videogeek
http://videogeek.shacknet.nu/index.php
"New" server
http://videogeek.shacknet.nu/index.php?entry=entry100624-223510
In the days ahead I'll be expanding this post to document how to secure MAMP for use as a real production server. There is information out there, but it's all in bits and pieces and some of it isn't all that current. I'll do my best to write up a clear and concise guide.
Later!]]>Encoding for the PS3
http://videogeek.shacknet.nu/index.php?entry=entry100215-095803
The correct method is similar to the posts below about encoding from bluray format in that you need to process the audio and video separately, and then mux the results back together into the final .mp4 file. Here is the recipe:
Step 1: Separate the Audio Separate the audio from your source into a separate .wav file. See below for how to do this for a bluray source. If your source is almost anything else, the following will do it for you:
Step 3: Encode the video Note that there will be some small but significant changes to the usual video encoding command line here. These will ensure a file that plays back on the PS3 beautifully. Note that I have omitted the usual crop, scale, and dsize commands from the -vf section, as these will vary greatly from file to file. Look at the bluray entries below for more information on these command line parameters. Just be sure to put the "format=i420" as the last filter in the chain.
There you have it. Copy the result to your PS3 via an SD Card or USB Stick, and it will play back perfectly on the PS3.]]>BluRay to .mp4 Part 3
http://videogeek.shacknet.nu/index.php?entry=entry090204-064824
Of course you need AnyDVD HD. And you'll need to follow the instructions in Part 1 of these instructions on obtaining and installing a UDF File System. And you'll need the neroaacencoder - follow the instructions in Part 1 for that.
You need the newest version of eac3to. There have been a lot of improvements to this tool that makes the process fairly painless.
Ok, let's start. Put your bluray disc (I'm still using Wall-E as my example) into your bluray drive, and open up a Command Prompt window. With the latest eac3to in your path, cd to a place on your computer where you want to store the 20Gb intermediate files that you are going to be ripping from the bluray disc. Then enter the following command:
eac3to j:
J: is the drive letter of my bluray drive - substitute the letter for your own drive here.
eac3to will chew on the disc a bit, and then spit out a listing of all the playlists. Now in the case of Wall-E there are 7 different playlists - the main movie in 3 different languages, plus the "geek squad" version of the movie in 3 different languages, etc. etc. With some experimentation on my part, I found that the playlist I wanted was #6. Remember - the longest playlist is not necessarily the movie. On Wall-E the longest playlist is the geek squad version. Not what you want. Now, enter this command to list the streams for playlist 6:
eac3to j: 6)
This will take some time--about 5-6 minutes--but be patient, eventually eac3to will list the video, audio, and subtitle streams contained in playlist 6. What we want is video stream 2, and audio stream 5. The command syntax for eac3to is really simple - you list the stream, and then say what you want done with it. Enter the following command line:
2: video.* This tells eac3to that we want to save track 2 as a file called "video". The "*" tells it to give the file an extension according to the format of the stream. In Wall-E's case, the video is encoded with h264, so the resulting file will be "video.h264". Easy.
5: audiodump.wav -down2 -down16 This tells eac3to that we want audio track 5 saved to a .wav file, down-mixed to stereo, and down-converted to 16 bit audio.
eac3to will set about doing these tasks, and will take some time to do it - up to 4 hours or so depending on the speed of your system. If you have the drive space to do so, ripping the entire disc to your harddrive first will speed up the process considerably. For example, if you had ripped Wall-E to the harddrive first, you'd use the following syntax:
eac3to e:\quack_d1_can, substituting your own drive letter and the name of your particular folder.
eac3to will do the processing in 2 passes. Because the movie Wall-E is chopped up into several files (46 pieces in all) there are tiny gaps in the audio track. eac3to will recognize this, and create a gap log file as it does the first pass. It will then go back and do a second pass on the audio, using the log file created in the first pass to eliminate the gaps. The reason the movie is chopped up into so many pieces is actually a testament to Pixar's obsessive tendencies - they not only translate the audio for the movie into different languages, but they also translate most of the visual signage seen in the movie - each little piece is a version of a scene where there is a sign or other visual material that has printed English in it. Other playlists use other pieces, with all those visual bits translated into either french, or spanish. Pretty cool.
