I scavenged this from a spent shop today:
“The Ultimate DVD Demo” alleges to flex the full capabilities of a DVD player (all kinds of audio tracks, audio encodings, viewing angles, subtitles– basically everything that your DVD remote has a button for). I wish I possessed this back when I was first heavily involved in xine development circa 2002; it would have been handy for testing and verification.
Jeff Atwood writes of automated spamming recently in Designing For Evil. The ensuing discussion.presented plenty of technical anti-spam brainstorms as well as the usual violent anti-spammer fantasies. However, one interesting insight I gained from the comment thread concerned the automated nature of Wikipedia’s anti-spam measures:
There is an IRC channel that receives every edit done to Wikiepdia, a bot then check the page for known bad URLs and string and reverts if necessary.
Aha! So it isn’t just a global network of diligent and vigilant volunteer Wikipedians keeping the content clean. That always struck me as largely intractable and learning this punctures the starry-eyed ethos behind the Wiki concept. But I did a little research and it seems to be a real thing.
I suppose something like that would be vast overkill for the MultimediaWiki. As the discussion also details, not all public discussion forums are created equally in terms of attractiveness to spammers, and the MultimediaWiki would probably be pretty far down the list. Some kind of registration CAPTCHA would probably be adequate. And now that I understand a little more about PHP programming thanks to FATE, I may have enough knowledge to try my hand at such a system.
Hey, here’s a CAPTCHA idea that I have entertained: Call it a phonetic CAPTCHA and challenge the user to type in the proper English word with a certain phonetic pronunciation; for example: KAH MEW NIK AY SHUNZ (communications). I was inspired by Infocom’s old Planetfall interactive fiction game where things were labeled phonetically. Perhaps it discriminates against non-native English speakers (and the less educated among the native set) as well as the spambots, but I guess every measure has its pros and cons.
Kostya recently lamented the matter of subtitle quality. I admit that subtitles are not a topic that I have traditionally cared very deeply about, popular though they may be in the multimedia scene. All the media I care about is generally already in English. Apparently, I’m one of the rare geeks who absolutely detests anime, so I have no reason to care about fansubs for media “imported,” one way or another, from certain Pacific islands.
However, some time ago, I suddenly found a reason to care about subtitles. It turns out that subtitles don’t have to contain bad translations. I’m a huge fan of the old TV show Mystery Science Theater 3000 (a.k.a. MST3K). In a nutshell, the silhouettes of a guy and his 2 robot puppets make fun of rotten movies. They crack an incredibly wide variety of jokes and it’s unlikely anyone can understand every one of them. Leave it to a collaboration of internet geeks to develop an annotation project where users can submit quotes and annotations corresponding to particular timecodes in the lousy movies. These annotations go into a database where they can be downloaded as plaintext .srt subtitle files.
Pictured is an annotation I added for episode 0904 – Werewolf. This is nothing new in the context of DVDs — I remember watching a popup trivia subtitle track on the Spider-Man DVD. But I’m wondering if there are other annotation projects like this one out there on the net for other niche areas of interest.
I’m pleased to announce that Jason Garrett-Glaser, a.k.a., Dark Shikari has moved his young blog under the multimedia.cx umbrella: Diary Of An x264 Developer. Looks promising, so keep up with it.