Now that I'm using a Mac Mini and FrontRow as my media center, there was one last thing I'd love to be able to do. I wrote a quick script to automate some backups of data off my Tivo, and it would be great to be able to play them from FrontRow. With tivodecode, you can quickly convert the .tivo files to an MPEG2 stream... but one that Quicktime can't play, even with the MPEG2 plugin. My efforts to convert them to a format that Quicktime can handle met with the same annoyance as with the DVDs, lots of time and effort, and all for crappy results. Maybe ffmpeg just does a crappy job of encoding, after all the conversion to iPod portable quality mpeg4's by the Tivo Desktop software was pretty decent.

9 months and nearly 3TB later, I've finished ripping my DVD movie collection. For storage, I used 2 Infrant ReadyNAS NV+ (it would probably have fit on 1 4TB unit, which is about 3TB after RAID, but it wasn't out yet when I started). For ripping, I used Slysoft's AnyDVD. My desktop box happened to come with both a DVD and HD-DVD drive, so I could rip two discs at once. I just used the built-in "Copy DVD to Drive" function for one drive, and Vista's file explorer to copy the other. Some discs needed to be ripped by "Copy" to work, and it has the nice property of stripping the "no forward" and other DVD annoyances, but it was slower than the simple copy. I initially tried a couple others, but AnyDVD was the best and worth the money. There were still about 4 movies that wouldn't copy, a fairly random selection (not the biggest blockbusters, or even the newest discs).

I had initially figured I would convert the discs to H.264. I spent a lot of time playing around with settings for HandBrake, trying to get a "good" conversion. Basically, video conversion sucks. The setting options are amazingly complicated, and greatly effect how long the encoding takes... but the output almost always looks like crap. Another consideration is that a lot depends on the quality of the player. I found that VLC usually did a good job, even on "ipod quality" videos up-rezed to HD. On the other hand, the Quicktime players in both the AppleTV and MacOS were pretty crappy. I eventually settled on a "hi-res ipod" level that at least would be portable... but neglected to test it. I let my linux box churn for about 3 weeks converting around 100 DVDs, and would up with files playable by my AppleTV, but not by the ipod. I think newer HandBrake versions have an easy setting that should work, but I haven't decided to burn the processing time yet. I just decided to keep the DVDs online instead.

I haven't decided whether I'm going to rip all of my wife's TV show DVDs or not. A lot of space, and I'm not sure we'd ever watch them a second time...

I hate web properties which ask for my zip code before showing me what I'm looking for. Big offenders here are the cell phone companies, the cable companies (Comcast at least), and the various car websites.

Cell phones and cable might be at least partially specific to zip code, though Sprint (which prompted this rant) has always claimed to have a Nationwide network that I would assume is pretty uniform. Perhaps their rate plans aren't exactly the same across the country? Why don't these companies just use geo-ip data? Its available, it might not be as accurate all the time, but I'm betting a bunch of people just flat out lie when prompted anyways (90210 anyone?).

But the biggest offenders are the various car research sites that all want your zip code so they can try and shove you into a specific dealer. Yes, I'm sure you get a lot of money for lead generation, but I don't want to give you my zip code.

These types of sites lead to a more generic class of problems with sites: when its easier to find information on a specific site by doing a site based search on Google then by navigating/searching on the specific site. If this is the case, you're failing the #1 point of the web: if you said marketing and making money, you've failed. Its finding information, the point of your site is information, you make your site easy to use, contain useful information, and make it easy to find that information, and boom, you have users ... which is the biggest step towards monetization.

Or maybe I'm mis-using these car sites, perhaps they exist more form comparison shopping of cars by "exact" value, and comparison shopping deals for one car from multiple places.. but I'm always using them for information way before I care about the price. They should be helping me investigate cars, and when I've made my decision on which car I want, then maybe I'll be interested in finding the best deal on that car. Forcing me up-front to think about actually buying isn't going to help.

Oh, and on a semi-related rant, why is it that Car websites make it so hard to investigate the interior of their cars? Its easier for me to go to a local Automall and take in all of the available cars in a class then to try and one-by-one figure out what the interior space is like visually online.

Poor brits, first Ford bought Jaguar and Land Rover, now they're going to India's Tata Motors. Or should the be the "passing" of the colonies from the old to the new or somesuch?

Too bad for the Ford execs, back to buying Lincolns I guess.

