Weekend update

[elfs]

Yes, I still have Tatu in my playlist. I was tempted to post it, but it's 97K in length, showing some 2720 song. And, y'know, even if the act is old, the first two albums were pretty good.

Oy, what a weekend. Friday, after picking Yamaarashi-chan up from her mother's house, I got home only to somehow tear something horrible in my back across my shoulderblades. For most of the evening, I was having trouble getting up, and couldn't move my head very far. An old cartilage injury in my right shoulder acted up in response, making using my right arm for any heavy lifting difficult. It's cleared up somewhat, but I'm still wondering what I did to it.

Saturday, when I arose Omaha was already out the door, heading north to do some kind of demo at a Triskeli Guild event. I had the kids all to myself, and that wasn't too bad. Despite the arm and the back, I still had the energy to make a batch of waffles, and this time I seem to have gotten it exactly right-- they were wonderful. I kicked the kids out of the house and into the back yard while I cleaned house a little, then traded places, sending them inside to get their bathing suits while I weeded and mowed the lawn, watered the garden, and then set up a sprinkler for them to run through. They had a blast with that.

I made (or rather, tried to make) bread. It was a standard French bread recipe, but I got the shaping of the boule a little off. It's very yummy, but instead of a loaf I got... a sphere. It's actually a very nice sphere of very delicious bread, but it's still a sphere of bread.

And I've learned how to burn VCD's. A VCD is a CD that will play in your DVD player; they can contain about 45 minutes of video with decent compression rates. I burned a couple of music videos and some vacation pics and other things to see what it took. The Quicktime didn't burn right at all, which means I haven't been able to make CDs of Troops (the Star Wars/Cops parody) or The Spirit of XMas, the original South Park short.

Sunday, I took the kids to a birthday party for one of Yamaarashi-chan's friends. It went okay; the kids were kept appropriately stunned on cake and stuff. I mostly spend my time making sure they kept their faces cleaned and orchestrated bathroom breaks and tried to stay out of the way. They had a lot of fun.

When we drove back, they both fell asleep. I dropped Kouryou-chan off and headed back into town with a snoozy Yamaarashi-chan to go pick up her sisters. Her mother needed to be somewhere at six and Yamaarashi-chan needed someone to watch over her at home, so somehow the task fell to me to pick up Aurora and Lily and drive them from the ferry dock to their house. Odd, isn't it, how "stay away from my kids" becomes "I want you to pick up my kids" when living up to one's principles becomes inconvient.

---

A reminder to George W. Bush:

United States Code, Title 4, Chapter 1, Section 8 (g):

"The flag should never have placed upon it, nor on any part of it, nor attached to it any mark, insignia, letter, word, figure, design, picture, or drawing of any nature."

Why George needs to be reminded.

Comments

[erisiansaint]

And how do you burn VCDs?

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Well, you need to take your MPEGs and transcode them (there's a suite of programs that will do this, the most notable of which is called, duh, transcode) into MPEG-1/2 format at 480x480 pixels (US/NTSC resoultion), 29.97 frames per second, two-channel audio at 44100Kb/s sample rate and a 128kb/s encoding rate.

Once you have them in a list, there's a simple tool called vcdimager that will arrange them into a VCD image suitable for burning with cdrdao.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

I'm way ahead of you in that regard. I've figured out how transcode works, and have used MPlayer to decode problematic files.

For an example of one of my problems, the "I'm Fed Up" video by Alizee's is encoded Sorenson 3 at 15FPS and a sample rate of 22100 mono. If I play the video, it seems fine. But when I write out the video portion as YUV, it's only two minutes long (29.97/15), and I can't figure out how to change the frame rate during the decode, so the encoder assumes it's okay and, well, ick.

The audio is worse, but I can probably fix that with a ratio resampling tool like sox once I've got it in WAV format. I just don't know how to manually change the frame rate on the video. Is there a YUV tool to double the framecount?

Oh, and if you know anything about burning stills to the MENU format to turn the selection process into a slide show, let me know. I'm told it's possible, but nobody will tell me how!

Only one coaster so far, and it was a real grab-bag of MPEGS, AVI'S, and MOVs all jammed together just for fun. The Shakira videos came out okay, the Alizee's video Gourmandises is kinda off-sync, the Weird Al It's all about the Pentiums was really off-sync; like I said, experimenting.

Fortunately, XINE makes a great previewing tool.

[lucky-otter.livejournal.com]

You might note that mplayer comes with a script, mencvcd, to make encoding VCDs easier. Whether it suits your needs or not, it might have some useful ideas in it.

[zaiah.livejournal.com]

hollow out a crusty bread spehere.. a dicensphere ;)