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• Expand (extend) a video to an specific duration

  8 février 2013, par BorrajaX

  Do VLC or FFmpeg (or AVconv) have any feature to force the duration of a video to a certain number of seconds ?

  Let's say I have a... 5 minutes .mp4 video (without audio). Is there a way to have any of the aforementioned tools "expanding" the video to a longer duration ? The video comes from a Power Point slideshow, but it's too short (running too fast, to say so). The idea would be automatically inserting frames so it reaches an specified duration. It looks like something pretty doable (erm... for a total newbie in video encoding/transcoding as I am) : A 5 minutes video, at 30fps means I have 9000 frames... To make it be 10 times longer, get the first "real" frame, copy it ten times, then get the second "real" frame, copy it ten times... and so on.

  I'm using Ubuntu 12.04, but I can install/compile any required software, if needed. So far, I have VLC, AVConv and FFmpeg (FFmpeg in an specific folder, so it won't conflict with AVConv)

  Thank you in advance.

• Trouble with CoCCA Registry

  7 octobre 2012, par Multimedia Mike — General

  I’ve been rather despondent all week. People who see me daily could readily identify this fact. Unfortunately, the exact reason was difficult to adequately explain. The problems that nerds deal with…

  When A Domain Expires
  As a few people noticed, the multimedia.cx domain and all of it’s subdomains didn’t work this last week. The problem started on Monday, October 1. Whose fault ? Well, fundamentally, I neglected to renew the domain name in time. However, I prefer to place the blame on the .cx domain registrar, CoCCA Registry. You see, they have never developed the technology to email a domain holder with a notice that their domain is about to expire or has already expired.

  This domain is the only one I have ever held so I don’t have a lot of experience in this matter. I wondered if I was crazy for thinking it would be normal for a registrar to send an email or 2 with status updates about your domain. I get the impression from speaking with others that this is indeed normal. I have 3 different email addresses listed under my account at the registrar– 2 at multimedia.cx and a backup gmail account. I checked spam folders after this incident. Then I remembered that I have never received any email notifications from them (although password reset emails show up, so that part thankfully works). Also, their support emails are black holes.

  So, I guess the moral is : be wary of dealing with CoCCA Registry. However, they seem to be the only way to register domains under a wide variety of uncommon country codes.

  By Friday, the domain appeared to have been reinstated, even through the status was officially listed as “renewal-pending” according to the web-based management console. Eventually, as cached DNS results started to time out throughout the day, I started seeing subdomains come back. I excitedly used the ‘dig’ command to count down the seconds until gamemusic.multimedia.cx was accessible on the network I was on (the number after the domain name is the time-to-live or ‘TTL’ value) :

  $ dig +nocmd gamemusic.multimedia.cx +noall +answer
  gamemusic.multimedia.cx. 3      IN      A       174.143.152.251
  $ dig +nocmd gamemusic.multimedia.cx +noall +answer
  gamemusic.multimedia.cx. 2      IN      A       174.143.152.251
  $ dig +nocmd gamemusic.multimedia.cx +noall +answer
  gamemusic.multimedia.cx. 1      IN      A       174.143.152.251
  $ dig +nocmd gamemusic.multimedia.cx +noall +answer
  gamemusic.multimedia.cx. 12962  IN      A       207.45.186.114
  

  Finally, today (Saturday), I received a receipt confirming that the domain has been renewed.

  8 Years Old
  Incidentally, happy eighth birthday to multimedia.cx. It was September, 2004 when I decided to branch out from a simple ISP-based web presence.

  People often ask why I went with the .cx TLD. When I decided I wanted a proper domain name 8 years ago, I found that multimedia.X was already taken for just about every TLD value of X. .cx was a notable exception and was distinctive enough (speaking of .X, though, I see that multimedia.xxx is still up for grabs as of this writing ; I imagine that would come with a whole other set of problems).

