They start by introducing a paintball gun robot that fires paint in succession…  The CPU analogy.

Then, they unveil a paintball gun with 2100 barrels to complete the GPU analogy, and paint a somewhat elaborate picture in just under a second.

Total number of times I’ve watched a few music videos via the gallery: ~30

Total number of videos left to transcode: gobs

Ability to enjoy my music video collection over the web: priceless

The transcoding of videos from whatever into FLV format is slow going mainly due to the fact that each video is so unique and requires a bit of attention — if you see the gallery you’ll understand what I mean; there are different sizes, quality, bitrates, etc.

I think once I finally finish the transcoding of the music videos, I’m going to begin to tackle the massive amount of home videos I have. I usually keep quite a bit of home movies of the family around as sort of “stock footage” for inclusion into whatever DVD I’m editing to mail to someone. Instead, it seems like a wonderful thing to just be able to point them at the gallery instead of tossing together a DVD menu, editing the movies, burning a DVD and then mailing it to them. We’ll see how that goes, but the music video collection thing was more or less just to see if the system can handle that much… stuff. Stuff being the sheer amount of thumbnails, videos, and people watching things at random times. So far, it has held up rather well, but there are only 88 videos. I can’t wait to see what happens when I have the entire collection in there!  At some point, I’ll probably turn on the ability for people viewing the gallery to be able to upload their own.  That seems like a dangerous thing that will need to be kept in check, but who knows…  it could be worth the effort.

Hey!  I have my own YouTube!!  yay!!

I never realized that my collection is so cluttered.  Its a mish-mash of videos of different sizes, different formats, encodings, and oddball bitrates.  I was originally thinking I could just go through all 300+ files and transcode them en-masse.  Nuh uh.  Some are AVI files which transcode rather cleanly.  Some are Mpeg in DVD format, which means I have to crank down the bitrate so its playable over the web.  Even then, some are MOV files, which could be mpg4, mov, mp2, or various other encodings.  Still yet, every MOV file I’ve come across is using an odd bitrate and sample rate.  While *most* videos use an audio sample rate of 44,100 or even 48,000, the MOV files I have are sampled at something really wacked like 16,000, for some odd reason.  To say the least, it makes transcoding them a pain in a big toe.

I’ve added the URL to the list (on the right side of this page) for future reference.

I’ve also locked down the access so the DRM/copyright police don’t come to lock me up (and so that I can limit access to people all over the world looking at my music videos).  To view any of the videos, you have to first register (with an email confirmation) and then login.

Well, I’m off, then.   ….back to transcoding.

Gallery 2!!

Man, this thing ROCKS!  It is mainly designed to host photos and images — and it does that VERY well — but there’s also a Flash video plugin that will handle FLV files and even allow you to play them from the gallery/albums.

So, I’m in the process of transcoding my videos while I find just the right quality to not lose too much of the video/audio quality but so that they still play smoothly over the network.

My thinking is this:

• since I have about 300 or so music video files in AVI, MPG, and MOV formats, I’ve always just burned them to DVD whenever I want to watch them away from the computer. This is a cumbersome thing when you consider that, on average, only about a dozen or so music videos will fit onto one DVD disc (plus menus and DVD overhead).
• I don’t really look forward to carrying around so many DVDs on the odd chance that I want to watch a few videos from a computer, or the fact that whatever computer I’m using might not even have a DVD drive.
• I don’t really want to spend the time and energy involved in uploading this massive collection onto a service like YouTube, etc. not to mention the entire set of DRM/copyright issues.

I was initially under the impression that the current state of CMS (content management systems) like Joomla/Mambo or even Xoops or Drupal would give me the ability to simply scan a directory (or upload a video) and have it instantly available to me on a webpage a la Google Videos or YouTube.com-style. This doesn’t seem to be the case. There is hardly anything out there for the hobbyist that enables someone to have a video collection. I suppose everyone just uploads their videos onto those services and tolerates the loss of customization and control.

Current Linux tools seem to be able to handle this type of need. ffmpeg will transcode just about any type of video into FLV (Flash), though that’s it — you get a Flash-encoded video, with no real way to view it even if you have a Flash plugin in your web browser — you still need a player. Of course, there are quite a few Flash players out there, but then you still have to embed the player into your website and then toss FLV videos at it in order for you to see anything.

There seems to be a large gap in pre-made web applications that do this well. One candidate is PIVIA. However, getting this thing to work in an automatic way has been rough at best. It doesn’t seem to want to encode videos on the fly like it claims to do. My workaround is to manually transcode videos, but I have over 300 of them and that could take a while… Also, using PIVIA, the filenames have to be mangled in such a way that the format, tags, and any meta-information are written into the filename, but most of that information is then written into a database. I’m not convinced this thing was written efficiently, but it seems the author didn’t really design it to do video but photos instead. I’m sure it does photos VERY well, but that isn’t what I need it for — and there are hundreds of other photo gallery applications out there to choose from.

Having said all this, I’m not even going to touch on the fact that I’m also downloading TV shows via RSS/Bittorrent as I posted about before. It would be REALLY nice to view those shows whenever/wherever, but alas I’ll probably still be transcoding videos until/when someone makes a major breakthrough in hosting video for the home-hobbyist.

[Ed. It seems that I already have all the tools necessary to make some sort of automated video file processor with a web-y frontend.

• ffmpeg transcodes video.
• flvtool2 will add meta tags so that you can skip to parts of a video before it has fully downloaded.
• PHP, for scripting the process on the web server.
• Apache, a web server.
• There's also a free FLV player than can be embedded into a web page.

All I need now is the time to toss it all together in some sort of sensible way.]

This last one is the most interesting and is the cheapest…
Vincent posted a neeto-mosquito tip about how to download TV shows to your computer — AUTOMATICALLY! The best part of this, unlike some of the methods mentioned above: you can burn the TV shows to DVD, or copy them onto your laptop, etc.