In the end, you'll have a video stream "video.h264" and an audio file "audiodump.wav". Follow the rest of the steps from Part 2 to encode the audio and video, and mux them into an .mp4 file.]]>Blu-Ray to .mp4 Part 2
http://videogeek.shacknet.nu/index.php?entry=entry090111-101431
Ammendment
After writing this, I discovered that I was doing a step wrong. There is an additional tool you will need called BDInfo that will parse the playlists on the blu-ray disc, and help you discover the correct playlist for your movie. You can then load the playlist in TSMuxer instead of the process I described below, and have a much easier (and correct) time of putting the movie back together. I heartily recommend this tutorial and in fact I've been having a lot of fun with the MediaCoder program described in that tutorial. Pretty nice GUI for beginners, and has access to the advanced encoder options for fussy people like me.
At this point you've downloaded all the software I mentioned in Part 1. You'll need to put all this software on your computer somewhere in your PATH. Follow the instructions here. You've got the UDF driver installed according to the instructions in Part 1. You've got your blu-ray drive hooked up, and you are ready to go.
Step 1: Extract the movie. Put your blu-ray disc in your blu-ray drive. For the sake of this tutorial, I'm going to be using Wall-E from Disney, since it has the most obnoxious file arrangement I've seen on a blu-ray disc (so far). If you can rip this one, you can rip anything.
Start up tsMuxeR GUI. Click the "add" button, and navigate to your blu-ray disc. You'll see a few folders. Enter the one called "BDMV". You'll see a few more folders. Enter the one called "STREAM". Here you'll see a large number of ".m2ts" files. If this were a normal blu-ray disc, you could simply select the largest file and that would be the main movie. On this particular disk the movie is scattered across 23 different files. By a process involving playing each file with mplayer, I determined that the movie was in files 00000.m2ts through 00022.m2ts. Select the 00000.m2ts file to begin. tsMuxeR will chew on the file a bit, then add it to the input files box.
A number of tracks appear in the Tracks box. Ignore these for now - we have to add the other 22 pieces of the movie to the input box. Click the "append" button, and select the "00001.m2ts" file. You'll see that it is appended to the input files list. Repeat this step for each of the remaining 21 files. When you are done, scroll through the input files list to make sure you got all the files, in the right order, with no repeats.
Now we'll have to delete tracks we don't want to demux. Select the first track in the list, and note that the track info (you might have to widen the tsMuxeR interface to see it completely) lists this as a lower resolution track. Click the "remove" button to delete the track. Repeat this for the second track as well. We want to keep the 1920 x 1080 track. We also want to keep the DTS audio track, so skip down to the AC3 track following that, and keep hitting the "remove" button until only two tracks remain in the list.
Under the Output section, select the "Demux" radio button, and then click "Browse" to select a spot on your hard drive with a LOT of room - about 20 Gb free. Then click the Start Demuxing button, and then go find something interesting to do. On my machine, with this movie, the process too about an hour.
When you are done you'll have two large files saved on your hard drive with long file names. Rename them to something sensible, such as "video.264" and "audio.dts".
Step 2: Encode the audio Relative to the other steps, this one is fairly quick, so we'll do it first. Open a command prompt, and navigate to the folder you demuxed the files to. Enter this command:
eac3to audio.dts audiodump.wav -down2 -down16
This will convert the DTS file into a stereo .wav file. Once this is done, you can delete the audio.dts file.
This will convert the .wav file into a standard .m4a AAC file. Once this is done you can delete the audiodump.wav file.
Step 3: Encode the video First we need to determine the cropping and scaling. Mplayer will help us out here. Enter this command:
mplayer video.264 -vf cropdetect
Let it run a little while, then ESC out of the video playback. The correct cropping will be reported on the command line. For Wall-E, the cropping was -vf crop=1904:800:8:140. Now, with that information in hand, enter this command:
mplayer will report the correct scaling needed for this movie. In this case, it is 1280x544. You can substitute any other mod16 number for 1280, depending on what size you want to encode the file movie at, and mplayer will give you the correct height.
With these two pieces of information at hand, we are ready to encode the video:
Once this is done, you can delete the temp_video.h264 and temp_audio.m4a files. Congratulations - you're done! The resulting .mp4 file should be playable on an AppleTV, XBox360 or Sony PS3.
If you want to retain the .DTS soundtrack, you can skip the audio re-encoding section, and mux everything into an .mkv file, but that's something I don't have a lot of experience with, so I'll leave that an exercise for the reader.]]>Blu-Ray to .mp4 Part 1 - software
http://videogeek.shacknet.nu/index.php?entry=entry090111-081603
THIS IS FOR WINDOWS XP ONLY. I do not have Vista, so I cannot test this out on that platform.
First, you are going to need some bits of software to get the job done. AnyDVD HD is essential. Without this installed, your blu-ray discs will be unreadably encrypted.
