An open letter...

Dear Hollywood, the DVD Forum, and Sony,

You guys are a bunch of idiots.

vs

For those that don't know, there's a battle going on between two competing formats for the market of high definition video disks. On one side you have the HD-DVD and on the other side you have the Blu-ray Disk. I won't go into specific details of each format because I just don't care (you can spend hours reading through the results of searching on "blu-ray vs HD-DVD" and you still won't have enough information to figure out what the successor to DVD will be.

My problem with all of this is that here I am in what should be the early majority phase of high definition home video disk technology and, being that I'm typically the early adopter for gadgets, I should already be well underway in my replacement of my favorite DVDs with some high definition format.

I should already have spent gobs of $$ buying these high definition versions, but alas that isn't the case. I can't buy them because there are two competing formats and until I have some inkling of the direction that this stupid battle will go, I sit on the sideline awaiting an obvious victor. (Hollywood: Read this as you are losing money.)

I wait because I don't want to invest that amount of money in a technology that may just go away, leaving me without any means to continue to use the technology moving forward. This is similar to the oft quoted demise of Sony's Betamax and the more recent abandonment of the Divx DVD format by Circuit City.

I have one HD-DVD player (the add-on for the XBox 360) because it was an inexpensive upgrade and two HD-DVD movies (one came with the upgrade and one was a present). I don't plan on buying many more until this mess gets wrinkled out.

The way things stand, I feel like the kid whose got some money burning a hole in his pocket. I want to buy some high definition video. I want to see high def movies at home at my pleasure. I can't because of this lack of a standard. Perhaps I'll find something else to spend my money on.

I suggest that others do the same. Perhaps the lack of sales can drive the two parties towards convergence. If you do buy, just remember that you have a 50/50 shot at buying something that will be worthless very shortly because at some point, the parties just have to come to their senses (one can only hope).

Tags : dvd / hd-dvd / blu-ray / sony / betamax / divx / high definition / video

Sharing Video - My First Time With YouTube

So there I was with the hottest video in the identity sphere in my hands and I had to figure out some way to share it with the rest of the world. I couldn't put this on my own web site as that would kill my bandwidth even if just one person took a look at it. Of course, the first thing that came to mind was YouTube.

There was a problem, though. My video was shot on my Canon Powershot SD800IS camera and was almost 800MB long (thankfully I had my 4GB SD card in there) (and to give proper credit, the video was shot by Pat as I was one of the "stars"). YouTube has limits on the length of a video (both in time - 10 Mins - and in size - 100MB). On top of that, the video was filmed under less than optimal lighting and audio conditions.

So I went poking around the internet to see if I could find some MPEG 4 compression software to see if I could reduce the size. I tried two different packages and even with reducing the video size to 320x240 (¼ of its original size), the size of the files were coming out to be 300+MB -- still too large.

So it looked like I was going to have to split the video into pieces and upload it one piece at a time -- not the best solution and definitely not the one I wanted to use. On top of that, neither of the software kits I had downloaded had any editing capability, so I needed to find another solution.

Then it hit me, I had a copy of Roxio Easy CD/DVD Creator (now Easy Media Creator) installed and since it could create DVDs, I figured it had some video processing software... A quick search found VideoWave. I started it up and did a quick test by cutting it at the 2 minute mark and generating the video file. Amazingly, that turned out to be only like 15 MB, so then I knew I could put the whole thing into a single file!

After processing and watching, it was clear to me that people who did not have the lyrics sitting in front of them would have a very hard time following along and even those that did still would have a problem (I did).

So back to the drawing board and looking at VideoWave options, I could add text, so I went and over a period of a few hours (and lots of listening) I added subtitles to the entire song. I'm sure there was probably a better way to do it, but I did get it done and only once lost some of my work because of a program crash (which did lead to more frequent saves).

Uploaded the 41MB video to YouTube (that took a while, even with my T1), added a link to it on my blog and the rest is history!

Tags : identity / YouTube / roxio / video / Easy CD Creator / Easy Media Creator