I won’t explain the entire following video, as much of it is obvious, except to say that Isao Machii has been referred to as “Modern Samurai”, and he demonstrates superior swordsman skill and flexibility in precision.  An egg, a mushroom, a green bean, and a BB fired from a gun are all sliced by the sword.  Near the end, he is challenged to slice an iron rod, and then challenged again to slice an iron plate.

I will not comment on the sensationalism or grandiose publicity on the clip below.  However, I marvel at his ability. His speed is quicker than the eye, as even the technology to capture his skill is stressed.

[youtube]b_gcPGI-ZMI[/youtube]

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.

[flash http://www.youtube.com/v/fKK933KK6Gg]

Originally, I went with Pixamo after I read a comment I saw while I was searching for a good online photo service. I spent the better part of two days diligently uploading to Pixamo, categorizing and tagging my entire photo collection. The thing I like about pixamo is that for each photo, the categorization technique is separated into:

• People (or subject of the photo)
• Location (or where the photo was taken)
• keywords

From a photographer’s perspective, this is really rather handy, and allows some fancy searching methods. This is a step above the “make your own category” category method used by, say… Flickr.

Flickr has a nice tagging methodology, but its somewhat lacking in that I have to sorta invent what I want to categorize my photos into. In other words, a “location” tag doesn’t really act like a location — its just a tag that lives along side other tags of names, events, and one-word descriptions. Sure, in Flickr, you can “geo-tag” an arbitrary number of photos, placing them on a map… but you can’t really do that with people/names, I’ve found. However, in Pixamo, I have locations that act as locations that are linked to other locations. For example, photos taken at “Disneyland” are linked to “Anaheim” and “California” and get those broader locations by default if I enter a photo as having a location of “Disneyland”. Then, I can later browse Pixamo for all photos in “California”, “Anaheim”, or just ones taken at “Disneyland”.

Another thing I didn’t like so much about Flickr was that there are limits on the file size upload.

So, anyway… after uploading every digital photo I have to Pixamo, and then looking around Flickr, I discovered I actually have a “pro” account on Flickr that came with my AT&T/SBC DSL service. Cool. So, then I spent the rest of my time uploading my photos to Flickr as well, which actually I should’ve done first because Pixamo is able to import photos from things like Flickr. Whodathunkit!

Pixamo
pros:

• Easy, practical categorization
• Searching by practically anything
• No limit on upload, from what I could tell
• Able to handle video as well
• Import from other sites like Flickr (the list is pretty long)

cons:

• Not apparent how to print photos, or order prints
• Not as well partnered with online printing as something like Flickr
• Limited to total size of photo gallery (free account, I think, is 5GB)

Flickr
pros:

• No visible limit on storage space; limit is on bandwidth uploaded and only on “free” accounts
• Easy printing and other wacky cool things you can do with photos on things like t-shirts and keychains

cons:

• No practical way for an amateur photographer to sensibly organize photos, without using keywords as a panacea.
• Upload file size seems to be capped at 10MB, which might be a real problem with newer 10+ megapixel cameras.
• No batch file upload utility (at least not for Linux) — best I could find was written by a 3rd party on sourceforge.net

Both have a pretty sensible interface, even though I don’t totally agree with either they still work relatively well. Most other features compare one for one — both have a date-search interface that you can locate photos by the date they were taken (as long as the image has EXIF data to categorize from), both have the original images available to upload (even though Flickr forces you to limit the file size to 10MB, so you’ll have to scale down the photo), and both have a “community sharing” function to share photos with other people with seemingly good privacy controls.

What I think I’ll be doing now is uploading new photos directly to Flickr so that they’ll be available to other things I might use like Pixamo, and QO-OP, etc.

For pure archival of files, I’ve found Humyo (www.humyo.com).  You can have a free account with 25GB of storage for photos, music, and videos plus an additional 5GB for non-media types of files (like documents).  Very nifty, and its brand new, so there might be a few glitches here and there while they evolve the service.

After hitting a huge snag with my transcoding videos (after only getting about 90+ out of 300+), I stopped for a bit while I troubleshot and regrouped. The issue was that for every new video I transcoded, there would be no audio in the music video. After quite a while of poking around, I found out that the ffmpeg utility I was using wasn’t built with an MP3 encoder — usually Flash video is encoded with MP3 audio. So, then I had to download the source for ffmpeg, and rebuild with the helper libraries (libmp3lame, etc.).

Now, I’m back on track, and almost to the ‘T’s. ~230 music videos in the library as of now.
Here are some of the artists I have:

3 Doors Down
Black Eyed Peas
Bon Jovi
Britney Spears
Celine Dion
Cher
Collective Soul
Duran Duran
Eminem
Enigma
Fergie
Gwen Stefani
Heart
Hillary Duff
INXS
Jamiroquai
Jennifer Lopez
Kelly Clarkson
Kylie Minogue
matchbox twenty
Paula Abdul
Pussycat Dolls
Red Hot Chili Peppers
Rihanna
Roxette
Santana
Shakira
Shania Twain
Spice Girls
Stacie Orrico
Sugababes

ACDC
Damn Yankees
Eric Johnson
Evanescence
Golden Earring
Green Day
Journey
Linkin Park
Motley Crue
Rob Zombie

JPop
Aya Kamiki
B’z
Eri Nobuchika
Foxxi misQ
Heartsdales
Kumi Koda
LISA
m-flo
Namie Amuro
Orange Range
Shanadoo
SOULHEAD
Southern All Stars
trf

I even have a song named “Anti Hero”, which was a collaboration between Rin (JPop) and Lisa Loeb.  Excellent song. Good video, too.

At the rate I’m going now, as long as I don’t add a large number of videos to be transcoded, I should be done in a few days.

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.