Avaragado's blog

As JWZ says, Linux
is only free if your time has no value. Amply proven by the
time-gobbling effects of trying to make DVDs using Linux, as I’ve
discovered over the last week.

My goal: a DVD with posh front-end for the output of Avaragado
Pictures.

I like a challenge. I wanted to use “free” Linux software like
dvdauthor to generate the DVD menus, as I’d read that it’s much more
flexible than the PC GUIs generally available. Certainly the Roxio “DVD
Builder” software bundled with my DVD drive didn’t let me do what I want.

The plan… Use my existing PC tools to spit out suitable mpegs and
graphics for the menus to a Samba share. Use dvdauthor (and its
legions of supporting tools, gathered like brothels by a Roman fort)
to munge these and the content (the mpeg movies themselves) into the
approved DVD directory structure, menus all belled and whistled to my
desires. Then finally use mkisofs to convert that to a filesystem
image, and return to Windows for the burn.

First, dvdauthor. With the help of the newly installed apt-get,
several web sites and Google, I conquered the dependencies of
dvdauthor and its cohorts. Least shocking news of the day: dvdauthor’s
current
documentation is unfinished and confusing. (Want to know what the
“cell” element’s for? “Foo”.) Still, I figured out how to do what I
wanted, just about. Using stub files instead of full movies helped
here: every time you “build” your DVD directory structure it processes
every last byte of your mpegs. (Good Thing: if you refer to a movie
more than once, it only processes it once.)

I used Photoshop (6.0) and Premiere (6.5) to design and produce the
menus. Both are Adobe products, of course, and Premiere trumpets its
ability to “seamlessly integrate” or some other marketese with
Photoshop files, “including layers”. Yes, well, up to a point. When
you import a Photoshop file into Premiere, you choose whether to
import one layer alone or all layers merged. You can’t import multiple
layers at once (I wanted to); it ignores any layer effects (which I
used); and helpfully labels the resulting imported blob with the
filename – thus making it indistinguishable from every other layer
you’ve imported from the same file. My workaround for these problems
was to use multiple Photoshop files, starting with a “master” design
which was then Save As’d into multiple copies, each of which was then
individually mangled (layers deleted and merged) to ensure I ended up
with a single layer that looked as I wanted. What a mess. Thankfully,
Premiere respected the original alpha channels. (The new Premiere Pro
apparently does this better, and also imports PNG. But I don’t have
that. I wonder what Final Cut {Pro,Express} is like on the Mac?)

OK, menus done, tick. With a suitable XML configuration file,
dvdauthor spat out the appropriate directory structure. mkisofs turned
that into an image, which I copied back to the PC to burn a test
disk, which worked fine. Helpfully both PowerDVD on Windows and xine on Linux can read
the dvdauthor output to let you test without burning.

Leaving out several iterations due to stupidity and rethinks, the
menus work. I can even type “make dvd” and get a DVD, now that I’ve
learned GNU make’s pattern-matching malarkey. I’m on nodding terms
with spumux for adding subtitles (which are the core of DVD menus) to
MPEG streams, and mplex for multiplexing multiple video and audio
streams into one file (which is how you do multi-angle DVDs and
multiple audio tracks – but before you ask, I didn’t do that).

Now the content. I sucked in my high quality versions from the
backup DV tapes, and rendered them out again as MPEG-2 straight to
Linux via Samba. Files on a DVD are limited to a gig, apparently, so I
split a couple of the videos into two. No problem, I thought:
dvdauthor lets you recombine them later – in the lingo, a DVD title
is a “pgc” comprising multiple “vob”s, which are the individual files.

Sadly dvdauthor barfs semi-randomly at these. The Malta video – two
700MB files – caused dvdauthor to segfault when writing out the DVD
index file. The workaround I found was to make each file a title, and
make the first jump straight on to the second. dvdauthor was happier
with that. Good thing too, I had to use that trick three times in
all. (The “proper” way worked once, when I used stubs for many titles
to save build time during testing. With all true files in place, the
same thing segfaulted. Bah.)

Menus and content in place, sticking plaster holding things together.
Now to make the DVD image file. Except… no disk space. (Ex-work box,
you see. Old, underpowered.)

Before you say anything, I’d planned for that. My PC’s got lots of
disk. I’d mount a PC share as smbfs and write to that using
mkisofs. What could possibly go wrong?

A 2 gig filesize limit on smbfs, that’s what would go wrong. At
precisely 61.66% progress writing the image file, to be exact.

