November 16, 2005
Adding Bookmarks to the audio version of Evening at Adler
Just change the extension on the file you're offering to .m4b to enable itunes to remember your place, as well as put it in the Audiobooks menu.I was 45 minutes in when I disconnected my ipod to go to lunch, and I ended up with a sore thumb seeking back to my place :)
Awesome awesome discussion. Real meat for any cocoa developer.
-justinb
Sincerely glad you enjoyed it, but the extension isn't going to change, for several reasons...
- You didn't say please, or proffer it as a suggestion, rather you just told me to do it, which is annoying on a vacation day. FYI, I get over being annoyed within a few minutes of finding coffee, so don't worry about it.
- Changing the archives at this point would be insanity, even if I was inclined towards .m4b.
- I'm not inclined towards .m4b. The .m4a extension is known quantity, and lots of things on platforms that may not have iTunes don't have a problem with it. Even on OS X, you can't open .m4b within VLC by dragging it to the Dock. Not everyone uses iTunes or an iPod, etc. and I'd hate to act as though they do.
- If someone is listening via iTunes, they can save their stopping point without changing the selection via the "Remember playback position" under the options preference.
- This is the kind of thing a user who knows what he's doing can change in two seconds to better suit his needs without it crimping the style of others.
That said, I have nothing against .m4b, which is why I'm posting it. It is a long archive, and some users may be served knowing they can save the change the file's extension to get that within iTunes.

November 14, 2005
Evening at Adler video is online
The Evening at Adler video is available on its own suitably campy separate section as of right now, which is where you should be sending people. This was that little deal where some of the brightest indies in the Mac scene descended upon Chicago for a casual conversation on October 21st, 2005.
The video and the audio rip are available via a torrent and many generous web mirrors, although bittorrent is preferred, as is seeding -- it's not just for downloading Doctor Who anymore. As previously mentioned, it's being released under a Creative Commons license, because I want as many people as possible to be able to get to know these guys, and to be exposed to some of the ideas in it.
Take it, show it, snip it, post it, remix it, or just string together all the drunkenbatman space-cadet moments as a reminder of why sleep is important and its not socially acceptable to drink before noon. Above all, have a good time with it.
With that, I'm going to Disneyland.

RM: Waiting for the video
After waiting for the video calmly and patiently (I have not written any e-mails of the EAA download FAQ type), I've reached the bursting point. I'm pretty sure my constant reloading of drunkenblog.com just to see if the video is up is using enough bandwidth to noticeably slow down your distribution to the mirrors. Perhaps I would still be calm and patient if I hadn't read the two "almost there" posts this weekend. Doh.Oh yeah, if you don't have DTS audio then I'm not listening because Dolby Digital is so bad it hurts my ears.
Insanely yours,
Steve Hoelzer
*Grins*
It'll be up at 11pm EST this evening -- it was meant to be this morning, but something came up. There'll be over 25 HTTP mirrors, plus a well-seeded torrent thanks to a pal at distributed.net (Moo).