You will also need to install a UDF filesystem so that the blu-ray disc is readable by the operating system. Get the UDF driver install from the Toshiba site. If it happens that your computer is not made by Toshiba, you'll have to fiddle around a little to get the driver to install on your system. Follow these instructions:
(copied directly from the SlySoft forums)
There is an easy way to "trick" installation of the Toshiba UDF2.5 driver on non Toshiba PCs.
1.) Unpack it.
2.) Start setup.
It will tell you, that you cannot install it on your non-Toshiba PC. DO NOT CLOSE THIS MESSAGE BOX.
Navigate to your temp directory with explorer. You'll find a directory named like this: {1347D5A6-4FE0-476A-B85F-D0FC91F55EB0}
Enter it. You'll find two files: thdudf.inf and thdudf.sys
Right click thdudf.inf, select "Install".
Wait a while. Close the Message Box. Reboot.
The next bit of software you will need is tsMuxer. You can get it from SmartLabs. This is the software that will let you demux a Blu-Ray title into its component streams, and re-assemble a multi-file title into one stream for the purposes of encoding.
To convert DTS audio into other formats, you will need eac3to, an indispensable tool for working with blu-ray titles. You will also need the Nero AAC Encoder. This will encode the audio into an .mp4 compliant AAC stream.
You will also need mp4box which is a handy little utility that you will use to mux the video and audio streams into a standard .mp4 file container.
Lastly, you'll of course need MPlayer and Mencoder. Follow the links from my Software Links page to get those.
Next post I'll show you how it all works.]]>Adventures in Blu-Ray
http://videogeek.shacknet.nu/index.php?entry=entry080527-110849
I wanted a legal source of HD content, so I purchased a Pioneer blu-ray DVD ROM drive and put it into an eSATA/USB2 optical drive enclosure. Of course the Mini has no idea what to do with this device. I plugged it into my PC.
First off, I need to explain that the forces that be in Hollywood have mandated a torturous DRM scheme in hardware and software to ensure that the same fate that befell DVDs does not happen with Blu-Ray discs. To this end there is a new encryption scheme - AACS, and various hardware requirements in a blu-ray equipped PC - encrypted data path to the video card, encrypted data path to the monitor, etc etc. The system requirements on the Pioneer box read like a list of things I don't have: Windows Vista, DirectX 10, HDCP-compliant motherboard, graphics card, graphics driver, and monitor, and a SATA connection. I run XP, DirectX 9, have none of that HDCP stuff, and all my SATA connections are used up already.
Funny enough, none of this matters. A quick upgrade of AnyDVD to AnyDVD HD, and an install of PowerDVD 8 and I was in business. Even hooked up via USB, Blu-ray movies play back perfectly on my PC. Silly DRM people, foiled again.
Of course, none of this does any good for me watching these movies on my TV set. I could investigate using something like Slingbox to deliver the content from pc to tv, but I'd rather go the re-encoding route. I've done a little experimenting, and I can create absolutely gorgeous .h264/aac .mp4 files from blu-ray sources using a handful of freely available software, and AnyDVD HD.
I'll be posting a script to do this once I perfect it, but for now, all you need is a copy of AnyDVD HD to do the heavy lifting of ripping the blu-ray titles from the DVD, eac3to.exe to extract and convert the audio tracks, neroAacEnc.exe to convert the audio to AAC, mencoder to convert the video to .h264, and mp4box.exe to mux it all together into an MP4 container.
I tried a couple of the gui based methods - MeGUI looks like it should do the job OK, RipBot produced uneven framerates, but my script produces absolutely perfect picture quality.
More Later.]]>Custom Artwork In Front Row
http://videogeek.shacknet.nu/index.php?entry=entry080421-074226
I recently upgraded the operating system on the mini to Leopard, which also upgraded Front Row to the new version. There are a couple of annoying differences between the old Front Row, and the new version:
1) The old Front Row used to display a moving thumbnail of each movie in your collection. The new Front Row has different behavior -- it now displays a still thumbnail image, captured from about 3 seconds into the movie. Unfortunately this is either a black frame, or a glimpse of one of the many logos that appear before any movie. It almost never has anything to do with the movie itself. Maybe you like all the Columbia, Universal, and Warner Bros. logos, but I don't find them all that attractive.
2) The old Front Row would remember what spot you were in a movie so that when you went back to it, you could pick up from where you left off. The new Front Row only does this for movies that are in the iTunes library now.
I wanted a method to choose which movie frame was going to represent the movie in Front Row when scrolling through the collection. And, I wanted to be able to stop videos and come back to them at a later date and pick up from where I left off. A search on the internet revealled some contradictory information, but I have come up with a solution that fixes both annoyances.
First off, this method requires that the files you want to use this method on are readable by QuickTime Player. If you have a file that can't be played in QuickTime Player, I suggest Perian which is a QuickTime component that adds native support for many popular video formats.