Backup plan… Now I’d got the DVD directory structure, I didn’t need
the original mpegs processed by dvdauthor. I could delete
those. Except if I did that, I couldn’t rerun dvdauthor if something
was broken on the DVD. No problem. I copied the original mpegs back to
the PC (“118 minutes remaining”), and deleted the copies on Linux. If
I needed to rerun dvdauthor, I could do that over smbfs as all
the files were under a gig…

Then finally, I could build the final ISO image. And then I spent
another two hours copying that back to the PC over SMB and my harassed
wireless link. A short burn later, and I had my DVD.

Except it doesn’t play properly in my DVD player. I’ve updated the
DVD player’s firmware, and it claims to support DVD+RW, but it doesn’t
like this one. The menus work, and the first movie works, but the
other movies play noise instead of sound (and one of them crashes the
DVD player). Sigh. Maybe I’ll try a DVD-R, or DVD-RW, or maybe
DVD+R… or build a DVD using the simple Roxio tools and see where
that gets me…

At least it plays fine from my PC drive. If you ignore the interlacing.

About quarter past midnight last night, feeling absolutely fine, I went to bed. As soon as my head hit the pillow the room started to spin. Not a gentle start, a switch. Before getting in bed: fine; after getting in bed: wheeee!

I scrabbled for the light switch, sat up, wheee! All of a sudden any head movement just sent the room circling. Not surprisingly I began to feel nauseous. And a little scared.

I sat on the edge of my bed, a light sweat forming, and focused on something in front of me. Keeping my head still brought things under control. Experiments suggested, though, that it wasn’t fixed. All sorts of things went through my mind.

Nausea prompted me to make my way to the bathroom, just in case. I took my mobile with me, just in case. After twenty more minutes, nothing had changed. I hadn’t thrown up – it didn’t seem like food poisoning – but I hadn’t improved.

I rang my brother. He found the number of NHS Direct (I wasn’t in the mood to look for it myself right then), which is 0845 46 47 by the way, and I rang them. They took my details, told me all nurses were busy right then, and promised to ring back in no more than about twenty minutes.

Much to my surprise, they did. A nurse went through her checklist. No rash, no chest pains, no numbness, no bumps on head, no confusion, no headaches, no vomiting, no diarrhoea, no alcohol… After a discussion she suggested I call my GP’s surgery.

I did, and found myself talking to someone at the CAMDOC overnight service. She took my symptoms again, and said someone would call me back in a few minutes. Again, they did. It was another nurse, who took my symptoms again. The doctor on call was on a visit right then; it sounded like I should see him. He could come to me, or I could go to them. I decided to go to them.

She told me I shouldn’t drive, so I rang my brother once more (who was waiting for me to call back and tell him how I’d got on). He biked over and drove me to the surgery, in Chesterton. That was a white-knuckle ride – sensory overload – but I managed not to throw up.

Surgery was empty except for staff, not surprisingly post-2am. The doctor saw me straight away.

Diagnosis was ultimately pretty straightforward: something called labyrinthitis. It’s an infection of the balance organs of the inner ear, not that uncommon. He said it lasts for 2-5 days, during which you can’t really do anything productive; he suggested bed rest. They don’t know what causes it (it does often come on suddenly), and they don’t have a magic cure, but they do have pills to reduce the feeling of nausea.

Another fun drive home. My brother stayed the night, since it was by then 3am and he didn’t need to be at work until lunchtime anyway.

No real change come the (late) morning, or afternoon as I write. Of the three traditional axes of head movement, yaw (left-right) is not bad, pitch (up-down) is worse, and roll (emoticon inspection and phone-cradling) is nasty. The really annoying things are sudden noises that make me turn my head involuntarily. Other than that I’ve spent the day so far in slow motion, and I guess that’s the plan until I recover. Borders will have to survive without my presence.

Someone can make a joke about an ex-SCO employee having a virus if they wish. It would make a change from “never mind that, what about my present?”…

I must have slept through February, as it’s March outside. All the snow and ice has gone, and there’s a warm gusty wind (no surprises after visits to the Wrestlers, the Beer Festival and Cafe Naz yesterday).

Avaragado hereby declares the new British season of Sprinter, replacing the archaic seasons of Winter and Spring which no longer exist due to cutbacks.

Finally bought a DVD writer yesterday (Freecom). It burns regexp(“DVD[+-]RW?”), which now just punts my personal format war onto the media rather than the drive. I bought a pack of ten blank DVD+RWs to start with. Filled up one with photo and movie backups already.

