Monthly Archives: March 2005

Denver Presentation

Thanks again to all the Denver-area folks who came out to see my presentation at the CLUE meeting. I had a great time and, judging by the reaction to all the cheesy multimedia clips, it looks like you all did, as well. Here is a redux of the intro clip:

Lopez, the narcotics king

That’s right! It’s Lopez– Lopez, the narcotics king. Remember: He has the mansion, he has the money, he has the drugs, he has the POWER. To say nothing of the receding hairline. It turns out that Digital Leisure still has the MPEG trailer for this game (Drug Wars) on their downloads page. Check out the whole thing. Always a crowd pleaser!

Just FYI, any other Colorado-area Linux/computer groups who would like a fun presentation on multimedia technology (complete with silly multimedia clips), just drop me an email. Have computer and projector, will travel. I always enjoy doing these talks (in fact, just try to get me to shut up about multimedia technology).

Apple Lossless Audio Codec RE’d (now in FFmpeg)

David Hammerton reports that he has successfully reverse engineered Apple’s custom proprietary lossless audio codec which goes by the fourcc ‘alac’. Source code is here. Hopefully, it will be integrated into FFmpeg in short order and be accessible to all libavcodec-using programs.

And– would you believe it?– it looks an awful lot like other lossless audio codecs in terms of underlying algorithms.

Update, early, early on March 6: It took me the better part of March 5, but ALAC is in FFmpeg’s libavcodec and ready for all the programs that depend on libavcodec.

Denver, CO Multimedia Presentation

I will be doing a presentation about multimedia technology soon. If you are in Denver, CO, USA, or a nearby area, check out my “Multimedia on Linux” presentation for the Colorado Linux Users And Enthusiasts (CLUE) group near the Denver Tech Center. Tuesday, March 8, free to the public. The group congregates around 6:30pm, my presentation is at 7:00pm. See their website for more details and specific directions and maps.