It occurred to me recently that the Bush "tax cuts" are actually just federal tax cuts. Federal taxes are generally larger than the other taxes people pay... but usually the various taxes have clauses so that other taxes are excluded.

This means, when one tax goes down, the others automatically benefit. Calculating the effect is complicated by things like people not itemizing their deductions, or their other taxes not being enough to exceed the default deduction... and of course it all depends on the average tax rates by tax revenue (not per person).

A simple example, though. Suppose you were making $100k in CA when Bush's tax cut reduced your federal rate from 38% to 35%. CA tax rate is 9%. So, at 38%, you paid $38k in federal taxes, so your income for CA was $62k, so you paid $5580. When the fed rate drops to 35%, you taxes to the fed drop to $35k, leaving $65k for state, paying $5850, an increase of 4.8%.

Obviously, there are a lot of other factors involved, its not nearly that simple, but its an interesting point to think about: A federal tax cut is a very complicated tax transfer to the states.

The Ice Donkeys, the SFAHL team I'm on, won our Division B championships this season, after several seasons of 2nd/3rd place. We had a good season, including a 9-3 win against a team when we had no goalie, a 4-4 tie against our nemesis Moose Factory when we had one of our 5 players ejected from the game half way through. The rink-rat Moose got scrubbed early in the play-offs, so we were up against the Scrappers in the finals, and had an added scrimmage when the refs failed to show for game 2, but we still managed to pull it off. I'm the big lout in the upper left.

Is it just me or was this new MINI Clubman commercial done by the same people who did the Aeon Flux movie?
If the youtube folks get around to deleting it, look for [mini pinball].

I have no idea what to think of the Clubman. Its a mini, but its bigger, but not much, and its funky... Maybe I should go smaller.

While I was playing with the new AV setup, and my Ipod Touch, I started thinking about grabbing videos off of my Tivo for various reasons. I played with the Tivo Desktop, and I played with Galleon. They were nice and all, but not quite what I was looking for. Tivo Desktop will only downconvert videos for portable video devices, and is rather limited in terms of automation, and I didn't want to run my windows box all the time anyways. Galleon had more options, but still wasn't quite what I wanted. So, I wrote my own... or started to. I haven't done much more than just archive a bunch of shows, but I figured I'd release the python module I wrote to allow me to script archiving the video. I uploaded it to a project on Google Code Project Hosting (ugh, long product name):

TivoAccess.

Its got my current ridiculously simple archive_tivo.py. I've got plenty of ideas, but I mostly decided it wasn't all that important. It was useful to be able to pull the video off from some important NHL games.

One idea I considered: having my computer maintain an ipod format copy of all of the videos currently on my Tivo. This makes it as easy as possible to just drag what I want to watch onto my ipod before running out the door. Well, easier would be if it synced magically... or I just used my slingbox to my TreoCentro instead. I could probably write an Android app that watched for the device being on my local wi-fi and synced the videos down, but even over wi-fi that'll take a long time, probably not great for battery life. And assuming Android devices will have wi-fi.

While working on this, I wasted another couple days trying to get "good" video conversion. Quicktime requires a paid plug-in for mpeg2, and supposedly can't handle the Tivo mpeg2 stream anyways (looks like Tivo uses some allowed by unusual features of mpeg2). I wanted to convert the mpeg2 stream to an h.264 stream to save space and to make it possible to play the videos in FrontRow. You'd think "same quality" conversions would be easy... not. Using ffmpeg's -sameq flag generates an h.264 video that's almost 2x the size of the mpeg2 video, and isn't as good. Interlacing is the enemy there, I think, but in general, the best I could do was a "pretty good" copy using mpeg4 (h.263) and getting about 80% of the space of the mpeg2. Didn't seem worth it, another reason I haven't really finished this project.

Can my infant sleep too much? (10hrs at <3 months)
Can my infant go horse? (maybe I just didn't hear his crying?)
Should I wake the sleeping baby?

I'm not sure why, maybe it was the decision to have a kid, but I got back into peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in the past couple years. Maybe it was seeing Marissa eating one at the Google cafeteria, an absurdity that just made me go "hmm, that sounds good, actually". In any case, it came in handy when raiding the pantry here in the pediatric ward trying to make dinner. Seems our generally late eating habit combined with our minds being elsewhere didn't combine well with the early hours of the cafeteria.

Anyways, it looks like Nolan should be going home tomorrow. Wonder if we've got any peanut butter at home?