To create the custom artwork for your Front Row movie, follow these steps:
1) Open the movie in QuickTime Player. Play, or scroll to the frame you wish to use for your custom artwork. Pause the movie at the frame you want. This can be any frame in the movie - I am a purist and tend to use a frame that displays the movie's title, but you can choose any image from the filme that evokes what the movie is all about, for you.
2) From the View menu, select "Set Poster Frame".
3) Go back to the beginning of the movie -- otherwise the movie will start at the poster frame when you start to play it in Front Row. I use the button that looks like this: |<- to do this.
4) Go to the file menu and select Save As... Leave the filename alone, but click the button "Save as Reference Movie" and hit save. This should be in the same folder as the original movie, but does not need to be. The filename will have a .mov extension on it, and will be 2-4 Mb in size, depending on the length of the movie.
5) Quit QuickTime Player, and fire up iTunes. Go to the Movies category, and drag the reference movie you just created into the window. If you have the movies listed by thumbnail, you'll see that the movie has the thumbnail of the poster frame you chose.
6) Quit iTunes, and fire up Front Row. Select Movies from the media list at the right, and you'll see the movie you added to iTunes listed there, with the correct artwork.
7) Crack open a cold one, put your feet up, and enjoy.]]>DVDtoAVI 2.9 Update
http://videogeek.shacknet.nu/index.php?entry=entry080417-224258
Details are in the manual. DVDtoAVI 2.9 is available here.]]>MEncoder and the iPod Touch
http://videogeek.shacknet.nu/index.php?entry=entry070930-082742
Apple iPod. Here is the new command line (this for a two pass encode of a wide-screen movie from DVD):
These set the output options, telling it that we are going to output to an .mp4 container file, and that the movie is at film frame rate. If this were a PAL DVD it would be -ofps 25. We are also telling it that it is going to be writing a file called TEMP.mp4.
These set the audio output options. We are telling MEncoder that we want to use the faac audio codec to produce an AAC audio track, with the properties appropriate for a Quicktime compatible audio stream in an mpeg4 movie. We want a stereo AAC file, 48000 sampling rate, at a bitrate of 160kbps.
These are the video filters we are using on the title. The pullup, softskip filters tell MEncoder to convert the 29.97 fps output from the DVD to a progressive 23.976 fps output, since we are sure this is a movie output. If this were a PAL DVD we would skip these two filters, as they would not be needed. The scale here is appropriate to convert a wide-screen format movie to a size that will play back comfortably on an iphone or ipod touch screen. The screen on these devices are only 480x320, so the size seems a bit large. They have this feature where a double tap on the touch screen will zoom into the video so that the height fits the screen, giving you a nice full screen view of the movie while cutting a bit off the sides. This scale accomodates that feature while keeping the quality of the movie high even while zoomed in. The dsize parameter ensures that the resulting .mp4 file has a SAR (pixel aspect ratio) of 1:1, required by the iPod. The harddup parameter ensures that all frames, even duplicate ones, are actually present in the output stream. The unsharp setting is a tweak to make sure the picture looks great on the iPod screen - scaling tends to soften things a little.
These set the video encoding options. We want to use the x264 codec for the video stream in our output file, at a bitrate of 1381. This bitrate is a little on the high side, and will produce excellent, artifact-free video from most sources. You can go as low as 768 with the bitrate if you want to produce smaller output files, at the risk of introducing blocking artifacts that the iPod doesn't seem to be too adept at hiding. The vbv_maxrate and vbv_bufsize parameters are there to ensure that the bitrate doesn't climb above 1500, the iPod's stated technical limit for bitrate in an x264 video stream. The nocabac parameter turns CABAC (context based adaptive arithmatic coding) off in this video stream, as this is an x264 feature that is not supported on the iPod. The me=umh tells MEncoder to use the "uneven multi hexagon" search" algorithm in it's motion estimation. This is better, but slower than the default 2 pixel radius hexagon search. This helps compression. MEncoder's default sub-pixel refinement quality setting (subq) is 5. Setting it to 6 is one better, and increases the quality of the output. The trellis setting stabilizes the bitrate needs of each frame vs wild fluctuations in bitrate, and usually increases the quality of the output file. The idc_level=30 tells MEncoder that we only want x264 options up to level 3.0, the top complexity limit stated in the iPod technical specs. The global_header parameter adjusts the structure of the video stream so that header information is repeated only once in the stream, for compatibility with the iPod.