  It’s funny that tech nerds often rail against outsourcing too much — email, storage, computing power, web hosting — all to some type of cloud provider under the premise that it could easily be taken away. But this episode teaches me that even having your own domain name is no guarantee of a solid online presence.

  Meanwhile, I have taken proactive steps to avert this same situation from arising again :

  
  
  

  Barring a lack of automated emails from the registrar, I hope a Google Calendar reminder set up a month ahead of expiration will do the trick.

• Death of A Micro Center

  21 septembre 2012, par Multimedia Mike — History

  The Micro Center computer store located in Santa Clara, CA, USA closed recently :

  
  
  

  I liked Micro Center. I have liked Micro Center ever since I first visited their Denver, CO location 10 years ago. I would sometimes drive an hour in each direction just to visit that shop. I was excited to see that they had a location in the Bay Area when I moved here a few years ago (despite the preponderance of Fry’s stores).

  Now this location is gone. I wonder how much of the “we couldn’t come to favorable terms on a lease” was true (vs. an excuse to close a retail store at a time when more business is moving online, particularly in the heart of Silicon Valley). But that’s not what I wanted to discuss. I came here to discuss…

  The Micro Center Window Logos

  The craziest part about shopping the Santa Clara Micro Center location was the logos they displayed on the window outside. Every time I saw it, it made me sentimental for a time when some of these logos were current, or when some of these companies were still in business. Some of the logos on their front window were for companies I’ve never heard of. It reminds me of the nearby 7-11 convenience stores when I was growing up– their walls were decorated with people sporting embarrassingly 1970s styles long after the 1970s had transpired.

  I thought I would record what those front window logos were and try to pinpoint when the store launched exactly (assuming the logos have been their since the initial opening and never changed).

  
  
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  Here we have Lotus, Hewlett Packard/HP, Corel, Fuji, Power Macintosh, NEC, and Fujitsu. Lotus was purchased by IBM in 1995 and still seems to be maintained as a separate brand. The Power Macintosh was introduced as a brand in 1994. Corel’s logo has seen a few mutations over the years but I don’t know when this one fell out of favor.

  Fuji (vs. Fujitsu) appears to refer to Fujifilm, though this logo is also obsolete.

  
  
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  Hayes– I specifically remember reading the Slashdot post accouncing that Hayes is dead (followed by many comments reminiscing about the Hayes command set). Here is the post, from early 1999.

  From Googling, it doesn’t appear IBM still has a presence in the consumer computing space (though they do have something pertaining to software for consumer products). Then there’s the good old rainbow Apple logo, something that went away in 1997. I suspect 1997 was also the last hurrah of the name ‘Macintosh’ (though I remember mistakenly referring to Apple computer products as Macintoshes well into the mid-2000s and inadvertently angering some Apple enthusiasts).

  
  
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  As for the next segment, obviously, both Sony and Toshiba are still very much alive. Iomega was acquired by EMC in 2008 but is still maintained as a separate brand. USRobotics is still around and making — what else ? — 56K modems (and their current logo is slightly different than the one seen here).

  Targus seems to be a case maker (“Leading Provider of Cases, Bags and Accessories for Laptops and Tablets”). I wonder if that’s just their current business or if they had more areas long ago ? It seems strange that they would get brand billing like this.

  Finally, searching for information about Practical Peripherals only produces sites about how they’re long dead (like this history lesson). It’s unclear when they died.

  The interior of this store was also decorated with more technology company logos near the ceiling (I didn’t really register that fact until I had visited many times). Regrettably, I now won’t be able to see how up to date those logos were.

  Based on the data points above, it’s safe to conclude that the store opened between 1995 or 1996 (again, assuming the logos were placed at opening and never changed).

  Epilogue

  Here’s one more curious item still visible from the outside :

  
  
  

  “See the world’s fastest PC !” Featuring an Intel Core 2 Extreme ? That CPU dates back to 2007 and was succeeded by Nehalem in late 2008. So even that sign, which is presumably easier and cleaner to replace than the window logos, was absurdly out of date.