November 13, 2005
EAA download FAQ
So, as we speak the EAA video and audio file are going out to a whole bunch of mirrors (distribute it, and they will come) and after a nap, my job for the evening is to hook it all up where it's supposed to go. I did want to nail a few things out of the inbox regarding the video so it was below 160 unreads, and because some of them were kinda wigging me out...
I don't think I've ever had so many questions about something "on its way", and it's probably partially my fault for mentioning there'd be a video and such. On the plus side, there's a lot of interest -- but some of them just seem a little out there when it comes to the chicken and the egg. I dunno, I'm not aware of other one-man-band sites trying stuff like this just because, and I'm guessing its hard to have a realistic idea of what goes into the whole thing -- and how amusing it is that it happened as it did at all -- unless you've been involved with something like it. I know I kept criminally underestimating and overestimating different things.
Anywho, bygones, as I'm not really annoyed so much as its hard for me to understand the mindset behind some of the questions, although considering all of the below was asked more than once, it probably says more about me than the questions. I did paraphrase a few of the questions to get to the point of them, and if I'm slightly snarky with a few, please attribute it to my banging them out before the nap instead of after.
How long is the total movie?
About 2.5 hours or so. It keeps on giving.
Will there be an audio-only download?
Ayep, however be warned that this is pretty ghetto, as in export as mono-mix to AIFF and then encode to 128k AAC ghetto.
What can I do with it?
It'll be licensed and distributed under the Creative Commons' "Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5" license, which basically means you can do whatever the hell you want with it, so long as:
- You include the license and proper attribution.
- You don't use it commercially in any way.
- If you alter it or include it in something, you can distribute it only under the same license.
If there is a special circumstance that someone wants to use it for, they can contact me and we can probably work something out, but I'm basically saying if you're an individual and not using it to generate cash, go nuts, but be cool while doing so and respect that you don't own it.
Will it be in super-duper delux resolution, like all HD and filling up my widescreen cinema display?
I want to say that if you're wigging about this type of thing you're in danger of missing the point of the whole endeavor, but that would be the lack of a nap rearing its head.
Part of dealing with groups of people is dealing with expectations, but -- and I mean no offense by this -- sometimes expectations wander out into left field and its your job to coax them back. I've gotten asked way, way too much about whether or not it'll be high definition, and I'm really only amused by those who offer up 200-300 megs of free space on their .Mac account to make it happen because there's a certain sweetness there.
I'm not going to go into great detail on this, because I'll end up strangling the next person who extrapolates Apple offering trailers into the real world, but while HD is the future it isn't close to being the reality yet for something like this -- at all stages, from cameras to processing delivery. It's the year of HD for sourcing downsized-rips for TV episodes and a fractional amount of users with $3500 cameras and suppah powerful comps and that's about it. As an indication, it's really just starting to get going in porn, and even then just for higher quality encodes and not distribution.
I can't believe I've been asked several times about the aspect-ratio. While there is some goofy stuff in it, and a certain camp factor, going through and letterboxing it while panning the content to be sure it was in frame would have been beyond overkill (even for me). Maybe for the platinum anniversary edition with the holographic cover.
Right, right, it's not porn. So what is it?
The movie is 416x312, encoded with single-pass h.264, because I needed my Mac back at some point. h.264 was used because for this type of source material it'll make a huge difference, single-pass or not. The total data rate is around 600k as that's where the balance worked out in terms of file size and keeping it reasonably playable on the majority of machines out there.
It looks great, and unless you're doubling up the size or something, you shouldn't be bothered by the encoding -- a much larger problem was say, lighting, which caused a bit of a Casper syndrome from some angles, but it's understandable for a variety of reasons.
We could have gone a little larger for those with the best of the best, but the majority of Apple CPUs out there would choke. G3 iBooks are going to be struggling anyways, and some might be out of luck, but they can always transcode down to something they can deal with. For various reasons someone with an 800MHz to 1GHz G4 or 1.7 GHz Celeron (my arbitrary median baseline) needs to be able to watch it while playing an MP3 without it choking, and h.264 basically exists to embarrass 3/4 of Apple's current CPU offerings and QuickTime for Windows' level of optimization.
Just trade-offs. If I had a dual-G5 so it wasn't taking 50 hours to encode, or wasn't uploading through a 35k cap on the cable modem, it might have balanced out differently.
