Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’ Category

This time, its been six months since I last blogged.  I keep thinking that I’m going to write my own blog using Django, but with 5 year old twins, there isn’t a lot of time to do this.  So I’ll stick with WordPress for now.

What have I been doing this year?  Well, I went to PyCon in March.  It was awesome.  I went to CFUnited in June.  I thought it was second rate.  And I got some training in Flex in July with FigLeaf.  Waiting on my copy of Flex Builder to come in so I can start coding with it.  Its some pretty cool software.

I’ve been looking at using Groovy and Grails for some future development at work.  I’d like to integrate it with Flex for some applications I have in mind.  I’m really getting interested in doing some serious mapping stuff especially since ESRI has opened ArcGIS up with the release of 9.3.  They have API’s available for Javascript and Flex.

I bought a new MacBook Pro in June.  I downsized from a 17″ to a 15.4″.  I really could have used a new Mac Pro, but I can’t afford one of those right now.  So I’ll get another year out of my PowerMac Dual 2.0ghz G5.

One of my hobbies is converting Virginia Tech football games from video to digital. I’m using Final Cut Studio to do the job. I export my video’s to MPEG-4 H.264 640×480 resolution at 2500 kbits/s and 128kbps AAC audio. Normally, I export only one half of a football game at a time and let it do the encoding while I’m sleeping. A 30 - 40 minute video will take about 3 to 4 hours on my Power Mac Dual G5 2.0ghz machine.

I had been reading about the Elgato Turbo.264 device which offloads the encoding from the computers CPU to the Turbo.264 Video Encoder Hardware. It looks like a thumb drive and plugs into a USB 2.0 port. Well, I ordered it and received it today.

I did a test to see how it performed. I took a video clip of a Virginia Tech game that was 2 minutes 6 seconds and exported it to Apple TV format. This translates to a 720×480 video at 2500 kbits/s data rate. It took about 9 minutes. Then I plugged in the Elgato Turbo.264 thingamajiggy and had the clip export to the Apple TV (Elgato Turbo) setting. It was done in less than 3 minutes! Amazing! So how’s the quality? Looking at the two video’s side by side, the Turbo.264 encoded video looks far better.

For my final test, I copied the video to my Mac mini which is running Ubuntu 7.04. I brought up VLC and the video looks great on Ubuntu as well.

I highly recommend it. And you too can save $2500 like I did. The Mac Pro is $2499. The Elgato Turbo.264 is far less at Amazon.

Flying out today to go to CFUnited. Hope to get some good information while I’m there. I need to learn more about Flex, Spry and AIR.