Last night I dreamed about zombies. Twice.

First time was a traditional chase dream: lots of us running away from something, lots of stairwell descents (a standard Avaragado dream feature: I usually jump down entire flights). It was very televisual; there was a “time passes” segment, where a serene image of a village with hills in the background faded into a flooded disaster area, with oddly lowered hills (zombie strip mining?). I only saw a zombie in a sort of coda to the dream; I think I woke up, thought “zombies” and went back to sleep again, at which point a zombie attacked me and I sliced him into several pieces with an axe.

Second time was more like comedy zombies. Imagine a zombie making a guest appearance in Coronation Street. A bit of verbal conflict, some comic zombie stupidity, and northern accents. There was a very good special effect, though: someone’s face morphed strangely into someone else’s upon zombification. I don’t think it ended on a soap-style cliffhanger.

Whatever can it all mean?

Hutton has cleared the Government and blamed the BBC for everything. I imagine that heads will roll at the BBC.

The PM is now pontificating and gloating in the House of Commons. A House of Commons, incidentally, that’s whooping and hollering and jeering, full of fake outrage and indignation that shows it at its absolute worst.

It is shameful that the only inquiry about the Iraq war has been about a dodgy early-morning radio report that led to a single unfortunate death.

About the non-existent reasons for going to war, nothing.

About the plagiarised dossier, nothing.

About the failure to properly protect the troops, nothing.

About the use of cluster bombs, nothing.

About the failure to follow the Geneva Conventions, nothing.

About the blatant sell-off of Iraqi assets to US companies, nothing.

OK, this is very nerdish. But here’s another one! I’m filling in a stupid form for Chris, with freeform text boxes. The instructions for these state:

Please limit each comment field to 2500 characters or less. Text should be typed in a continuous line, without using carriage returns.

Did someone uninvent input handling while I wasn’t looking?

It snowed overnight. Later I shall frolic upon it. Had I a sledge, and had Cambridge a hill, I would be very surprised. I’ll have to make do watching kids throw themselves off Castle Mound on tea-trays.

Five days before the deadline, I finally got round to filling in my tax return today. I did so online, and it was painless. For a web application, it’s a pretty good one. I noticed only one absurdity: there’s a box you can fill in “to enter any additional information you feel is needed to support your entries on the Employment form” (box 1.40, tax fans). A note above a big fat text box says:

You should only enter alpha, numeric and the following special characters ()*,-/. You cannot enter more than 2200 characters (including spaces) here.

The £ sign and the Enter or Return key located on your keyboard are not accepted.

Leaving aside the dodgy oh-so-programmerese text, I can’t use a pound sign? OK, it’s only an “additional information” box, but it’s a tax return! I guess this was justified to a PHB using some fluff about character encodings, but it smacks of laziness to me.

And of course I also can’t use plus and equals signs if I want to include some maths, or use a dollar sign if US currency is involved, or quote anything, or use those wacky colons and semi-colons for punctuation, or use multiple paragraphs (erk!), or even use an apostrophe (hey, I know how), an exclamation mark or question mark. I guess I could use txtspk, if only to annoy the Inland Revenue (probably not a good idea).

I didn’t try using the forbidden characters (I didn’t have anything to put in that box). In any case I imagine there’s an amendment to the Criminal Justice bill going through Parliament that makes doing so an offence punishable by five years in prison or something.

Parrot’s oratory stuns scientists

The finding of a parrot with an almost unparalleled power to communicate with people has brought scientists up short.

The bird, a captive African grey called N’kisi, has a vocabulary of 950 words, and shows signs of a sense of humour.

…

He uses words in context, with past, present and future tenses, and is often inventive.

One N’kisi-ism was “flied” for “flew”, and another “pretty smell medicine” to describe the aromatherapy oils used by his owner, an artist based in New York.

When he first met Dr Jane Goodall, the renowned chimpanzee expert, after seeing her in a picture with apes, N’kisi said: “Got a chimp?”

Daughter scotches Churchill parrot claim

The daughter of Winston Churchill has dismissed claims her father was the owner of a 104-year-old parrot which shouts anti-Nazi abuse.

…

He supposedly entertains customers at the garden centre by squawking anti-Nazi abuse which [current owner] Mr Oram claims it picked up from Churchill.

But [Churchill’s daughter] Lady Soames said: “My father never owned a macaw or anything remotely resembling it.

“Before the war we did have an African Grey for about three years, but that’s quite, quite different from a macaw – it is smaller, or more compact, with a sort of red face.”