...But anything less than (x)
sucks!
I know, and some people get invited over for dinner and then complain about the food. While a few of you may look forward to downloading a 4.3 gig file I'm not that interested in uploading it tomorrow, let alone dealing with getting that seeded. All doable, but my cycles aren't prioritized there right now. It's just the reality of the -- and my -- situation at the moment, and there are going to be a ton of downloads of this.
Thousands upon thousands I'm guessing, because if I didn't exist and someone else had it up I know I'd want to see it, and I'm not above extrapolating a sample of size of one onto the world. If it goes well and people really like it, of course I'll look at getting something at a higher quality up, and yes I'm aware the preceding sentence made little sense.
Will it play on my spiffy video iPod?
Nope, as its not:
- Baseline profile
- 320x240
I believe it'd be hard for you to get through 2.5 hours on most of the models anyways, but if you're on of those who wants to do this, you're welcome to transcode it down in h.264 or MPEG-4.
Why not just put it out as compatible with the iPod or at least include a version that is?
A few reasons:
- The iPod currently only handles Baseline profile, which is weird and can't last and will probably change in the future anyways. Since they're in the minority, and the source will really benefit from Main, there you go.
- If someone has a video iPod and wants to take it with them, they can transcode it so it'll work multiple ways. Since they're a very small percentage, it makes sense to let them do it. Besides, I'm sure some enterprising soul will take it upon himself to whip up an iPod-compatible version to share with the world.
It's just where the balance worked out, with my time, the fact that I don't own a video iPod, and that people have the power to do it themselves all being big variables in the equation.
Surround sound?
The only explanation I have for people asking about 5.1 AC3 and such involves nurseries and peeling lead paint. Evening at Adler was a hack thrown together with love and luck and faith and lots of help, not an endeavor for a true cinematric experience. We're getting it online, but expecting to kick back in front of your plasma TV with the audience's voice coming from behind you is a bit much.
You haven't said much about how you put the video together...
Um, let's just say karma was on our side when it came to Evening at Adler, but made me its bitch the next day. Worth noting it all at some point, because some of it was spectacularly ghetto-fabulous, but would take too long to go into right now.
What's that surprise you mentioned?
Patience! There are hints to this already, and even one in the video.
I can't do torrents, so please make a web download available!
Ok!
Please make a .torrent available!
I think torrents would be great, but I'm probably going to leave it to others to do (and hope they do). There are two factors at play here:
- It looks like the HTTP mirrors are going to come through, and will deflect the initial onslaught in a major way. Yay for DrunkNet.
- I'm all about bittorrent, but I also want to get this up and going now, and part of the problem with bittorrent involves getting it sufficiently seeded so everything doesn't choke -- and my home connection would have blown for it.
There are workarounds to the seeding problem, like:
- Time.
- Getting some people with fast pipes to latch on and super-seed straight quick.
- Getting it up and running on the server and feeding it out that way since its got the pipe, but it would have taken time to make sure it wouldn't have caused problems in other ways.
All doable and solvable, but with DrunkNet coming together again it's probably better to just get a nap in. That said, I'd encourage people to put together torrents of it and throw it around wherever they please because if nothing else it might expose people to it that otherwise wouldn't have seen it. At worst, a bunch of Windows users will get royally confused.
Checking my mail, someone (Moo) is taking care of setting up the torrent and getting it properly seeded so I can take a nap before getting it all up.
Happy dance.
"You should sell DVDs of the evening @ adler as well. There are probably lots of us who would go for some kind of T-shirt/DVD deal..."
I ignored the first few of these, but the most recent came from someone at the domain of martian.com , which is about the coolest domain name evar (me want) and put me over the edge towards responding. This would be entirely possible, and actually wouldn't be that big of a deal to get going unless you went crazy with subtitles or something.
However, if one was going to do this, from a marketing POV you'd want it ready to go when the download is ready to go, and it doesn't really factor into any of my goals for this -- chief of which is to give people a better feel for who these guys are and how they think, which is why it's going up under the license it is, why we worked hard to keep every aspect free, why I'm hoping you'll spread it around to as many people as possible, and why we tried to keep it as accessible as we did -- camp included.
I could see where it might be a cool thing to help offset the costs of an EAA 2.0 bigger and better, but I'm not allowing myself to think much further than the next few days at the moment. If enough people like it and would want it, I'll look at it, but first things first.
Cool?

