Author Archives: Multimedia Mike

A Reason To Subscribe To The Sunday Paper

Finally, a useful reason to subscribe to the newspaper again– at least the Sunday newspaper: Movie Previews on CD-Rom To Come with Sunday Papers. This reminds me of when Sony was experimenting with alternative methods for distributing promotional material. I went into a Best Buy store one day to find a large display with FREE Hellboy promotional DVDs. I took one home, checked it out, and found that it just contained proper DVD versions of all of the same teasers, trailers, and featurettes that were already available online. I’m not sure if Sony ever tried the same thing with any other movies.


CD-ROM

Naturally, if anyone gets one of these CD-ROMs in their Sunday paper, let me know what kind of multimedia is on them. Also, it will be interesting to know what format they choose– 80mm or 120mm. The smaller size, with over 200 MB available, should be plenty of space to get the message across.

Blog Upgrades

I finally got around to upgrading all the blogs on this site from WordPress 1.5 series to 2.0. It feels slick. Last weekend’s conference encouraged me to look into the hundreds of plugins already written for WordPress. I quickly found a code syntax highlighter:

Hey, it even links to descriptions of standard functions! I didn’t catch that until I wrote this post just now.

Update, July 25, 2020: Time and technology both march along. For years, the code highlighting plugin mentioned above has been broken. Instead, I went through the blog and moved all of the code snippets on this site over to Github’s gist service.

I never cared much for the old theme on this blog, inappropriately named “Simple Green”, but it was one of the few decent themes that had a fluid layout. I don’t think the narrow fixed layout themes fit well for this site. I sometimes need to spread things out. Thankfully, WordPress hosts an amazing themes resource site that enables you to search for certain properties, such as fluid width. I have settled on this Business 1.0 theme and I even delved into the underlying code in order to customize it somewhat. I am truly proud of myself. For the curious, the banner icon comes from here, the same icon set as the MultimediaWiki icon.

Sony Blu-Ray Computer Hardware

So I was in a Sony Style store yesterday when I noticed a Vaio laptop equipped to play Blu-ray discs. Who wants to take the US$3500 plunge to try to learn how to extract data? It seems there is a slightly cheaper option available though– the BWU-100A internal Blu-ray drive, which can read and write just about every CD and DVD format preceding Blu-ray, as well as reading and writing Blu-ray media. US$750

Does anyone care yet? Or will Blu-ray and HD-DVD go the way of DVD-Audio and Super Audio CD?

You Can Stop Using The Reference Decoder Now

Thanks to Kostya’s diligent, Google-sponsored work, FFmpeg now has a native, open source VC-1 decoder module that is working quite well for most WMV3 media found on the internet. It’s working well enough that there should not be much good reason to be using my old convoluted process for incorporating the SMPTE reference VC-1 decoder into FFmpeg. There are some bugs remaining in Kostya’s code that he is quickly ironing out but it’s time to cut over to it, at least for non-x86 platforms. Some more advanced features are known to be missing. This is primarily because no sample media can be found that exercises those features. If you have some, please pass it along.