The threads option is going to be different on everyone's computer. My computer has a dual-core processor, so setting threads=2 allows both CPUs to work on encoding the video at the same time. If you have only one CPU core in your computer, you can eliminate the threads parameter completely. If you have more cores, set this to an appropriate value. pass=1:turbo allows MEncoder to skip some CPU heavy calculations on the first pass that won't really affect the bitrate decisions on the second pass, and this speeds things up a bit.
nicmp4box -add TEMP.mp4 OUTPUT.mp4
This is necessary. You'll need nicmp4box to set the iPod UUID atom in the resulting output file, because this is something that MEncoder cannot do on its own. Without this atom, the resulting file would play fine in MPlayer, Quicktime and iTunes, but would not be synched to the iPod.]]>iPod touch vs PSP Slim
http://videogeek.shacknet.nu/index.php?entry=entry070929-142951
Sony PSP, or the Apple iPod touch. I'd like to take a few minutes and compare the strengths and weaknesses of each device.
This image shows the new slimmer PSP and the ipod touch at the same relative scale.
Watching Movies You can see right away that the ipod touch will fit in your pocket better, because the entire size of the unit is only slightly bigger than the PSP's screen. This also means the PSP's screen is much larger than the ipod touch's screen area. And, it's got a really nice screen. The ipod touch has a maximum of 16Gb of memory, the contents of which must be managed by the iTunes on a "host" PC or Mac. The PSP uses memory sticks up to 8Gb in size which can be swapped on the go. Additionally, any PC can be used to put content on the PSP, as no special application is needed at all other than a file browser. The PSP also accepts commercial movies on UMD discs, while the ipod touch has no such capability. The PSP's screen is larger, and arguably nicer to watch videos on, and the built-in speakers make watching movies and videos on the go that much more convenient. Winner: psp..
Listening to Music The ipod touch is an ipod. This means you get the ipod's legendary audio output, small size, great interface, and WiFi access to the iTunes music store. On the downside, your music collection is tethered to the iTunes library on the "host" computer. Listening to music is what the ipod does best, and the interface on the touch is particularly impressive, and a breeze to browse through your library with. You can manage the PSP's music library from any computer, and you can download music content from certain sites using the built-in web browser. The music listening interface is far more clunky than the ipod's. On the plus side, you get some really neat visualizers to stare at while you listen to music. Both players will continue to play music while you are otherwise engaged in using the devices. Winner: ipod touch.
Viewing Photos There really is no contest here. The photo viewing capability of the ipod touch with its gestural interface really blows away the rudimentary photo viewing capability of the PSP. The only real hurdle to this feature is the necessity of having to use iTunes to manage everything on the ipod. The PSP has no such restriction, and photos can be added to the memory stick from any computer. Winner: ipod touch.
Surfing the Web Both of these devices are capable of basic wireless web surfing. The PSP however has a fairly crippled mobile browser that isn't capable of doing much else than stuggle to display most web pages. The Safari browser built into the ipod touch isn't perfect either, but is much more capable of displaying most sites (if they don't rely on flash for navigation, that is). Safari on the ipod touch is insanely easy to navigate and zooom around pages with - it's a genuine pleasure to use. Winner: ipod touch.
Other Tasks The PSP is great for playing games. The ipod touch has no games at all (at the time of this writing). The ipod touch has a few rudimentary applications - calculator, calendar, world clock, but nothing that is going to make or break your purchasing decision. The PSP can act as a really cool little wireless network strength meter, while the ipod touch is really limited to showing you one of three signal strength states. The PSP has a camera and TV tuner add-ons available for it - no such thing for the ipod touch. The ipod touch can watch YouTube videos through it's own special interface - nothing like that available on the PSP, even through it's limited web browser.
Both devices are capable of being charged via USB cable. This is the iPod touch's only means of recharging. The PSP comes with a power supply, so it can be charged on the go.
Overall, the PSP is a much more general device, with more expansion options (memory stick, accessories, and UMD media) that also happens to be a great media viewer. The ipod touch is a more constrained device with specific purposes, which it happens to excel at. Winner: psp.
Value for Money The Sony PSP retails for $250 Canadian, and for that you get a pretty good game (Daxter), a collection of five Family Guy episodes, the PSP unit itself, a power supply, and a 1Gb memory stick. No earphones or USB cable are included. The ipod touch retails for $499 Canadian, and for that you get the ipod touch, a cleaning cloth, ear phones, and a usb cable. Winner psp.
Overall Winner The ipod touch is going to amaze your friends and confound your enemies with its sheer cool factor, while the retooled slimmer PSP is going to get a yawn from everyone as 'old news already'. Which is unfortunate, because overall the PSP is the more capable, less restricted device, which also happens to cost about half as much. Winner: psp.]]>