November 11, 2005
The great encode of 2005
Earlier this morning I got time to setup my Mac to encode the video for Evening at Adler, which is going to take awhile, but assuming there are no issues with it we'll be good to go. I've seen it about 3 times all told while editing the cameras, and these guys still crack me up, so you'll hopefully enjoy it. I'm going to be looking at hooking it up to a tracker (thepiratebay would have a certain irony), but bittorrent is still beyond a lot of folks.
To that end, some mirrors for the two files would be really helpful:
- The video - ~700 M
This may not end up being exactly 700 M, and more like 650 or 750, so be aware. I'm going from memory when I crunched it last night, and have slept since then, but I know it'll be around there.
- The audio - ~130 M
This is just the audio track from the movie exported to AIFF and encoded as an AAC m4a file for my small yet loyal blind base.
If you've got the space and bandwidth and are able to help alleviate some of the initial brunt, that'd make my day -- just send me an email with "mirror" in the title and which of the above you'll be able to mirror.

November 05, 2005
Flying MarsEdit
Over at Inessential, Brent of Ranchero noted last night that they're going to be contracting out to Gus for the development of MarsEdit for the next version:
We thought about different people, but one name kept coming up as totally ideal: Gus Mueller of Flying Meat.(Now, before anyone worries that Gus has given up his indie status, he hasn’t: he’s working on MarsEdit as a contractor. He’s still Gus of Flying Meat.)
(And, by the way, Gus does live near me. We just had a meeting at my office, in fact, and now he has the source code and is getting started.)
Brent mentioned at Evening at Adler that development would continue, but wouldn't say who or what company might be taking over development, but just the fact that it wasn't dead alleviated some minds (cough -- I use it) but there's always the worry you're going to end up with something weird.
If you're a MarsEdit user and spend a few minutes with Gus's VoodooPad or his other works, you'll probably notice it'd be difficult to think of another independent dev better suited to taking over dev of MarsEdit from a look and feel POV -- there's an obvious alignment there between Brent and Gus's sensibilities. If I'd have had a say, he's who I'd have wanted but probably wouldn't have followed up with because I'd have assumed he wasn't a realistic option.
Of course sensibilities and actually getting up to speed to make headway on the next release are two different things, but Gus also mentioned last night that he's used to working with other people's code (should have followed up, but I needed to get back on the video) and was finding and fixing some reported issues within a few hours of getting the code. Cool, and good thing I didn't have a say.

November 02, 2005
Evil is as Zentu probably does
Apparently Maui X-Stream is hyping their new product, The Zentu Platform, which is billed as the third generation of their VX30 Codec and a video encoding tool for streaming media. Riiiiight.
They've got a press release and everything.
*bangs head against desk* You couldn't make this stuff up if you tried, and I have a feeling when someone takes the time to deconstruct Ventu they'll find interesting things. For newer readers who don't understand why I'm mixing brandy with the coffee before noon after seeing this, the company behind Ventu has an.. interesting... history when it comes to their video encoders and other products.
The following links should be enough to get you up to speed, especially if you go in reverse chronology.
- MXS and CherryOS archives, where you'll want to start with The Pits in CherryOS.
And then the ones on VX30, which are more directly applicable to Zentu:
- MXS and VX30 archives, where you'll want to start with Deconstructing Maui X-Stream.
The stuff Jim Kartes and Arben Kryeziu pull makes my soul hurt, and it's made worse by the fact that I'm not supposed to talk much about them while some legal things still unravel. Thank god for Yano, who is the only IP lawyer I'm aware of running around in a Cow shirt on weekends.

My doorbell
Ten minutes after backing up and installing 10.4.3, I accidently hit the corner for Exposé, and when I dropped out of it there was a nice obvious graphical error. I was able to repeat the error several times. It stopped once I brought a different app to the foreground. Fun...
I'd been using a semi-recent nightly build of WebCore for daily use, and a fairly-recent snapshot is included with Tiger which should make a lot of casual users happy. Some of those memory leaks were just sick (at the time, every other Mac dev I knew was downloading the source because they couldn't believe the memory leaks), and the snapshot takes care of a ton of them. Loves teh snappy.
Haven't had time to see if the Tiger Text Bug from Hell is still there (or much at all really), but I did see that they've disabled Q2DE (hardware accelerated drawing) when updating, and officially said it isn't a supported feature in 10.4. As mentioned before, from the rumbles I picked up it was starting to break hard, and won't be showing up at all in Tiger.
The graphics system is currently too fragile to go there (changes in 10.4 were too much too sexy) without a whole bunch of core work, so they're just looking ahead to 10.5. Probably a good idea, as it's better to get it right than to push out something half-baked which causes more problems.
The update leaves the Finder enabled.
