video in its original MP4 format: best quality, but full size (> 7MB). Moreover, it always loads the clip in an embedded Quicktime player, it does not wait until you press ‘play’.
Isolde Lasoen – Billie King concert on Vimeo
Size: 400 x 324
___

Revver

Size: 480 x 392
___

GoFish

Size: 343 x 290
___

ClipShack

View Isolde on Clipshack
Size: 430 x 354

Observations

• I haven’t researched which services use what kind of compression (need to set-up a packet sniffer for that).
• The only service that does not use a Flash player + FLV Flash video is Vimeo. Their leave-the-format alone approach makes that the servers need less CPU (no transcoding necessary) but more bandwidth. Additionally, the lack of a Flash player means that there is no thumbnail, and the video starts loading right away.
• Thanks to the fact that I made this blog template wide enough to show Flickr pictures at normal width (i.e. slightly wider than 500px), I could show all movies. If your layout is different, you might have trouble with the Revver (480px wide) format.
• Most services take their thumbnail around the same time: some 5 seconds into the movie. Google Video takes it screenshot way further (around 15 seconds).

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